With the most recent update this game goes from super easy to quite difficult, midas touch and shopkeepers dagger both received huge nerfs, meaning no more absurd builds based on those two with survival burger and bat fang charm, and extra floors just add more to the game, great game, I can't wait to see where it goes next
Thanks for the feedback. I agree. I'm reworking a lot of stuff right now so the balance is a bit all over the place. I'll try to stabilize things more for the next build.
The difficulty level is quite fun at the moment, but I do think that Midas touch was nerfed into the floor, sacrificing health drops for 1 coin a piece just isn't worth it, my suggestion would be that only x% of hearts become gold
I had a small glitch. The bread reads as adding +2 gold instead of +2 hearts.. I think it’s because I had Midas Touch on a previous run which changed its effect to the +2 gold and it didn’t revert back on restart. Picking up does add +2 hearts as normal though. Great game so far btw! Been having a lot of fun!
Hey, just finished trying out this demo. It's honestly very fun to play. I love the concept of a Vampire Survivor + The Binding of Isaac mashup. This has the potential of having cool synergies and more spells to make an incredibly fun experience.
My only criticism would be that the wizard's collision seems a bit funky. I'm able to collect pickups with my head, but I would expect the collision to be at the foot of the player. I think that is more natural on a top-down bullet hell game.
Congrats, this is a very fun concept. Honestly I'd love to make a game with this concept myself, looks simple and very fun to make. Good luck on your project!
Really enjoying this so far.. though I really feel like the current state of the game doesn't reflect the description of "wacky" too much yet. I love the spider design and hope to see many more enemies, rooms, bosses, and items that help reinforce this theme. This may be something that comes later with visual design iterations, though please don't forget this in the long run! I personally believe this is an important aspect in establishing the game's identity and theme and would hate to see it left behind
Thanks for the feedback. I agree. I've tried some different monster iterations for the bat, the snake, and the slimes but I haven't quite found something that worked yet. I'll keep iterating until I find something that works. The dragon boss is going to need some iteration as well. Needless to say, I have my work cut out for me still on the art design side haha.
i beat triple heart curse (the good part about triple heart curse is that the tail (i think that's what it was) item was basically free damage (sort of like the lost with devil deals)
think i might try a triple heart curse no item no book bost run next time. (not sure if that will even be possible)
Glad you are enjoying it! I have a lot of ideas to improve the demo (including more curses, relics, and charms). I'm looking forward to making some updates for you!
really fun - perhaps to augment the difficulty a little - the warning sign for the area a monster will land could be delayed a little. This will require the player to anticipate more where the monster will land, instead of immediately knowing where it will land!
Great game, super fun but sometimes when killing enemies they'd drop a heart without the fang . Also after the 10 soul upgrades the games grinds to a halt as you have to spend run after run for the 30 soul ones, this might not be a problem in the longer runs of the full game but as a suggestion maybe you could add an upgrade or item to earn more souls.
felt good to play and the movements were fluid. i didn't expect it to be so short but that's understandable since it's a demo. i look forward to suffering in the later levels.
i'm already in love with the binding of isaac; when i saw the screenshots of this game i already knew that i needed to play it XD. Anyway, for being in a beta version, it is very good! i really like the pixel art and the sprites! congratulation and keep it up!!
Fun game. I found it a bit too easy however. Beat the dragon on 1st try without even knowing what most of the items do and how enemies act. Unlocked everything including the negative max hp. Beat the game using only negative max hp modifier to start on 1 heart. Pic of proof:
Wish there was just 1 more level to ramp up the difficulty past the dragon. Also wish there was more items that have a trade off like the tiger tail. Like doing half dmg but shooting faster or shooting with a bigger spread.
All in all the game is a lot of fun. Hope it gets more content. I can see myself spending a good 10-20h on this if there was just more levels or unlocks.
Not sure if this was intended, but I found a rather OP playstyle that 1 hits the dragon. Basically just farm for golden hearts and buy a ton of items (mainly attack speed) and just instantly kills the final boss. Game was pretty fun tho :)
I was sure that was intended since it's not that easy to get. You need midas pretty early on to stack up enough gold to have for re-rolls. The whole fun of rogue-likes is finding these broken combinations and being able to finally get a good run with them.
