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valdera114 days ago

Thank you

You might be right about the ray thing; I only briefly tested that you can dodge them on reaction(well that I can react to them & I'm pretty slow too I feel), but to dodge them I really had to be focusing on the bottom of the screen and watching for the shadow(and I also might have already had the character moving before hand to skip the acceleration part of the movement). 

I kind of purposely made a lot of things distract focus(especially on the big sword and the ray); like I remember purposely tuning the rays spawn timing to shock me while fighting other rays or being distracted looking elsewhere on the screen etc. so that stands out to me as something that might be causing it(though I'm sure you know if that applies or not & yes it might just be impossible if you're not already moving if it doesn't). The sword guy has a similar concept with the fact he moves(drawing you eye with aiming) and he kind of locks you into dodging(drawing your eye into the characters body for dodging)

With the sword I also tuned a lot of the timing when staying at nearer to the bottom of the screen; if it's not that(and you weren't at the top or in the middle or something) then I guess it might also be me skipping the acceleration again but I'm not sure

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GreyManedLizard108 days ago (1 edit) (+1)

It was a fairly small issue and -eventually- simple to counter. So it could be a complete non-issue. It just stands out in being the only part that felt unfair in an otherwise well-balanced game that even leaned on the side of being easy/gentle.

acceleration part of the movement
skipping the acceleration again

This might be the key? There were moments of distraction that worked to ambush me as you designed, those are all good. But after dying to them consecutively I was actively looking for them, and still moved too slow to completely evade, getting clipped on the side. Plus, per your words, both our dodge efforts only/mostly worked when we were already moving.

Though again, mostly a non-issue, even I eventually formed a simple strategy within the game’s mechanics to get through it unharmed.

Weighing in on the other matter you mentioned if only to expand your data pool: I had no issues with the character’s hitbox. But I rarely play games in this genre, so maybe there are some conventions that I am blind to.

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valdera108 days ago

"leaned on the side of being easy/gentle."

Yeah at one point during the time I first released the game I kind of panic nerfed a lot of health values; I actually went back and rebalanced the values again just now when doing a couple of test playthroughs(the new patch is patch 1.1.3) since really it was just (initially) that big soul edge/crusher guy on the first stage and now obviously the ray/sword attack reactability being divisive

I actually went back and tested dodging the ray and sword on reaction again before the recent patch because I was going to fix it if it was too egregious; I actually did manage to successfuly dodge them from a stand-still purely from zoning out and using visual cues once they showed up, again I don't have the fastest reaction speed so I can only imagine it might be some other factor I'm not catching up on. I might do some tests later on to see if there's any significant input lag in the browser version of the game vs the compiled pc version I'm testing on for example so I can figure this out (I'm assuming you're playing on web)

On the characters hitbox: I feel it's a 50/50 on whether people tend to think that the hitbox is closer to the character's vitals(in the middle of her chest, where the hitbox actually is) or on the center/origin point of the character(near where she's sitting on the broom); I think both make sense just in different ways - obviously the "vitals" one is more logical but a lot of games tend to do the other one too so depending on what they've played it might set the precedence (as is always the case with games)

Thanks for the extended input and feedback btw, you're right on the more data-points and conversation being really helpful for figuring out what's going on. I also noticed you have the highest "karma" value on this game-jam meaning you've voted and engaged with other entries the most out of all the participants, so thank you for that too 😇

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GreyManedLizard107 days ago(+1)

I beat v1.1.3 today, and could not really notice a difference in difficulty. The witch has a glowing medallion now, is all I could tell.

By “balanced leaning on the side of easy/gentle” I meant things like the safe zones are clearly noticeable and numerous, the enemy shots come at a reasonable speed (even a little on the slow side, but fitting for our own acceleration), we’re not ambushed from off-screen (we get telegraphs for anything incoming), our weapons are effective. We can win on first tries, without having to die 10 times over to learn attack patterns. That sort of balance.
A larger hp pool on bosses still maintains all of that, so it didn’t feel like it changed.  This is all praise, by the way, not some complaint that it wasn’t made hard enough.

Rays still got me twice, on the windows build. (I know it wasn’t modified, and I’ve let the matter go, just reporting). I suppose I am simply old.

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