Had a great time with this! The inspired 90s and early 2000s feel really shines through. There's a lot of good stuff being put into the lore, hacker plot setup, music and look of the game. At the moment though, it's pretty obvious that this is still sort of a game jam build. I've been seeing a lot of the upcoming mechanics on Twitter and looking forward to them.
The multigun is a cool idea but it feels just a bit bland right now due to the same textures and color being repeated throughout the modes. Some of them also look and feel a bit too similar (the two shotty-style guns). They also seem to lack the punch in their sounds and don't have tracer rounds to help you understand your aim. For some reason, they just feel sorta clunky as a result? The lack of particles on hit against enemies (I don't seem to notice any at least) also makes feedback a bit awkward in fights.
The current second level stands out from the rest right now because it feels a bit basic. The first level was a vertical travel and so is the second one except you don't have as many places to explore so you get to skip the whole level without any surprises or challenge.
This might also be due to the current enemy designs. The major enemies (virus and turrets) are both projectile-based but easy to dodge and outrun so junction points take a lot of difficulty out of combat. Is this why the final battles are tight spaces with wave-based spawns currently without any junction points? They also seem to aim at you regardless of walls instead of walking around them in the current build so you can easily camp them without putting yourself in danger. A sniper enemy who tracks and hitscans you would immediately spice things up.
Btw, I notice junction points/grappling can be a bit awkward sometimes? I would grapple on a point but it wouldn't detect my input quick enough so I'd end up falling out of range and dying.
Would love to see more Goldsource stuff in this too! Melee combat, bunny-hopping, crouch jumps/dashes, enemies based off those nostalgic games, etc. Keep it up!
Hey, thanks for playing and for leaving such detailed feedback!
Addressing readability on the guns and fixing up their sounds is one of our bigger priorities at the moment! A lot of people don't realize that weapon you find in The Mall is supposed to be a sniper, but this, like many things happened due to time constraints and we are working on hopefully fixing it in the next update! Tracers is another big one I've been wanting to add, even though the weapons are technically 'hit scan', that would be a really good way of giving some feedback on the aiming. Particles hitting enemies is something I want to add as well, hopefully striking a good balance in the process.
The Mall struggled from a lot of over ambition in not a lot of time. It's getting a complete re-work as we speak to make it more in tune with the rest of the game.
I like the idea of a sniper enemy quite a bit! Difficulty and balance are two things we want to address, I'm hoping to give the AI a whole polish pass and maybe implement some kind of path prediction to enemy projectiles.
There's a lot I plan to do to clean up junction points. The major issue you're referring to is an easy fix because for whatever reason I had the grapple still check if it's valid while the grapple animation is playing. I'm going to spend some time converting this so that if the animation is playing, the grapple will attach even if you fall out of range.
More gold source movement is on the way! We're currently completely re-writing the character controller.