The best combo would be getting midas and the burger early on, since the burger gives back gold heart meaning 2 gold so everything that cost 3 gold is now 1 gold each and boots are basically free. Spamming boots will stack up the damage of the shopkeeper dagger too so its extra damage.
Combine it with the bat fang charm and it's absurd, I killed the dragon in about a second, just buy only boots, mugs, and swords after you have the set up stuff and take the extra shots with the spellbook
Okay I made another small update. Hopefully it addresses the slime bug for good. I also added a hearts curse (for those who want more of a challenge while playing) and a sneaker relic for dashing.
I really enjoyed it! Controls & mechanics felt very intuitive, but then again I am familiar with roguelikes and have played a fair bit of Vampire Survivor. It was cool that some upgrades carried over between runs. I never managed to make it past the dino, though that was mostly bc I always got stuck in a room before I could collect enough 'permanent' upgrades to be boosted enough haha. For my skill level, the game definitively felt balanced. My favorite enemies were the slimes (bc of how they split up and can really overwhelm you if you aren't careful) and the fancy man spider (mostly bc of his design). :)
I like the auto attacks, but I wish there was some more strategy/complexity to the attack/movement relationship. Things like e.g. the attack rate increasing when you stand still, so there's an incentive for minimal movement, or adding different attack types that require different movement patterns/have different ranges. Idk if these examples specifically would be good ideas, I'm just throwing out suggestions. Or you could introduce upgrades that completely change the way attacks work (e.g. they become AoE instead, or have shorter/longer ranges, etc.) so there's some more variety. I understand it's a demo, and that this would involve a lot of balancing, but some wild cards beyond simple +attack +speed would surely be fun.
I would also like to be able to attack bats while they are flying above obstacles, I found that a bit frustrating. If you wanted to introduce an enemy type that sort of 'ambushes' you by mostly moving in obstacles / walls, e.g. something like a ghost, that would of course be fun. But I just expected to be able to hit a flying bat right next to me.
The slime bug seems to still be there (I played the web version today), since I got stuck in a room with a slime outside the wall (see screenshot). Another time I got stuck in a room AGAIN, but this time I couldn't see any enemies at all. It might've still been an off-screen slime, since there were slime enemies in that room.
Overall this was a very fun game and I like where it is going!
Also an off-topic comment, but: I bought Endhall a couple months ago, and I still play through it every other week or so when I need a break from work. It's one of my favorite 'short' games. :)
loved the game. sometimes felt like the game needed a 2nd button so that i can do something else other that just moving while fighting the enemies XD. But sometimes there are just so many things to worry about that you are happy with just moving XD
Hey Heartbeast, fun little demo! There are a lot of things about the prototype that I enjoyed. I thought you hit a really good balance of difficulty with the slime, that was definitely my favorite enemy type. (There was a bug where the game soft locked me in a room because a slime jumped outside of the walls) Most everything in the game was readable and easy to understand. I quickly figured out the dungeon map, the combat, how to play, etc. Of course the quality of the pixel art and small amounts of polish were all a great cherry on top as well.
One of the few things I felt the prototype could improve on is how it feels to move and evade attacks. The squishiness of the combat felt great, but moving around not so much. That's not to say the movement is bad by any means, I just found it to feel too simple. Might be cool to have a dash or teleport and the directional movement feeling a bit smoother?
Anyways, very fun game thanks for sharing. I'm a sucker for dungeon crawlers with classic enemies like bats, slimes, and dragons. Excited to see how this progresses!
Thanks for playing and for the great feedback! I have already started working on some ways to make the movement more interesting! I should have an update with the changes by the end of next week.
What a fun demo! I liked the clear indication of where enemies were going to spawn and land. Making the slimes random(?)ly land around the screen after they split made the slime room much more interesting than if they had just split in place. The different powerups made me actually think about what I wanted to purchase. Lastly, this was very colourblind-friendly, thank you for that.
It’s great. My least favorite part was that I had to stop playing so soon! You’ve got something special on your hands and I am very much looking forward to the Kickstarter!
You guys should all read Ben’s book, Production Point, by the way. He’s running a podcast to follow the process outlined in that book while making this very game. The process clearly works!
I made i two times to the baby dragon boss, but after beating it nothing happens. I'm stuck in the room. In the second run I had the last blob land outside the room, maybe thats the problem!?
