I think it's an interesting direction you've gone with turning the game more into an action adventure as opposed to a boss rush. I personally still think the initial idea of Jusha being a boss rush roguelike(?)-esque game is really cool and I liked that first demo of it I played a lot. With this new demo there's a lot more lore given to you and you talk to a lot of NPC's; things are still kept kind of vague as to what exactly is going on, but I think the monster design and atmosphere of Jusha sells an interesting story better than the writing in this demo. None of the dialogue captivated me as much as my imagination did with coming up with what *might* be going on in the first demo.
That said, the game still looks really nice. The fire VFX are pretty stellar (both the magic attack itself and the flaming sword). The effort you put into the water simulation definitely paid off. Even if it's only in a few parts of the game it's one of those things that really feels good to see despite it not regularly being on screen. It's a very nice touch. Combat is fluid and everything feels quite satisfying to land a hit on. The dashing is incredibly fast and is better movement than just holding down a WASD direction; it doesn't feel good to know if I want to maximize movement I've gotta' spam dash. Not sure how you would want to change this (maybe a cooldown or having it be a parry instead?).
I did run into a few bugs I'll list out below: 1. Saving & loading seems to wipe your hotbar for using items, but they're still there it's just that the icon is gone. I can't seem to get the icons to appear again either when trying to reassign items to the hotkeys. 2. The cube puzzle has some issues with being able to move the cubes around from off-angles.
Overall I enjoyed the gameplay and pacing of the genre change. Bosses are definitely still the most interesting part of the combat, looking forward to more
I like the design of the inventory and skill menus
Lighting your sword on fire when swiping through the fire spell is a super cool interaction! I like this sort of emergent gameplay
The designed environments are really nicely done and atmospheric, in contrast the combat hallways are pretty plain
other thoughts and feedback
- In the starting room, I fell out of the window twice by climbing on the piano and on the second time the game had a fatal error crash.
- The move animation seems to feel like the player is running faster than he is moving
- Sometimes I can't see enemies since they're behind walls
- Are you planning to have a map of some sort? Can be a little tricky figuring out where to go
- The crystal money stuff doesn't pickup well when you're moving
- enemies don't catch on fire when they're downed
- cute girl is still here, yay
- sometimes hit sounds overlap and get really loud
- crossbow enemy can keep shooting you from across the map
- is there a death screen yet? nothing happens when I die, although I'm playing on 0.2.2 and I see you might've fixed this
I wish there was an autosave on interacting with the blue lamps.
the xanadu next vibes are perfect, customizable combo system is great, had fun finding the right sequence to stunlock everything.
regular enemies are always really easy to stunlock if they're alone, this may not be a bad thing honestly. but thinking of xanadu next, that game had many "trick enemies" that would have some bullshit behaviour or function and they really spiced things up, i think your game would benefit from having some like that.
Spell cooldowns are cringe but they're not too bad here.
loot items are really small and kinda just disappear when you auto-pick em up. that combined with some walls covering up the chests and the items can make it kinda unclear when something even entered the inventory.
This is the first DD demo I've played that's had shader precompilation. The power of Unreal. It took 1-2 minutes.
I like the little video demonstrations in the tutorial dialogs.
The chandelier above the blood fountain you spawn in looks weird, it's just floating there. I understand what you were going for but I'm not sure I'm a fan of that kind of prop.
The checkboxes on the tutorial dialogs feel somewhat unresponsive, it takes a few clicks for them to work.
The UI looks pretty cool, it's not super streamlined but it has charm. The one caveat is that the buttons don't seem very responsive, sometimes I have to click more than once for the action to happen.
The game feels pretty nice, there's a lot of small juicy touches that add up. I especially love the fire spell, it's very punchy.
The knockdown health meter is an interesting mechanic, it trivializes a lot of fights in the tutorial but I imagine it's different in the real game.
Opening the pause menu while your inventory is open does not close your inventory.
I wish the walls would become see-through at a greater distance, it's easy to be in combat without being able to see the enemy a t all.
The inventory is a bit glitchy after dying. It said I had no healing crystals, but if I click onto equipment and back onto items, crystals appear.
I don't understand how the lizard boss' attacks work, they attack inward or outward seemingly at random. What's the tell?
I just brute forced the lizard boss. The entrance barrier glitched out a lot when I did, it kept lowering and respawning infinitely.
Died at the second boss, can't be bothered to keep going.
It's definitely got potential! I will definitely check it out again in the future.
I like how the tone feels so far! The visuals are quite nice, and the contrast of darker environment/UI with the somewhat silly music and dialogue make the dark humour work well.
