apologies for the world's latest demo day feedback, i wanted to make some kind of progress before commenting but never got very far. i played a little on v55 but mostly on v55-1
the changes to ammo cost on v55-1 was confusing since it no longer says explicitly "1 x ammo cost" and i'm left to infer that 1/6 means 1 ammo cost, 6 shots per magazine. the rest of the HUD changes seem good, especially for quick glancing
i remember when i first gave feedback and didn't notice that you heal in between battles -- i think it should be more obvious when you heal a small amount on a level transition, with a pause, a visual effect, and a sound effect
gun crafting is very fun
i play Logan because his ability sounds fun but i can never find a good use for it
i wish there was a way i could rearrange my weapon slots
more crosshair options would be nice. i crank it up to maximum size with a bright color because i spend most of my time kiting with it in my peripheral vision and it'd be less clunky for me if there were the kind of crosshair options you get default in Source games
my biggest peeve would be that one room generation type where you go to the right (i think it's called craters?). i like it -- actually i used to hate it, but now it's fun to keep track of avoiding the mortar while fighting through -- but it feels like the same room each time i'm there and not very roguelite-ish
the game feels very complete and polished
the farthest i got so far was the room with the wizards who shoot arrows, knights, and falling boulders
It's always fun to playtest your game. Any feedback I got for you s mentioned in the video, but it is probably mostly for your entertainment. One thing that is probably the most important is that one weapon I found which kept dropping my frames.
Hello again friend, I always appreciate you taking your time to do this. Answering some of your thoughts:
There is a new version of the jolly purple horned lads that you can encounter later, basically the same thing but stronger.
I see you struggling with the awful gun tooltips, for example the one for frags do not even list the released projectiles so not very easy to know how strong they are... But I am currently working on improving them and I think its going well.
The different heals have gotten a bit confusing know that there are several, the ones in the shop are actually a lesser one that heals for less and it differs how many there are you can buy. The Ration one is a bit less than the one you can get in the Interstice as you can take it with you. I'll put in exactly how much each one heals, hadn't really thought about there coming up situations where you can choose between multiple ones for example.
Mass isn't really explained anywhere, but its just physics. So increasing your mass will slow you down a bit but also make you more resistant to being pushed around by enemies.
And then onto the slowdowns, I looked into it and apparently its a rendering issue. Most likely because of an inefficient shader I haven't bothered to improve. I don't notice anything at all on my dev machine, so its great you found it. I think I have it sorted out, if you would like to do me a favor and help me even more here is a test version where Logan starts with a Sawed Off with twice the regular projectiles. If you clear the first level you can hold down the button by the portal and see if its still bad: https://file.io/XLkd3bnt0xeJ
Wow that was fast, thank you. Still not looking good though, really odd. I was trying it out on a laptop with an integrated graphics card and it didn't go below 90 FPS. Must be something else going on too, I will look into it! Have a nice weekend.
I am on a laptop, but it has GeForce RTX 2080 with Max-Q Design.
Processor is Intel Core i7-9750H CPU @ 2.60GHz x 6
Memory is 31.1 GB
My reply was fast because I just noticed it. Normally it might take days until I reply during the week. If you got another built to test after you figure something out, then I can test it for you when I got the time.
Thanks for the quick test again! It looks like it worked too, although I'm reminded that I still need to figure out why the bullet casings going left are black for you. Have even less of an idea why that happens.
The problem had to do with the way I handle animations, in short its all flipbook animations handled in shaders in an attempt to optimize it for the CPU. Now this is all speculation but it seems like trying to fix what I think the problem was fixed it; the way I had it set up with handling different properties for different projectiles created a massive amount of branches that caused the slowdown. How shader branching is handled seems pretty dependent on hardware, drivers, etc so its possible that how its handled on some systems caused it. Could be because of some difference between Linux or Vulkan or something, not sure. So I made a change to avoid branching that is much more convoluted and probably ~80 more instructions per frame but if it works...
I don't use Discord much but I'll add you for sure.
It makes sense. Branching in shaders can make huge differences the more convoluted they get. I am happy you managed to solve the issue. As for discord, I was in the same boat, but everyone I know uses it.
From a gamedev perspective good job. The game seems very polished and well designed. One small bug I ran into was when I had a gun on the ground and a portal spawned too near it so I couldn't see what it was because when I tried I got teleported.