Hey! Thanks for playing the game. You reached the end of the demo, but it should show a victory screen. I apologize for the bug with the slimes. I'm actually uploading a fix now that should address it.
I like the art and the balancing is already very good. At no point I thought the game was unfair. The monsters are also cool. Bellow are some suggestions for the demo. Some points may be not so important for you at this special point of development (or at all). So take what's useful for you :-)
- You should add some kind of animation to the main menu. At my first start I thought the game did freeze, because i couldn't click on "Start Game". Maybe an animated frame for the selected menu-point!?
- Replace the "g" in the shop with the gold-sprite. At first I didn't understand what the "3 gram" beneath the item could mean ;-D
- A hover animation for the shop-items would be nice. Otherwise there's no movement in the shop and this feels a bit weird.
- You should pick a different font. One that fits better for pixel art games.
- After "Set Fullscreen" the keyboard-input does not work. You have to click on the screen to get the focus back on the game window. Does not happen every time. But maybe it's "just" a browser problem, not a Godot problem...
- I don't like Midas Charm. It's cool that I get extra gold, but to get no more hearts/health from this point on (as far as I know) is hard. I would rethink this - however, I don't have a better solution at the moment :-)
- The dungeon stairs should only be accesible from the right side (as you would expect because of the sprite)
- There should be a way to get back from "Essence Upgrades" to the main menu. Just to have a "correct" main menu.
- The symbol for a spawning monster is a call sign in a circle. I would replace this symbol, because it does not fit into the world. Maybe pick something like the symbol of bowsers face.
- this one is very nitpicky: pushing hearts, you can't pick up (health bar full) does not feel "good". I suppose this is because of a circle-collision shape. Maybe you should not be able to push them at all!?
However, I like your book, like your YT content and the podcast is a great idea. Thank you for your work Ben!
Cool game, very impressive for a prototype. It plays smoothly and the art already has a lot of personality despite the game being in an early stage of development.
My only real criticism is to do with having different camera perspectives for various assets in the game. Some of them are top down like the blocks, some are almost side on like the player character and some are half way in between which overall can be somewhat visually confusing.
I'm not entirely sure what the exact solution is and you're clearly a much better artist than I'll ever be anyway, so I'll just suggest looking at games like The Legend of Zelda: Minish Cap approach it and leave it at that.
FYI (may be something with Godot 4.0 itself) but on Firefox it instantly crashes the browser after finished loading. Will play on a chromium based one.
Oh, just noticed on the description it won't work on MacOS :(
I've also been listening to the podcast and was curious to play the game. I expected it to be in a cruder state, but I was surprised to see it is already a pretty solid game. Congratulations! It took me 3 tries to finish and I think the difficulty is pretty fair.
I have been listening to you devlog podcast, and was excited to try this demo. I think you have a very good thing going here (he said after playing through the entire thing 6 times).
I really like the progression system. Having plain upgrades (ex: more damage), risky upgrades (more damage, less health) and long term upgrades (+0.1 damage per buy or something:PP) makes each decision just a little more engaging.
Furthermore, the art-style is cute, movement feels fluid, enemies are varied and funny, and I think that your core mechanic (positioning) is very well highlighted.
Which brings me to my next point. You have been talking a lot about the difficulty of the game. Specifically, how some of the feedback has led you to think that the game is sometime unfair in cornering the player into unescapable situations. From my personal experience, that has not really been the case. Most (99%) of the times I have taken damage (I feel like) it has been my own fault exclusively. That is not to say that I haven't been cornered into unescapable situations. But being in such a situation due to your own positioning is something quite different from being forced into these situations by an unfair game.
I fear that trying to make these situations less frequent would take away from the deeper aspects of the main mechanic, which is to not only position well for the current state of the game, but also thinking one or two steps into the future when finding the optimal position.
That was way longer than anticipated (I know i tend to become very vocal when writing). I hope you understood my main points:PP That being said, I am really looking forward to seeing/listening to the progression of this game. I had a lot of fun playing this demo, and I will definitely buy the game if you keep up the good work;)
Thanks for the feedback! I agree. There is a balance here. I also made some changes on Friday that I think improved the situation from my last podcast episode. I might talk more about my thoughts in the next episode, but I think we are on the same page.
Hey, I love the game and art style! I'm usually not a fan of roguelikes (besides Hades), but I found the simplicity and not-too-difficult gameplay creating a fun experience.