I think the tutorials are a really good start, but there's some dumb small things that confused me. Starting room: I tried multiple times to push the cube, it didn't work, I gave up and figured that wasn't the solution, ended up pushing it by accident (it seems only a specific corner of it really works?). I missed the sword chest initially and thought the combat tutorial was bugged, so you may want to stop the player from entering the next room before they pick up the sword. It would be good to be able to close the equipment and spell menus with a key press, as pressing on the button every time doesn't feel so intuitive.
You'll probably add more enemy types and vary them in future updates; that'll probably make combat a lot more fun, as right now it doesn't feel bad but it is a lot of repetitive clicking without needing to really think. I do like the idea of the enemies getting dazed on the ground and being able to get back up if not killed in time, I think when you add more enemy types (especially some that are faster and the player would more easily get overwhelmed by), it'll make the player have to be strategic with who they take out first.
Game is looking interesting. I like what you have here so far. What I'm not sure if I like so far, is that we attack were the mouse is pointing. It's a bit confusing because my character is facing a direction, then it suddently attack to another direction, since I forgot about the mouse (and we don't use it for much else).
I found it a bit tricky to dodge the enemy attacks. Do we have i-frames? I think being able to "phase" through enemies when dodging would help solve this issue, as I think it's kinda easy to get stuck in enemy colissions.
The keys right know are kinda unconfortable,but I know that's a work in progress. When you add controler support, the gameplay is going to be a lot more confortable. But then again, on controller I assume you would press the attack button, and the character will atack in the direction it is facing. Probably should be the same in Mouse+keyeboard. ?No mouse aiming.
Eye guys are funny. I think there might be a bug with the item pickups disappearing, since I went to both chests but still wasn't able to open the door to the next area. Inventory didn't show any keys either.
Esc menu is totally covered by inventory/skill menus. Couldn't figure out what to do with the skills menu when it showed up, or maybe the pickup for that was also bugged since I didn't have anything show up.
Without combos to perform, the basic puppet enemies just become a matter of spamming left click, and maybe the only thing is to try and group them together to hit them all at once.
The block pushing only worked when I was at the corner of the box rather than on its face, which I initially thought to do.
since you are giving us an action key (F), i expect to be able to close the tutorial dialogue boxes with it as well.
esc should also be able to close them. indeed, esc should be able to close lots of other things, like inventories.
took me a long while to understand how to equip spells
i didn't personally enjoy the entire stagger meter thing with common enemies. they just spend a lot of time helpless on the ground while i kill them, slowing down the pacing. i'd say give weak minions less health or shield
the boss rush you had before felt more climatic and satisfying
lots of typos and some engrish in the dialogue, which is a shame because the eye guys seemed pretty funny
Comments
VFX looking stunning as always with Jusha.
I think it's an interesting direction you've gone with turning the game more into an action adventure as opposed to a boss rush. I personally still think the initial idea of Jusha being a boss rush roguelike(?)-esque game is really cool and I liked that first demo of it I played a lot. With this new demo there's a lot more lore given to you and you talk to a lot of NPC's; things are still kept kind of vague as to what exactly is going on, but I think the monster design and atmosphere of Jusha sells an interesting story better than the writing in this demo. None of the dialogue captivated me as much as my imagination did with coming up with what *might* be going on in the first demo.
That said, the game still looks really nice. The fire VFX are pretty stellar (both the magic attack itself and the flaming sword). The effort you put into the water simulation definitely paid off. Even if it's only in a few parts of the game it's one of those things that really feels good to see despite it not regularly being on screen. It's a very nice touch. Combat is fluid and everything feels quite satisfying to land a hit on. The dashing is incredibly fast and is better movement than just holding down a WASD direction; it doesn't feel good to know if I want to maximize movement I've gotta' spam dash. Not sure how you would want to change this (maybe a cooldown or having it be a parry instead?).
I did run into a few bugs I'll list out below:
1. Saving & loading seems to wipe your hotbar for using items, but they're still there it's just that the icon is gone. I can't seem to get the icons to appear again either when trying to reassign items to the hotkeys.
2. The cube puzzle has some issues with being able to move the cubes around from off-angles.
JUSHA
Overall I enjoyed the gameplay and pacing of the genre change. Bosses are definitely still the most interesting part of the combat, looking forward to more
I like the design of the inventory and skill menus
Lighting your sword on fire when swiping through the fire spell is a super cool interaction! I like this sort of emergent gameplay
The designed environments are really nicely done and atmospheric, in contrast the combat hallways are pretty plain
other thoughts and feedback
- In the starting room, I fell out of the window twice by climbing on the piano and on the second time the game had a fatal error crash.
