Another game with stellar graphics and solid gameplay.
I really like the level design. Not too straightforward, but still satisfying to explore (1-2 in particular). I only encountered two major roadblocks in total:
- In 1-2, I had trouble with the red block you have to push around. I didn’t know you could refresh its duration with more fire paint, and was using the baseball bat to push it away, so it kept disappearing before I could jump on it. The timing was tight, but not impossibly tight so as to make it obvious I was doing something wrong; instead it made it feel like I just needed to do things faster. I eventually figured it out by pure accident.
- In 1-3, I had trouble destroying the block on the path to the Ghost Lady’s room. The first solution I found got patched in 0.1.2, and I had to look it up on discord to learn about the backflip-spray. I never suspected the backlip would have any mechanical relevance, I thought the difference with other jumps was purely aesthetical.
The character controls have solid bases, but could be made more intuitive. I don’t think they’re as bad as some people say, but I can see why they would be complaining about it. They did feel clunky until I was able to figure out all the little subtleties, and learnt to work around them. Trying to enumerate them all feels like a lot of nitpicks, but the cumulation of these is what gives off the overall feeling of clunkiness.
A recurring issue is actions being too dependant on the character’s state, and not so much on the inputs. Certain short animations (crouch, stand-up, turn-about) will lock you out of other actions for a split second, which makes the input for some actions very timing-sensitive: pressing the correct keys just a tad too fast will cause some inputs to get eaten away, and the wrong action to be performed.
Most cases can be fixed by implementing either input buffering or animation-cancelling for those action.
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Suppose your character is facing left, and you want to do a frontflip to the right. If you press and hold
[Right]->[Jump]too fast, she will do a straight-up jump instead, (despite still turning around to face the intended direction). If she was crouching and had to stand up before turning around, the delay before she can frontflip will be even longer.
Jumping while holding a directional key should always result in a front flip in that direction. (This was a much bigger issue before v0.1.2 when trying to grab ledges. Letting the character grab them during backflip was a huge help, since backflips are a lot easier to pull off consistently than frontflips.) -
Suppose your character is facing left. If you try chaining a light attack to the left with one to the right. Pressing
[Atk]->[Right]->[Atk]too fast will result in both attacks going to the left. Pushed to the extreme, spamming light-attacks will cause directional inputs to be ignored pretty much indefinitely. This also applies if your try to crouch or stand up in-between attacks.
This mostly happens to me while fighting the ghost lady, because she involves a lot of crouching and flip-flops. (She is still very fun to fight nonetheless).
In this case, directional input should take precedence over the attack inputs. -
If you try chaining a light-attack with a heavy attack, pressing
[L-Atk]->[H-Atk]too fast will result in two light attacks instead. If you then proceed with spamming[H-Atk], the character will spam light attacks.
I can’t picture a situation where I would want the heavy-attack button to result in a light attack. I’d rather[H-atk]be completely ignored until the light attack animation ends. -
While running with a paint can equipped, pressing the light-attack button will instead result in a heavy attack (firing the spray paint).
Again I can’t picture a situation where I’d want this button to fire the paint. I’d prefer if the character did the same attack as when no weapon is equipped. -
When crouching, the character will refuse to start crawling until she has finished playing the entirety of the crouching animation. This including all jiggle physics, making it unexpectedly slow. It doesn’t usually happen in fast-paced situations, so it’s not a huge problem, but it still contributes to making the controls feel irresponsive.
By contrast, you can transition into a slide-kick immediately after pressing[Crouch]. Optimally, crawling should be able to cancel the crouch animation in the same way. -
From a standing-up position, the character will refuse to fall through a platform if you double-tap
[Down]too fast. The delay you have to wait between taps isn’t as long as for crawling, but I still run into this a lot.
Aiming the spray paint upward is fine, but aiming it down is much more awkward. Using [Left]/[Right] instead of [Down] isn’t very instinctive. But mostly, there are a lot of cramped spaces that don’t really give you the freedom to take a step forward before firing. (E.g. when fighting smaller enemies like the toads or crawling shadows). To avoid taking that step forward, I have to press the two keys as fast as possible, at the risk of pressing them in the wrong order, and firing in the wrong direction.
I think it’d be a lot more comfortable by reworking the aiming mechanic :
Hold the attack button to aim, and release it to fire. While aiming, all other movements would be disabled, so all directional key could be used to adjust the aim. This completely neuters any risk of the character moving while trying to aim, and would also enable the usage of the actual [Down] key to aim downward.
I think the crouching pose is giving false expectations of what the character can or cannot do in that position:
Visually, When the character crouches, she faces directly at the camera, in a very symmetrical pose. It gives the impression that, from there, she could potentially turn to face either direction.
In reality, she’s already committed to face either left or right, and she cannot change direction without first standing up.
(She will also revert back to this pose after doing a light-attack, giving the impression it is still possible turn around after crawling. )
The crouching direction has some mechanical relevance, since this locks the direction the character can slide, attack, or throw kunais in.
In the current state of the game, this doesn’t end up mattering; there are no combats taking place in the vents, and none where sliding is required. But for a new player, who doesn’t know what’s waiting for them, It could potentially matter. (And who knows, maybe this will end up mattering in upcoming levels).
I did waste some time trying to figure out how to turn around while crouched, so as not get bad surprises later on. I was a bit frustrated when I decided to give it up; it felt like I was missing out on something obvious.
Depending on what you want to achieve: Either allow the character to change direction while in that pose, or modify the visual a bit, so as to have her explicitly face a specific direction.