On another topic, I was wondering if I could compose the music for your game because it looks like a project I would have much fun making the music for!
Thanks, and I look forward to seeing this game evolve over time!
General feedback incoming, but first a screenshot:
Edit:
I played for like 45 minutes:
The biggest issue is the slimes going outside the room, I’m sure you’ve seen that. Some thoughts in no order:
The combination of Isaac + Hades + Brotato (or any of the other Bullet Heaven games) feels really good! Nice enemy variety too, even if the slimes are plentiful lol
The wizard looks like Ralsei from Deltarune, also a plus
Some of the upgrades are 😬 Coffee makes you do so much more dps than the 0.5% damage upgrade.
Item descriptions could be obfuscated a little, instead of saying 3% chance to drop heart, say chance to drop and allow some balancing behind the scenes. I know in Isaac harder enemies have a higher chance of dropping a heart, that might work here too
The dragon boss was fun!
Overall I enjoyed it! I haven’t done a Kickstarter in a while, but I signed up for yours 👍️
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With the most recent update this game goes from super easy to quite difficult, midas touch and shopkeepers dagger both received huge nerfs, meaning no more absurd builds based on those two with survival burger and bat fang charm, and extra floors just add more to the game, great game, I can't wait to see where it goes next
Thanks for the feedback. I agree. I'm reworking a lot of stuff right now so the balance is a bit all over the place. I'll try to stabilize things more for the next build.
The difficulty level is quite fun at the moment, but I do think that Midas touch was nerfed into the floor, sacrificing health drops for 1 coin a piece just isn't worth it, my suggestion would be that only x% of hearts become gold
I had a small glitch. The bread reads as adding +2 gold instead of +2 hearts.. I think it’s because I had Midas Touch on a previous run which changed its effect to the +2 gold and it didn’t revert back on restart. Picking up does add +2 hearts as normal though. Great game so far btw! Been having a lot of fun!
Thanks for letting me know! I'll get that fixed in the next build.
i beat triple heart curse triple enemy hp curse.
triple heart curse has a hidden superpower in that some items are essentially buffed (ex:tiger tail and beserker charm)
the demo doesn't seem to be working
Hey! Sorry it isn't working for you. What OS are you on and which browser?
Im just on windows 11 and on google chrome
Hey, just finished trying out this demo. It's honestly very fun to play. I love the concept of a Vampire Survivor + The Binding of Isaac mashup. This has the potential of having cool synergies and more spells to make an incredibly fun experience.
My only criticism would be that the wizard's collision seems a bit funky. I'm able to collect pickups with my head, but I would expect the collision to be at the foot of the player. I think that is more natural on a top-down bullet hell game.
Congrats, this is a very fun concept. Honestly I'd love to make a game with this concept myself, looks simple and very fun to make. Good luck on your project!
Midas touch + food is overpowered lol
Hahaha yup. I left that in the demo for now because it's fun to pull off. It's gonna get nerfed though in the future.
Really enjoying this so far.. though I really feel like the current state of the game doesn't reflect the description of "wacky" too much yet. I love the spider design and hope to see many more enemies, rooms, bosses, and items that help reinforce this theme. This may be something that comes later with visual design iterations, though please don't forget this in the long run! I personally believe this is an important aspect in establishing the game's identity and theme and would hate to see it left behind
Thanks for the feedback. I agree. I've tried some different monster iterations for the bat, the snake, and the slimes but I haven't quite found something that worked yet. I'll keep iterating until I find something that works. The dragon boss is going to need some iteration as well. Needless to say, I have my work cut out for me still on the art design side haha.
i beat triple heart curse (the good part about triple heart curse is that the tail (i think that's what it was) item was basically free damage (sort of like the lost with devil deals)
think i might try a triple heart curse no item no book bost run next time. (not sure if that will even be possible)
Glad you are enjoying it! I have a lot of ideas to improve the demo (including more curses, relics, and charms). I'm looking forward to making some updates for you!
really fun - perhaps to augment the difficulty a little - the warning sign for the area a monster will land could be delayed a little. This will require the player to anticipate more where the monster will land, instead of immediately knowing where it will land!
really really fun! great combination of isaac and stuff like vampire survivors. i could see this being a very successful full game.
