itch.io

Still at the beginning, but impressive and polished!

Most of all it shows how arcade controls and levels can be made and since you also have the first classic grounded and flying enemies I learn a lot about how we could make it working in our game:

• basic attack is between melee and range, as a good mid-range (and enemies are tall enough to take it). Also grounded melee animation somewhat works even if legs are standing on nothing, since character is moving and legs not detailed we don’t really pay attention to it. Air attack still makes sense with the chain and allows air control during attack. In the final boss in particular it’s very useful to play like Smash, doing air attacks only for full character control… (but the chain? that’s why she looks like a villain. Well it fits the prisoner theme with black & white…)
• grounded enemy is tall, fast enough to be annoying and not stunnable so it’s quite stressful when it approaches, but managing distance well you can kill it with repeated chain attacks. It also has a nice ceiling variant to trap player (we originally designed a separate hedgehog enemy and snail enemy that sticks to ceiling but I never thought about reusing the same sprite to save budget, clever!)
• flying enemy has challenging but logical pattern where it prepares for a bird of prey dive, which makes sense and can be learned. Our game and several others had issues with the “annoying flying enemy that keeps coming at you, not giving a break” (mostly because it’s easier to code), but I see how spending a little more time on enemy movement pattern can make a big difference! However the fact that it flies far below ground level makes it hard to punish it immediately by hitting it back.

Issues encountered:

• some scenes load with noticeable lag (and no fading or anything to hide it)
• Bobby tea / save point still plays attack animation when interacted with
• Some platforms look solid but are not

• Web build: when I came back to game after typing this, screen was black? Maybe just Firefox issue since I also noticed the animated GIF on the left side blinking

I’ll keep playing on Windows build to avoid this issue and finish my rating.

EDIT: It looks like the Windows build is DEBUG though, is it intended to unlock some cheat keys or something? Fortunately it’s Godot so that’s still just 70 MB. I also noticed it didn’t have fullscreen, so I preferred continuing on web where I had my save.

Feedback continued:

• Cutscene: Ebony doesn’t speak at all in the first cutscene, so it’s weird when villain says “3 vs 1”. Ebony and Ivory should probably ping pong some quotes

• Cutscene: Ebony face sprite is hard to see on dark background

• Cutscene: No button/command to skip full cutscene

• Walk: get stuck in low slope

You can also exploit this to trap the Hedgehog and kill it at your pace…

• Jump off one-way platform: great, although it’s easy to guess for veteran players, could be explained how to do it for beginners

• Pearl skill: funny nod to Metroid, I like the “undignified” gag. I also found it very odd when I discovered it in Smash for the first time. “How can she become so compact?!”. Smooth controls (can press down then left/right, or reversely, it chains well, you can even chain with down-jump to jump off one-way platform)

• Projectile skill: clever to bind it to a companion, and to require chain attacks to recover it to force alternating moves during boss and also vs minions. I like how projectiles really stuns the opponent, even a boss, making it much stronger than the usual projectile. (thinking about it, in Shadow Generations projectiles only stun enemies, it’s their role)

• Dash skill: classic, but nice detail touches (purple aura in air, blue on ground)

• Boss 1: nice blue hit and SFX feedback that hitting the cat with chain without projectile defense break is not very effective (I thought at first it would do 0 damage but it does a little - I wonder if I could beat it without Ebony at all, may try it again in speedrun mode, although I want to see if there is a funny dialogue after that)

Bug: waits a lot of time with the charge attack with red indicator toward right. Was very fast for left charge though

A dead spot where I can lock the boss to kill it safely, it won’t attack

… and thanks to that, I could beat the cat without Ebony’s help. OK I got the boots. Time to leave this place now.

Well, I guess the developers didn’t think about this possibility and just counted on the dark wall to stop me after all.

OK, I take it back. Now that’s a nice nod to achievers who try to do things their own way!

(note: the cage respawns after that, but it does nothing anymore when destroyed)

• Last boss: the huge ground kick smoke effect disappears when player character is hurt. Such a big AoE should stay on screen, not disappear like a projectile. Pretty hard to avoid the low frog jump, low enough that you can’t dash below, high enough that you can’t easily jump over it, and she seems to repeat them until she gets you. I think with right timing you can jump-dash over her, but not so easy. As she says: “Is it possible to jump too much?”

Mini-map: I knew I recognized this style somewhere! Metsys, uh? We tried it during the jam but we were already mid-production and using LDtk so we didn’t use it, but it looked interesting. Had to clear the default unknown space texture to avoid having ugly logos everywhere on the mini-map though, and I see you did the same.

And indeed, Metsys has immediate transitions so you can’t hide the loading times, but Godot should be fast anyway, I wonder what takes so much time when you enter the room with the dark wall broken by projectiles. Particles FX loading?

• BGM (area 1): too loud compared to other sounds. No clean loop.

• Level: the first (or second depending on how you progress) top-left bubble tea area with grass clearly shows edge tiles on the left. The tilemap should be extended a bit so it doesn’t show. On the right maybe too, although it connects to another tileset so it’s technically correct that it shows edge I suppose

• No checkpoint before last boss, I had to cross the whole forest again. It also means no healing before boss if you got hurt by some minions on the way, making things harder.

• Speedrun mode: timer appears correctly, but when Speedrun mode is enabled, play, then disabled and retart game, the timer will appear at 00 until you actually start the game when it will disappear.