Post by Wyrd_Agyo in Echidna Wars Mini: Revitalized comments

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Nah, no worries dude, it was a joy reading your feedback. I was very passionate about this game about 10 years ago which is why I know all these things. Then DX came out and I kinda walked away from this one, viewing it as more of a tech demo of sorts leading into the DX version.

I did notice just a couple more nitpicky things on a second glance.

1. Mirea's level 2 power up seems to be missing. Her projectiles don't gain more damage or change visually on each level up like Sachiho and TGO-03's do, she just gains an additional one per level. Level 2 gives her the upwards angled additional shot and level 3 gives her the downward one (which you have correctly implemented).

2. Enemies heal at a fantastic rate when digesting a character. So much so that if you're trying to save Sachiho with Mirea and only her level 1 shot, you're going to have a tough time out-DPS'ing her heals.

3. Escaping a grapple is not a random chance each time as you've implemented (though I do kind of like this change). In the original, it ALWAYS takes EXACTLY 10 button presses of any combination of movement, jumping, and/or attacking to escape. You do have the HP cost of each button press down pat though.

4. Lamias have a very small chance (~5%) to drop an HP MAX upgrade upon defeat. You may have already implemented this, but I didn't farm them enough to find out for myself, so I'm notifying you here just in case.

NOW I think that's everything haha.

If you want some more help or information, I do have the raw original java files if you care to decompile them.

I also have my own footage I recorded of a playthrough back in 2015. It's only ~6 minutes long, but maybe it has something unique in it compared to other vids.

Keep up the good work, mang

Ceph9 days ago(+1)

1. Oh, this is helpful! I haven't been able to find anything on the level 2 attack, just 1 and 3. I'll get right on that.

2. They might be recovering every frame, instead of every animation + sound cycle, and they might be recovering way too much. What I know is that some (slime and jellyfish) are meant to spit out their capture after dropping below half health, which I don't remember whether I properly implemented. They DO take half damage from attacks while capturing, I did implement that though. I'll double check video evidence and compare notes again.

3. I originally had it exactly like this (press the button X times in Y seconds to escape) then I carefully read the user manual which said something about a gacha-type system for escape (which sounded like spend X health for a Y% chance to escape). I think both have their merits, and I could definitely add it to the list of things to include in an options menu once I know how that should look like.

4. See, I knew SOMETHING was going on with the inconsistent, infrequent item drops. I did a whole statistical analysis across multiple videos, tracking which rooms exhibited which enemies of which types dropping what at which frequencies. I believe I settled on a per-enemy sorta.... "juiciness" metric, which determines which item pool to select from. Enemies are either "regular" (25% chance to drop rice, 12.5% chance to drop meat), "ricey" (50% chance to drop rice), "meaty" (50% chance to drop meat), or "upgradey" (25% chance for rice, 12.5% chance to drop meat, ~3.9% to drop a pow-up, ~3.9% to drop a health-up [3/4 × 5/6 × 1/16). If you had more concrete stats, or could tell me otherwise why the slimes at the end of level 1-2 seemed to drop a meat when that's outside the expected range, or why the spawned slimes from le pipes ALWAYS dropped ONLY rice, that'd be awesome and amazing, stats are really tough to glean from limited video evidence.

And thank you for being so thorough with your feedback

Ceph7 days ago(+1)

Re: Point 2, enemies healing very quickly. I checked the code, they SHOULD (excluding unforeseen consequences) heal 1 hitpoint every 32-60 frames (depending on their eating animation lengths, a shorter animation means quicker healing), WHICH IS once to twice per second (it's the worm that heals every 32 frames, and I could probably artificially slow that animation down to take 48 frames instead...?)

Is it ACTUALLY true that enemies take half damage once they have captured a player character? It really limits your DPS- if it's not true, that'd get you double the friend-saving DPS and make Mirea plenty effective at saving characters.

Wyrd_Agyo6 days ago

Yes, but since they didn't move or attack you directly (lamia's would bump into you if you were careless, but wouldn't chase you), the half damage made sense to keep you from just destroying them in an instant. It created a nice sense of urgency when trying to save your friend.

If you were lucky, you could have your attack free your ally and then you'd have a few frames before the still-helpless ally just got scooped back up to deal some real damage.

itch.io

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