Great game, super fun but sometimes when killing enemies they'd drop a heart without the fang . Also after the 10 soul upgrades the games grinds to a halt as you have to spend run after run for the 30 soul ones, this might not be a problem in the longer runs of the full game but as a suggestion maybe you could add an upgrade or item to earn more souls.
felt good to play and the movements were fluid. i didn't expect it to be so short but that's understandable since it's a demo. i look forward to suffering in the later levels.
VERY heavy TBOI vibes. love it
i'm already in love with the binding of isaac; when i saw the screenshots of this game i already knew that i needed to play it XD. Anyway, for being in a beta version, it is very good! i really like the pixel art and the sprites! congratulation and keep it up!!
great game, i see myself sinking some hours into this if it had more content.
very good game
i found a bug that if you dash in to the door,is will send you back a little and you can noclip in to a wall
Thanks for letting me know! I'll work on getting a fix out.
very fun game
You've got a great game in the works here
I like it, very fun to play! :D
Fun game. I found it a bit too easy however. Beat the dragon on 1st try without even knowing what most of the items do and how enemies act. Unlocked everything including the negative max hp. Beat the game using only negative max hp modifier to start on 1 heart. Pic of proof:
Wish there was just 1 more level to ramp up the difficulty past the dragon. Also wish there was more items that have a trade off like the tiger tail. Like doing half dmg but shooting faster or shooting with a bigger spread.
All in all the game is a lot of fun. Hope it gets more content. I can see myself spending a good 10-20h on this if there was just more levels or unlocks.
https://youtu.be/hM174wh3A5k
Not sure if this was intended, but I found a rather OP playstyle that 1 hits the dragon. Basically just farm for golden hearts and buy a ton of items (mainly attack speed) and just instantly kills the final boss. Game was pretty fun tho :)
I was sure that was intended since it's not that easy to get. You need midas pretty early on to stack up enough gold to have for re-rolls. The whole fun of rogue-likes is finding these broken combinations and being able to finally get a good run with them.
The best combo would be getting midas and the burger early on, since the burger gives back gold heart meaning 2 gold so everything that cost 3 gold is now 1 gold each and boots are basically free. Spamming boots will stack up the damage of the shopkeeper dagger too so its extra damage.
Combine it with the bat fang charm and it's absurd, I killed the dragon in about a second, just buy only boots, mugs, and swords after you have the set up stuff and take the extra shots with the spellbook
Okay I made another small update. Hopefully it addresses the slime bug for good. I also added a hearts curse (for those who want more of a challenge while playing) and a sneaker relic for dashing.
I really enjoyed it! Controls & mechanics felt very intuitive, but then again I am familiar with roguelikes and have played a fair bit of Vampire Survivor. It was cool that some upgrades carried over between runs. I never managed to make it past the dino, though that was mostly bc I always got stuck in a room before I could collect enough 'permanent' upgrades to be boosted enough haha. For my skill level, the game definitively felt balanced. My favorite enemies were the slimes (bc of how they split up and can really overwhelm you if you aren't careful) and the fancy man spider (mostly bc of his design). :)
I like the auto attacks, but I wish there was some more strategy/complexity to the attack/movement relationship. Things like e.g. the attack rate increasing when you stand still, so there's an incentive for minimal movement, or adding different attack types that require different movement patterns/have different ranges. Idk if these examples specifically would be good ideas, I'm just throwing out suggestions. Or you could introduce upgrades that completely change the way attacks work (e.g. they become AoE instead, or have shorter/longer ranges, etc.) so there's some more variety. I understand it's a demo, and that this would involve a lot of balancing, but some wild cards beyond simple +attack +speed would surely be fun.
I would also like to be able to attack bats while they are flying above obstacles, I found that a bit frustrating. If you wanted to introduce an enemy type that sort of 'ambushes' you by mostly moving in obstacles / walls, e.g. something like a ghost, that would of course be fun. But I just expected to be able to hit a flying bat right next to me.
The slime bug seems to still be there (I played the web version today), since I got stuck in a room with a slime outside the wall (see screenshot). Another time I got stuck in a room AGAIN, but this time I couldn't see any enemies at all. It might've still been an off-screen slime, since there were slime enemies in that room.
Overall this was a very fun game and I like where it is going!
