Hiya!
I like metroidvanias. I like platformers. I like pixel graphics. Thus, I like this game, and wanted to give some feedback on it so that it hopefully becomes even better.
- Combat:
My biggest problem with this game is that there's about 20 different combat mechanics that I could be using, but there's no incentive to do so. Every single enemy in the game can be killed very easily by mashing the sword button and sometimes pressing directions, including the bosses. This is especially noticeable during the minibosses, since by just rushing in at the start and then doing stab>stab>launch repeatedly you can indefinitely stunlock them and never have to deal with a single attack. During my entire playthrough I never used any of the following:
- Kicks
- EX moves
- Sword throw/projectiles
- Warp tag during combat
The strat of mashing stab>stab>launch, while easy, is not fun, and will cause many of the people that play this game to miss out on the fun parts of the combat system. I think much of this problem could be solved by rethinking some of your enemy designs. Right now, of the enemies you have, there are: Things That Shoot Projectiles, and Things That Exist To Die, because they can't get an attack in before they get infinitely stunlocked. Some ideas I would suggest are:
- Give an enemy a shield that can block attacks, and will force players to come in from a different angle than straight on from the front, which right now is the optimal approach route for every single enemy in the game.
- Make the plant enemies, (including the miniboss,) have roots in the ground so you can't launch them. In fact, make it so that if you try to launch them, they counter, forcing you to approach them with a different strategy.
- Make an enemy that stays in a protective shell, and then flys out of reach when you hit the shell. This would force you to use the warptag and/or some parkour skills to hit it. You could also cause EX moves to break the shell for added options.
- Make certain enemies be able to break out of their stunlock, either by pushing away the player without damaging them to break the combo, or by just not letting them be hitstunned, but lengthening their attack animation so the player has time to react to attacks and get out of the way. A good candidate for the second approach would be the rock golem, as it would make sense that they wouldn't be stunned by a mere sword, but they would also be pretty slow to attack.
- Cause kicking to launch certain enemies sideways, and allow launched enemies to deal damage to other enemies. This increases the viability of the kick, and also allows for comedy value.
- Building off the previous point, if you allow kicking to launch enemies, you could make certain enemies explode on death, forcing you to kick them away to kill them, but also turning them into a viable weapon in certain scenarios.
Implementing some of these ideas, or some of your own, would help to make the enemies feel like interesting and unique challenges, as opposed to the indistinct cannon fodder they are now. Right now the only differences between enemies, including the minibosses, are the way they attack.
That said, I'm a big fan of the tree boss. It still didn't actually make me use anything except the basic sword combo, but it was certainly memorable.
- Tutorials:
The tutorials could probably be handled a bit better. The might just be due to this being a demo and needing to dispense information as quickly as possible, but as a Professional Gamer (tm), I can't read, and thus found the signs trying to teach me how to do stuff extremely tedious. Here's some ways I think these tutorials could be improved.
-- Movement:
Most people who play metroidvanias, and in particular indie metroidvanias, already know how to run and jump in a video game. If you really want you could have a prompt come up to press the WASD keys/left stick if the player doesn't move after a while, but in general this one shouldn't need a whole sign to teach. I would suggest having a starting area that forces you to move left/right, jump, and fall through a platform, which covers all of the stuff that the sign was trying to tell you without requiring any reading.
-- Kicks and Stabbing people:
My reaction upon seeing the signs for: How To Kick and: How To Sword, was "Ok, I have two options for combat, and one of them has a larger and more useful hitbox." I then proceeded to never learn how the kick works since I was too busy using the sword. I would suggest separating these two tutorials by not giving the player a sword at the start of the game. This will force them to use the kicks for combat, making sure that they know how, and also allow for the cool moment (tm) of finally getting your sword and doing a heroic pose. You could also put some static objects in your levels that exist solely to kick-jump off of, keeping the kick useful while also adding some fun gameplay.
-- EX moves:
My suggestion for these would be to have a (block/enemy/something) that can only be hit with an EX move, and a simple prompt that comes up and says something like: "Attack+Kick at the end of a combo -> EX move." Less reading means I can get to the actual gameplay faster, and theoretically the player is going to discover that different directions = different EX moves on their own by nature of using them in their combos.
-- Warptag:
As with everything else, force the player to use them at least once and the tutorial pretty much writes itself. I never used the warptag, and never bothered to actually figure out how it worked, until I had to use it on the spider to reach the upper tree area. This, along with barely skimming enough of the tutorial to see what buttons it used, allowed me to figure out how it worked. I would also strongly suggest making the warptag necessary immediately upon pickup, like you do with the walljump. If you tell someone how to do something, and then they don't actually have to do it, it doesn't stick in memory very well.
The wall jump, wall run, and ceiling run tutorials, on the other hand, felt pretty good. It might be because at this point I was used to skipping all the dialogue after learning the buttons to use, but the text didn't feel as overbearing. These tutorials also forced me to use the skill to leave the room, which meant I got some immediate reinforcement on how they worked.
- Nitpicks:
This is a list of tiny annoying stuff that happened where I thought: "hmm, I don't like this." Take these with a grain of salt as some of them are very subjective.
- Falling down a 1-tile gap next to a spider causes you to get hit by it, despite not visibly touching the spider. This could be pretty easily fixed with level design, by just not having the gap there.
- Certain rooms have enemies that spawn right next to the doors. This has the effect of making me perform a quicktime event when I enter that room in order to not get hit, and feels a little unfair.
- You can't actually close the game without alt-tabbing and closing the window, unless I'm missing something obvious.
- The wall jumping feels very inconsistent, someone mentioned this earlier in the comments when they said that wall sliding doesn't do anything until you get the wall run. My new player experience with this was that sometimes my wall jump was just: different and worse, for no discernable reason. The massive launch that you can sometimes get makes this especially annoying, as I still have no idea how to do it, but sometimes it would just happen, and mess up my jumping.
- As cool as the backflip looks, it's A. not consistent on a controller, and B. seemingly useless, except to cause my jumps to miss at random intervals and cause me anger.
- Mantling over walls, much like the backflip, feels unecessary, and like it only exists to make the movement less consistent. Part of this is just my bias against mantling in video games, but it's mostly that it doesn't really add anything to the game. If you removed mantling, and did the necessary level design adjustments to compensate, there would be exactly 0 people who would say, "Hmm, this game is good, but it really needs mantling to be perfect."
- The tree boss cutscene becomes instantly annoying after the second time listening to it. It might be a good idea to immediately start the fight after the first death instead of running the cutscene every time.
- Certain enemies, like the monkey and the trident gremlin, have very erratic movement patterns. The problem is, this doesn't make them any more challenging, this just makes them more annoying to hit.
- The window to perform a warptag hit feels unecessary, it might be better if you're just allowed to hold the warptag button instead. The only effect this would have on the game is that instead of sometimes missing a warptag input, I never miss a warptag input.
- It's possible to die after killing the tree boss and losing control of your character, by landing in the death spores and having your health eviscerated. This is one death that feels especially cheap, and has happened to me multiple times, even from over half health.
And Finally...
- Things I like:
- The art and music is dope. Big fan especially of the music in the cave and the tree bossfight, as well as the art for the tree boss.
- The combat system does feel very nice to use, even if I barely used any of it for my first playthrough. Fighting the tree boss was very satisfying.
- It's a melee-based metroidvania, and is therefore already a 9/10 game.
Sorry about the massive text wall, but hopefully some of my ramblings are useful to you. I'm looking forward to see how this game develops!
:)