Post by Nascent Space in Shadow Peaks (Demo) comments

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Hey, tried to beat your game but I ran out of checkpoints and got stuck. I like the visuals and the movement feels snappy. Just wanted to point out a couple weird bugs I found.

It's possible to get stuck on the top of an ice slope if you hit it at just the right spot on the top. Landing on an edge has a chance to cause you to get stuck, either left floating or you float down and are unable to move or jump. If you ground slam a ledge you can get stuck, resetting to a checkpoint makes the ground slam animation play. Dashing without moving causes you to play the dash animation without moving. There's a few ledges where pressing jump and holding right doesn't seem to want to put you on top of the platform so I can't get on top of them.

I hope these can be fixed because I do really want to beat your game but it's just a bit too tricky for me right now. Keep up the good work

Darkland Studios357 days ago

Hey! I appreciate the input! I'm glad you mostly enjoyed it!

The bug of hitting a ledge and the animations bugging out to where you just float down slowly is one that's been known to me for a while. I believe it has something to do with the trigger that detects ledges not being activated properly, or being activated too early/late. I'm working on fixing this bug as we speak, it should be fixed by the "big update" date on the games description.

I also knew of the getting stuck on the tips of the ice platforms, but I thought i fixed this, I suppose I just wasn't able to hit the the right angle. This bug can be fixed just by adjusting or replacing the collider, so it should also be fixed by the big update.

Resetting to a checkpoint should force you into a falling animation, but it's possible I forgot to set slam to false, so, when you reset while doing the slam attack, it just completes the action. This should also be pretty simple to fix, just a line to two of extra code.

Dashing on the ground and staying in place is an interesting one that I'll have to take a better look at.

If I understand correctly, the issue of holding right while climbing a platform and not being placed on it may be because you are able to move immediately after finishing the climb animation, so I would suggest just waiting till the animation finishes before moving. If you're still interesting in beating the game, try this during the next big update and let me know if you still have the same problem.

Could you give me a tad more information on what you mean by getting stuck when you hit a ledge?

Nascent Space357 days ago(+1)

Thanks for responding, there's been a few times where I've tried to climb up a ledge and if I press jump during the animation I go straight up and fall back down right onto the ledge, which sometimes seems to put my character in this weird floating state. It seems like it deactivates some kind of check for when you land on the ground, which makes it so that if the character floats down and hits a platform you just get stuck on the floor.

Darkland Studios357 days ago

Interesting. I'll see if I can replicate this and find what's going wrong. Also, I'm happy to announce I believe I've already fixed the issue of getting stuck on ice platforms, continuing the slam action when resetting to a checkpoint, and dashing in place while on the ground. I'm working on the glitching into ledges glitch now and will try to find this one afterwards.

Also, may I ask how far you got? Did you manage to get passed a few screens, or did these bugs prevent you from making much progress?

Nascent Space357 days ago(+1)

I managed to get past about 5 or so screens, but at a point the ledge grab bug where I couldn't grab certain ledges just got too bad and I couldn't progress further

Darkland Studios357 days ago

That's not as bad as I expected. I just released a new build that hopefully fixed most of the bugs you mentioned, save for the one you described further as I haven't yet been able to replicate it.

Next time you feel like playing Shadow Peaks, if you don't mind, put a checkpoint or two and test some of the bugs you found to see if they still appear, let me know how it goes.

Thank you.

Aside from the bugs, do you have any comments on the level design and gameplay? Visuals, animations (excluding when they didn't work because of the bugs), speed and weight of the player, anything like that?

Nascent Space357 days ago(+1)

Once I got used to it the movement was alright, but at first not being able to change direction at all in midair was a bit jarring. The level design is good, I like how open it is, leaves a lot of room for finding shortcuts or easier routes. The visual design is nice but I think a bit of extra contrast and readability would be useful. Especially for differentiating between the crumble platforms and the non crumble ones. Also telling where the spike walls are isn't always easy, maybe having white highlights on the spikes or even creepy bloodstains on them would help. I think the room I got up to was the one on or after the one with a spike wall that is really small for some reason.

Nascent Space357 days ago(+1)

The movement feels a lot better, not running into as many issues. But there are still a couple really weird edge cases I'm noticing, had a thing where I tried to latch to a wall and the character was latched but flipped the wrong way around somehow. Jumping didn't send me away from the wall. Also the square platforms after a point are just impossible to latch to the sides of or ledge grab on. I can still jump off them, but I just keep going in the same direction so I just fly up it and then eventually shoot off to the other side, only by ground slamming can I avoid that.