Also an off-topic comment, but: I bought Endhall a couple months ago, and I still play through it every other week or so when I need a break from work. It's one of my favorite 'short' games. :)
That's really good feedback! Thank you!
loved the game. sometimes felt like the game needed a 2nd button so that i can do something else other that just moving while fighting the enemies XD. But sometimes there are just so many things to worry about that you are happy with just moving XD
youtube.com/watch?v=uvNrW7FmpJY
Hey Heartbeast, fun little demo! There are a lot of things about the prototype that I enjoyed. I thought you hit a really good balance of difficulty with the slime, that was definitely my favorite enemy type. (There was a bug where the game soft locked me in a room because a slime jumped outside of the walls) Most everything in the game was readable and easy to understand. I quickly figured out the dungeon map, the combat, how to play, etc. Of course the quality of the pixel art and small amounts of polish were all a great cherry on top as well.
One of the few things I felt the prototype could improve on is how it feels to move and evade attacks. The squishiness of the combat felt great, but moving around not so much. That's not to say the movement is bad by any means, I just found it to feel too simple. Might be cool to have a dash or teleport and the directional movement feeling a bit smoother?
Anyways, very fun game thanks for sharing. I'm a sucker for dungeon crawlers with classic enemies like bats, slimes, and dragons. Excited to see how this progresses!
Thanks for playing and for the great feedback! I have already started working on some ways to make the movement more interesting! I should have an update with the changes by the end of next week.
What a fun demo! I liked the clear indication of where enemies were going to spawn and land. Making the slimes random(?)ly land around the screen after they split made the slime room much more interesting than if they had just split in place. The different powerups made me actually think about what I wanted to purchase. Lastly, this was very colourblind-friendly, thank you for that.
You're welcome! I try to design with colorblindness in mind. Let me know if you notice any places where I can improve.
Thanks so much for playing and leaving feedback!
Burger Charm - give +1 heart on each future shop purchase.
Midas Charm - heart drops turn into gold. Golden heart give +2 gold instead of health.
If you have these 2 charms, every time you purchase item, it will drop a golden heart mean that you will get 2 gold back :)
Yup! It's currently the best build in the game haha. Probably too good but I left it in because it's fun.
It’s great. My least favorite part was that I had to stop playing so soon! You’ve got something special on your hands and I am very much looking forward to the Kickstarter!
You guys should all read Ben’s book, Production Point, by the way. He’s running a podcast to follow the process outlined in that book while making this very game. The process clearly works!
Okay, the slime bug should be fixed now.
Thanks again to everyone who has played so far and left feedback!
[edit] It seems it's only mostly fixed. I'll give it another go today.
Thanks for the fixes 😄 I died the first time I played but I made it through the second time, Really fun!!
I made i two times to the baby dragon boss, but after beating it nothing happens. I'm stuck in the room. In the second run I had the last blob land outside the room, maybe thats the problem!?
Hey! Thanks for playing the game. You reached the end of the demo, but it should show a victory screen. I apologize for the bug with the slimes. I'm actually uploading a fix now that should address it.
The new build is live! Thanks again for the feedback.
didn't work :-(
Edit: my next two runs did show the victory screen.
Darn, from my testing the error is much more rare, but it looks like I haven't solved it completely. I'll look into it. Thanks for letting me know.
I like the art and the balancing is already very good. At no point I thought the game was unfair. The monsters are also cool. Bellow are some suggestions for the demo. Some points may be not so important for you at this special point of development (or at all). So take what's useful for you :-)
- You should add some kind of animation to the main menu. At my first start I thought the game did freeze, because i couldn't click on "Start Game". Maybe an animated frame for the selected menu-point!?
- Replace the "g" in the shop with the gold-sprite. At first I didn't understand what the "3 gram" beneath the item could mean ;-D
- A hover animation for the shop-items would be nice. Otherwise there's no movement in the shop and this feels a bit weird.
- You should pick a different font. One that fits better for pixel art games.
- After "Set Fullscreen" the keyboard-input does not work. You have to click on the screen to get the focus back on the game window. Does not happen every time. But maybe it's "just" a browser problem, not a Godot problem...
- I don't like Midas Charm. It's cool that I get extra gold, but to get no more hearts/health from this point on (as far as I know) is hard. I would rethink this - however, I don't have a better solution at the moment :-)
- The dungeon stairs should only be accesible from the right side (as you would expect because of the sprite)
- There should be a way to get back from "Essence Upgrades" to the main menu. Just to have a "correct" main menu.