- The move animation seems to feel like the player is running faster than he is moving
- Sometimes I can't see enemies since they're behind walls
- Are you planning to have a map of some sort? Can be a little tricky figuring out where to go
- The crystal money stuff doesn't pickup well when you're moving
- enemies don't catch on fire when they're downed
- cute girl is still here, yay
- sometimes hit sounds overlap and get really loud
- crossbow enemy can keep shooting you from across the map
- is there a death screen yet? nothing happens when I die, although I'm playing on 0.2.2 and I see you might've fixed this
I wish there was an autosave on interacting with the blue lamps.
the xanadu next vibes are perfect, customizable combo system is great, had fun finding the right sequence to stunlock everything.
regular enemies are always really easy to stunlock if they're alone, this may not be a bad thing honestly. but thinking of xanadu next, that game had many "trick enemies" that would have some bullshit behaviour or function and they really spiced things up, i think your game would benefit from having some like that.
Spell cooldowns are cringe but they're not too bad here.
loot items are really small and kinda just disappear when you auto-pick em up. that combined with some walls covering up the chests and the items can make it kinda unclear when something even entered the inventory.
thas it, fuckin great game man
Thoughts as I play.
It's definitely got potential! I will definitely check it out again in the future.
I like how the tone feels so far! The visuals are quite nice, and the contrast of darker environment/UI with the somewhat silly music and dialogue make the dark humour work well.
I think the tutorials are a really good start, but there's some dumb small things that confused me. Starting room: I tried multiple times to push the cube, it didn't work, I gave up and figured that wasn't the solution, ended up pushing it by accident (it seems only a specific corner of it really works?). I missed the sword chest initially and thought the combat tutorial was bugged, so you may want to stop the player from entering the next room before they pick up the sword.
It would be good to be able to close the equipment and spell menus with a key press, as pressing on the button every time doesn't feel so intuitive.
You'll probably add more enemy types and vary them in future updates; that'll probably make combat a lot more fun, as right now it doesn't feel bad but it is a lot of repetitive clicking without needing to really think. I do like the idea of the enemies getting dazed on the ground and being able to get back up if not killed in time, I think when you add more enemy types (especially some that are faster and the player would more easily get overwhelmed by), it'll make the player have to be strategic with who they take out first.
Game is looking interesting. I like what you have here so far.
What I'm not sure if I like so far, is that we attack were the mouse is pointing. It's a bit confusing because my character is facing a direction, then it suddently attack to another direction, since I forgot about the mouse (and we don't use it for much else).
I found it a bit tricky to dodge the enemy attacks. Do we have i-frames? I think being able to "phase" through enemies when dodging would help solve this issue, as I think it's kinda easy to get stuck in enemy colissions.
The keys right know are kinda unconfortable,but I know that's a work in progress. When you add controler support, the gameplay is going to be a lot more confortable. But then again, on controller I assume you would press the attack button, and the character will atack in the direction it is facing. Probably should be the same in Mouse+keyeboard. ?No mouse aiming.
Keep up the good work
0.2.3
- Fixed a bug where when you die it fuks the save.
- Fixed a bug where you don't restart when die.
patch notes changing genres entirely is crazy
Eye guys are funny. I think there might be a bug with the item pickups disappearing, since I went to both chests but still wasn't able to open the door to the next area. Inventory didn't show any keys either.
Esc menu is totally covered by inventory/skill menus. Couldn't figure out what to do with the skills menu when it showed up, or maybe the pickup for that was also bugged since I didn't have anything show up.
Without combos to perform, the basic puppet enemies just become a matter of spamming left click, and maybe the only thing is to try and group them together to hit them all at once.
The block pushing only worked when I was at the corner of the box rather than on its face, which I initially thought to do.
since you are giving us an action key (F), i expect to be able to close the tutorial dialogue boxes with it as well.
esc should also be able to close them. indeed, esc should be able to close lots of other things, like inventories.
took me a long while to understand how to equip spells
i didn't personally enjoy the entire stagger meter thing with common enemies. they just spend a lot of time helpless on the ground while i kill them, slowing down the pacing. i'd say give weak minions less health or shield
the boss rush you had before felt more climatic and satisfying
lots of typos and some engrish in the dialogue, which is a shame because the eye guys seemed pretty funny
0.2
Changed genre to RPG.
Lots of things are still a bit half-baked, apologized for that :(
Still no support for controller.
No support for keybind yet.
Initial start requires shader compile, might take a bit.