Post by ReanimatedMagpie in DirtWorld - Alpha Demo comments

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fun little thing, I definitely see where this is going, and I'm very curious, if im frankly just not that good at platforming, i love a thing where i can Tinker With Stuff and i appreciate that theres Some measure of options to bruteforce the jumping puzzles for those of us who werent doing those since age 4

some sprites kinda had clarity issues to me? i couldnt really tell what an unlit torch was for a while and the fairy altars have symbols on them that i Think represent objects in the game world but i just cant tell what theyre supposed to be i dont think. i got the impression some objects are ambiguous on purpose but the more basic ones i dont think so much are?

it would also probably help more folks get to the specs menu to tune it down if it didnt run in 4k on startup. if someone really wants to run a pixel art game in 4k i wont stop them but no need for it to be the default. my screen cant even do that its just wasting resources.

developers do tend to forget i think that the average person owns something with the specs closer to a thinkpad than their own rig so, while i know this is an early gameplay test, youre most definitely excluding more people than you think you are from giving it a spin by doing so simple as having it start up with maxed graphics

you are also Most Definitely a console-first dev it seems bc some of those keybind choices are... inspired. Why am I pressing "L" in a real time game for literally any reason much less a frequent action thats hilarious.

On a more serious note I am an unnecessary long-press hater, both from the acessibility angle and that they feel kinda bad. I do not think the 'start run' door needs that extra confirmation of the long press, both because accidentally starting a run is not worse than accidentally buying an item [no long press, arguably more consequences?] but also, at least as it stands right now, the portal for that is kinda out of the way, you already need to intentionally get there, i dont think that extra bit of confirmation is worth the annoyance and the hands unpleasantness, especially on the keyboard where its a lot more unpleasant than the controller

[even if i owned a controller i could plug in i wouldnt because i did not grow up with controller games its kinda like asking me to write with my non-dominant hand, im getting nowhere with that]

theoretically i see the idea with that, long presses, thematically, kinda are connected with Conducting Rituals and the like, but since thats the only instance it feels incongruent and not super intentionally picked so far

also, i believe some text scrolls weird/doesnt fit the scroll and cuts off in the 1x ui scale version if youre keeping that ui anyway

KRANKENHAUS8 days ago

Thanks for checking this out and for giving so much feedback!

On performance: it's definitely a struggle to work out how much optimisation to put in place at different stages of a project. This build had some culling etc. in place to enable the map building. Gleb [our other programmer] also pushed a hotfix to address an issue where some hybrid laptops were not having their GPU detected by GameMaker. But yeah, the project was not really at a stage of proof where I would be concerned about extended the playtesting reach beyond "hey, play it if you can!". We'll definitely set the settings lower by default in future builds - and do further optimisation. I think a recurring issue we're also going to have is just people expecting any 2D game to run on anything, because they think the job of a GPU is to render realistic 3D graphics... I don't think we're going to escape from that no matter how much we do.

All of your UX/controls feedback is valid. We haven't dropped an update in a few months but the next one with have key rebinding (it's already in, we're just not updating the build until some other stuff is ready as some of the core design has pivotted a lot). I wouldn't necessarily think of myself as console-first, but I do tend to play character/action-driven PC games with a controller, and when it comes to platformers I have a hard time empathising with keyboard players! The next build will have better controls generally - and some of the contextual long-presses will be gone as the teleporter concept is leaving the game in the next stage of design changes. There's also some wonk around the character controller where sprinting momentum doesn't transfer to jumps etc. which is on our list of things to address.

I really appreciate you taking the time to play and I hope if you play the next update it'll work better for you! The only reason it's taking so long is that this was always a strange design and it's only really in the last 2 months that certain aspects of the loop have come together in a way which makes it easier to see what the final game might be.

ReanimatedMagpie7 days ago (3 edits)

oh yeah i will say that since my setup is fairly "standard" [2016 budget build with old ram, intel cpu, middle of the road for the time gpu no hybrid anything] lowering the settings did very much help it just was an adventure to get to them on startup

its not a huge issue at the end of the day since final releases tend to have at least some crude specs detection just something thatd definitely help not prevent people that Could run your playtest specs wise from actually being able to, so nice to know thats coming! i am a big fan of "weird" mechanics combos so im definitely looking forward to what this might look like in the future!

itch.io

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