Thank you! This is great input and you have spotted a lot of problems which I would have had a hard time to find myself.
- I don't think I ever found that fourth party member.
I guess i phrased it a bit incorrectly, the "fourth" partymember (should have been playable character) is the teenage Sarah you get to control when she is on her first real hunt, the scene where you unlock the bloodrites skill. She will be able to join you as a companion at a later point though.
- I also find it interesting how you’re seemingly able to retroactively decide what Winter’s relationship with Velouria was like, or at least his views on it, through your ingame choices.
You are on the right track. Lets just say that even if you choose to view their relationship through rose-tinted glasses, the reality of it is implied even in the "it was good" choices. You will get to know more later on in the game. What you choose do change stuff though, there are 8 hidden "personality-values" which will change up stuff way further into the game.
- It seems that the game will always autosave right after you die.
Yes, it does not work properly at all, I have added a "make manual saves" message up top. I dont know how to fix it for now but I have to look in to it at some point.
- The Simpleton and Finish stat screens appear to be identical, and both of them cut off near the bottom, preventing you from seeing the character’s Swagger bar and Biography.
The cut off is something I need to fix. "finish" was actually supposed to be the "I am done" button at one point, guess I forgot to remove it. I should take a closer look at the menus overall.
- There’s generally a lot of issues with sprites transforming when you interact.
Yes, this is easy to fix and due to me being sloppy when creating spritesheets and disabling animations. Thanks for pointing the instances out.
- Gaslight skill, even if you already got the skill from the previous mirror.
Yes, this is just not done yet. You will get two new introspection skills, berate and belittle, which works as debuffs once I have made their animations.
- The default attack being “blasting with bullets” ends up being weird when paired with the Confusion status, since it makes enemies without any visible guns start shooting themselves or the party out of nowhere.
I added that mood pretty recently so I haven't given it a lot of testing, I am guessing this can be solved by altering the "confused" state. If you had chosen the other option at the scarecrow you would have gotten a mood which protected against the confusion state.
- Enemies appear to skip their turns very often. Not by guarding or “waiting to see what happens”, they just don’t do anything and there’s no combat message indicating it’s intentional. It was especially noticeable with the Crowcrone, who permanently stopped attacking me after she used the Butchering self-buff.
This is due to the enemies speedstats, they can get more or fewer actions than the player, it certainly needs a lot of adjustments.
- The PCs’ sideways walking cycles are very odd: there are visible black lines in the air above their sprites, and they appear to be missing a second contact pose which is very distracting imo.
Probably some stray pixels in the spritesheets, funny that I dont notice this myself. Please elaborate on contact pose, I am not sure what you mean.
- The game seems to stop responding to keyboard inputs when you run away from the Euthanasia, but only if you started the fight by interacting with her instead of colliding with her.
I will look into this.
- The Crackerleader gun skill is kind of busted, in my opinion.
The combat system needs a lot of tuning overall, but I guess my gut feeling is to leave overpowered stuff alone and instead increase the difficulty later on in the game. There are some things yet to be implemented that are designed to be broken by an observant player. I also recently nerfed the enemies in part 1 since most people thought that it was too difficult.
- On the other hand, does Sarah’s Curse work on anything?
Both curses are actually pretty OP if you play your cards right. There are at this point no enemies immune to curses, but curse only has a 40 % success rate while deathcurse has 80 %, success meaning that "it takes hold".
- When you recruit Sarah again post-demo, her talking instance seems to remain in the pond for some reason, only becoming invisible.
Minor oversight from me, there is collision there that is supposed to go away if she enters the party.
- For some reason, the text box for the Rusted Key (East)’s pickup text permanently stays on the screen after picking it up, and not even closing and reopening the game seems to fix it. It also seems like the Crowcrone’s overworld sprite doesn’t disappear when she’s defeated until you leave and reenter the area.
These have been fixed. The next demo will contain the entirety of act 2, so you will have to wait for a bit! I think I will add a cheat area sometime soon with teleports and other stuff for people who wants to keep testing without playing it all again from the beginning.
Again, thank you! If you want to be credited as a playtester once it gets to that point you can send me whatever you want to have written.