- The symbol for a spawning monster is a call sign in a circle. I would replace this symbol, because it does not fit into the world. Maybe pick something like the symbol of bowsers face.
- this one is very nitpicky: pushing hearts, you can't pick up (health bar full) does not feel "good". I suppose this is because of a circle-collision shape. Maybe you should not be able to push them at all!?
However, I like your book, like your YT content and the podcast is a great idea. Thank you for your work Ben!
Thanks for all the feedback that is super helpful!
Cool game, very impressive for a prototype. It plays smoothly and the art already has a lot of personality despite the game being in an early stage of development.
My only real criticism is to do with having different camera perspectives for various assets in the game. Some of them are top down like the blocks, some are almost side on like the player character and some are half way in between which overall can be somewhat visually confusing.
I'm not entirely sure what the exact solution is and you're clearly a much better artist than I'll ever be anyway, so I'll just suggest looking at games like The Legend of Zelda: Minish Cap approach it and leave it at that.
Good luck with further development!
I recorded myself playing it! I really enjoyed the game overall hope this is helpful! https://clipchamp.com/watch/9c4MvQNCJZa
Thank you!!!
I just finished watching and it was super helpful! Thanks for taking the time to recording it.
Your welcome glad to help!
Found a bug in this room in which the doors don't unlock after beating all the enemies.
That’s usually because an enemy has gone outside the room. Apparently it’s fixed now!
Sick! Gonna go for another run then
FYI (may be something with Godot 4.0 itself) but on Firefox it instantly crashes the browser after finished loading. Will play on a chromium based one.
Oh, just noticed on the description it won't work on MacOS :(
I've also been listening to the podcast and was curious to play the game. I expected it to be in a cruder state, but I was surprised to see it is already a pretty solid game. Congratulations! It took me 3 tries to finish and I think the difficulty is pretty fair.
Slimes keep getting stuck behind walls =(
I apologize :(! I tried a fix yesterday, but it didn't fix it completely. I'll try to address the issue again on Monday.
Hey, Ben!
I have been listening to you devlog podcast, and was excited to try this demo. I think you have a very good thing going here (he said after playing through the entire thing 6 times).
I really like the progression system. Having plain upgrades (ex: more damage), risky upgrades (more damage, less health) and long term upgrades (+0.1 damage per buy or something:PP) makes each decision just a little more engaging.
Furthermore, the art-style is cute, movement feels fluid, enemies are varied and funny, and I think that your core mechanic (positioning) is very well highlighted.
Which brings me to my next point. You have been talking a lot about the difficulty of the game. Specifically, how some of the feedback has led you to think that the game is sometime unfair in cornering the player into unescapable situations. From my personal experience, that has not really been the case. Most (99%) of the times I have taken damage (I feel like) it has been my own fault exclusively. That is not to say that I haven't been cornered into unescapable situations. But being in such a situation due to your own positioning is something quite different from being forced into these situations by an unfair game.
I fear that trying to make these situations less frequent would take away from the deeper aspects of the main mechanic, which is to not only position well for the current state of the game, but also thinking one or two steps into the future when finding the optimal position.
That was way longer than anticipated (I know i tend to become very vocal when writing). I hope you understood my main points:PP That being said, I am really looking forward to seeing/listening to the progression of this game. I had a lot of fun playing this demo, and I will definitely buy the game if you keep up the good work;)
Thanks for the feedback! I agree. There is a balance here. I also made some changes on Friday that I think improved the situation from my last podcast episode. I might talk more about my thoughts in the next episode, but I think we are on the same page.
Hey, I love the game and art style! I'm usually not a fan of roguelikes (besides Hades), but I found the simplicity and not-too-difficult gameplay creating a fun experience.
On another topic, I was wondering if I could compose the music for your game because it looks like a project I would have much fun making the music for!
Thanks, and I look forward to seeing this game evolve over time!
General feedback incoming, but first a screenshot:
Edit: I played for like 45 minutes:
The biggest issue is the slimes going outside the room, I’m sure you’ve seen that. Some thoughts in no order:
Overall I enjoyed it! I haven’t done a Kickstarter in a while, but I signed up for yours 👍️