Skip to main content

On Sale: GamesAssetsToolsTabletopComics
Indie game storeFree gamesFun gamesHorror games
Game developmentAssetsComics
SalesBundles
Jobs
TagsGame Engines
(+1)

Let's start with the positives: The visuals are absolute kino, everything from the lighting to the 3D backgrounds which remind me of The Adventures of Lomax, and the camera movements are really well executed. Being taught the basic controls in the beginning without having to read the description is a huge plus.
The overall gameplay is also solid.

Now for some room for improvement: I think the biggest weakness of this entry is the communication. It wasn't a huge issue but it would have been nice to have a way to tell where the singing blades would hit exactly. The falling platforms also didn't communicate their rhythm very well, although these also posed no huge challenge despite being quite punishing in places. I think this is all exacerbated by the small field of view of the camera which makes it very hard to see what's ahead, which was especially painful at the end where I could barely discover the platforms I needed to jump down on.
After jumping down those platforms and seeing that I'm back in the beginning of the section I actually gave up on trying again only to go back to the center and discover one of the torches lit up - I must have picked up the macguffin without knowing.

The right hand side part was a bit better, but it was still tough to figure out where the platforms on the water were moving with the small field of view for the camera, but at least I did see the macguffin I was picking up here.
On the way back I tried to jump off the platforms onto the beginning as that seemed like what I needed to do, only to hit an invisible wall and fall down. This is despite the fact that that was where I was supposed to go.

The auto-targeting was a bit weirder than last time, I wasn't sure if it was distance, direction, or some combination of the two that got Michiru to target one target or another which was a big step down from the last game imo where I could hold fire while running around and still be assured that I'm targeting something I'm supposed to target.

The Michiru model's vertex snapping also seems to be in screen space, since it gets worse as she gets further away from the camera, to my knowledge no graphics hardware actually does that, it's snapping to integer coordinates in space and then snapping to exact pixels on the display.

 However overall I think this is a very very solid entry and it looks amazing, so great job, I'm glad to have gotten to play it!

(+1)

Thanks for the feedback! Good point on the timing of traps; the drop platforms need a timing retune in general; they need to spend longer visibly lowered before resetting imo. I'll also look at adding a particle glimmer just before the swing on the blades or something. They're actually a moving overlap volume hugging the blade rather than a momentary area, that may or may not be the correct approach. It seemed most flexible for what I was expecting to do when I made them. I don't think I did a pass adding camera tweaks to the blade area, and if I did it wasn't a good one. I should add a kill volume so you don't have to redo that whole area despite the checkpoints up top; that did occur to me at the time but the coin toss went the other way. Confusion over being done after the drop down occurred to me also, but I didn't expect the macguffin to be easy to miss visually; you must have fallen on it or something. I can reuse the victory grabbing animation from the cup to make that very obvious, though for the water side I'd have to reposition it for that. The invisible wall was a leftover for preventing the player from falling out of the map, I should've gotten rid of that one specifically, but then the elevator back up was a last minute solution. If you don't move at all it drops you where you're meant to be, and I didn't consider what people might actually try to do based on what they were seeing. Didn't have time to diagnose the tracking, it's a bug and I'm not sure what's going on; alternating shots will track and fail seemingly at random. There was an intention to modify the tracking so that you had to at least partially face the target, but I don't think I implemented that at all.

The vertex snapping was a code snippet I had to hand from the ps1 stuff I was messing with a little while ago, I didn't especially intend to leave it in, as it does make her inconsistent with the environment. I don't remember exactly how the ps1's behaviour operates but clip space snapping is how the emulations I found approached it.

Thanks again for the comprehensive feedback!