Darkland Studios357 days ago

I think this is because the edge needs to hit a certain collider for the player to reach for it, so, say, if shadows box collider hits the edge of a platform before the edge detection trigger does, then it treats it as a normal ground tag, so, if you jump before the edge reaches the trigger, the player will jump as if he's on the ground.

This is actually intentional. There are ways, if you're really good with the movement, where you can exploit this to skip having to climb the edges, which could save you several seconds, which is really big in speedrunning, which is a big target demographic for this game. But I can see how that could be annoying or not very obvious.

Would you say you'd prefer for the player to always grab the ledge when you hit one, say, set jumping and moving to false if the edge is within a certain range, or would you think it be sufficient to bring attention to this? I do actually plan to implement a tutorial in the near future, so, if the latter then I could make this obvious in the tutorial level. I can do either option, but I would like to get some more opinions on this matter as well.

If you'd like to play the game further, try waiting a moment when you hit the edge of the platform if the player doesn't immediately grab it. The trigger for the player's edge detection is near his face or a bit higher, see if that lets you get a bit further until I've come to a proper solution for this.

Darkland Studios357 days ago

Also, with the wall collider mishap, this is because I made a few of the wall colliders too short, so the player is hitting the ground collider behind them. I'm in the process of fixing this now, but I need to go through every ground chunk in the game to move the collider slightly out, so it may take a couple updates, since not all of the wall colliders are even placed yet. After the 10th or so screen only wall colliders on ground chunks that are necessary to complete the "true" path, or the path I think is the most obvious for beginners, are placed. I'll add this as a bug to the page. To avoid this for now, just try and press the arrow key pointing towards the wall of any ground chunks. I'll let you know when this issue has been fully resolved.

I'm glad you liked the level design!

Darkland Studios357 days ago(+1)

I'm actually glad to hear that. This game is designed to be a foddian platformer, so I took that inspiration from games like jump king, so the player not being able to move in the air is meant to be an extra layer of difficulty to the movement.

I see, I'll take that into account, maybe I'll make the crumble platforms a bit smaller and darker, or brighter. White highlights on the spikes isn't a bad idea. I have a similar highlight on an item later in the game.

The smaller spike platforms are intentional. In some instances, having too large of a spike platform would ruin the flow of the level, but no spike platform at all would lead to players performing shortcuts that were too easy and obvious for my liking and that weren't accounted for. So I shrunk some of the spike platforms so that players could get past it fine, but not allow for unintended and undesirable shortcuts, or players getting onto or in areas they weren't supposed to be.

Nascent Space356 days ago(+1)

Took me 40 minutes, but I finally made it to the white outside area. Ran out of checkpoints and so it felt like I wasted 40 minutes of my time because I just genuinely can't progress past this point. It's the part where you have to dash back and forth a lot. I am honestly really liking the dash, especially now that I figured out you can jump out of it to grab a wall instead of just smacking into the side and falling. Also I found another bug, managed to clip inside of and get stuck in one of the square platforms, genuinely no idea how, but it happened when I was grabbing the ledge, and it flipped me and I just jumped through.

Darkland Studios356 days ago

I'm sorry to hear that. I'm glad you managed to progress further through. I'm thinkin of just making you have unlimited checkpoints. You can see on the update agenda and the main menu I plan to add challenges, so I may just make no checkpoints a challenge for people who've played the game a lot and wanna test their abilities more. Or for a steam achievement when the full game releases.

The point of the limited checkpoints is to force people to be aware of them, so they need to consciously space them out. However, I think the level at the moment is just a bit too hard for that to be reasonable to new audiences. This is a foddian game, so it is meant to have a small rage element, but it's also a speedrun game, so it should be completable within a reasonable amount of time. We'll see.

But, assuming you only got to the first level in the outside area, that means you only actually have 5 screens to go, including the one that's just you standing there, the ending one. And being able to finish the game is a couple hours is a pretty good first completion time. So I'll leave it at 20 for now. If you'd still like to play further and beat the game, let me know after a few more attempts if it's just truly too difficult to get to that point without using all your checkpoints.

I'll look into the bug as well. I've had a few times where I glitched into the ground chunks while I was sprinting and dashing around like crazy actively trying to break it, but it wasn't even remotely repeatable. This bug will probably take a bit longer to fix, since I need to identify the problem basically through trial and error. For now if it only happened to you once in 40 minutes or longer I can leave it allow to focus on more important updates. But let me know if it starts happening more frequently.

Thank you for playing! This has been extremely beneficial feedback. ^^

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