From a player's perspective I'm not a fan of tight corridors for bullet dodging. My run ended when I was met with a huge group of eyeballs and no space to dodge the projectiles. The weapon upgrades seemed rather unsatisfying. Maybe I had bad luck but I kept getting the no piercing upgrade when all my guns had 0 pierce and the other upgrade was always something minor that didn't feel like it made much of a difference.
Also checked out your Steam page and I have to say it is nice. You've done a good job with that.
Is there a way to see what kind of ammo a weapon uses when looking at it in the shop? I seriously couldn't figure it out and didnt want to just buy them to see it. I guess theres some logic to it after playing a while: blue for most automatic weapons, green for kaboom guns and red for the rest. Still, i felt like i was missing this info somewhere on the tooltip.
Apart from that i cant complain about anything. No lags/crashes/bugs for me, death animations are great, music and sounds are fitting and satisfying. Its already on the gonna-make-it-highway, just needs more content.
Maybe a question since i had the laser in my last run: what are some of the upgrade effects for it? I got a -5% spread modifier on it, so it obviously had less aoe, but did it "focus" the damage too, or was it a straight up downgrade? Also not sure if the powerup from starting the level that gave me more projectile range affects the laser. I doubt it, since its not a real projectile?
You can see which ammo a gun uses in the tooltip, but they are pretty confusing and I am right now in the process of redoing the tooltips. I believe it will be easier to tell.
A lot of the upgrades are a bit undercooked at the moment, especially for laser type guns. Increasing the spread of the laser will cause the beam to go in a different direction every frame. The spread is so small on it that its not very noticeable unless the spread is increased a lot by a flat amount. Having it change AoE would be much better though... If you can apply an upgrade to a gun it will also affect it, unless I've made a mistake. Increasing the range will increase the laser range too.
Thanks for the video! You're right its great just seeing people play. You bring up some good points - several I've considered myself too actually. Will definitely take into consideration, thanks.
The slowdown in the beginning is concerning though, it shouldn't happen.
I haven't played this style of game since I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MBIES 1N IT!!!1 It's the type of game where playing too many of them makes them all feel the same, so when you play one, it needs to be good. And this is really good. I've wishlisted.
The gun is indeed good. I feel like this just needs juice at this point. (sound effects, screen shake, etc.) Some smaller feedback:
It threw me off that the dash/roll didn't have i-frames until I saw the rune upgrade for that, but it still felt kind of useless. Or at least very situational- if you were crowded at a short distance, the only way out is dying.
When I first booted it up, the only controls shown in the menus were for controller. After I started playing, the M/KB controls were available.
The gun tooltips when hovering(?) on the ground would move out of view if I moved the mouse.
I wish there was an easier way to compare weapons, or if it were easier to parse the differences.
Gameplay is good. Idk, it felt a little hollow, but maybe I wasn’t in the mood. Compared to Nuclear Throne, the special ability cooldowns are so long, it makes the game feel way slower and more tactical in a way. Throws me off, I was just wanna shootan. Same when picking the upgrades, I am quite impatient, the music stopping does not help, I wanna go on and shoot more and have banger soundtrack playing again, instead I am prompted to figure out if any of my weapons is an Assault Rifle so it would benefit from option 1 of 3.
I did not initially understand that I need runes to buy upgrades, I thought they just came for free after finishing a level. The runes are another thing making this game feel very tactical. It’s not enough to beat the enemies, it must be done so that runes are picked up. Paired with the over-the-top guns, this actually makes the game appear more like an ore mining (or lawn mowing, if you will) game than an enemy fighting game. This is a neutral statement.
All that being said, this is ofc. very much "a game," and a fun one at that, and I appreciated all the little details like items drops flying towards the portal on level finish. I gotta unlock more of the characters, usually in games like this there are 1-2 I really love, and it’s not the starting ones.
Last thing - I tried to play on Linux at first, but the game just hang without ever painting anything and needed to be SIGKILL’d. I can send you an strace or stackdump if you care, but since it’s Unity I guess you don’t have much control/insight. (I had no problems with other Unity games though.)
Thank you for playing, and streaming it. Helps a lot just seeing people play.
I think the beginning is a, I don't know if hollow is the best word but sure, and it gets better later. But I need to strike a good balance of having the start being easy enough for new players and also somewhat interesting to replay again and again. I don't think its good right now and it seems most players get caught off-guard by it suddenly getting harder.
The characters ability cooldowns aren't set in stone, I do want the starter character to have a moderate long one though because people get overwhelmed as it is. And the Items have long ones because many are mean to be "oh shit" buttons, or supplement you in some way, so not really be anything you absolutely have to use.
The stopping and resting part is very intentional though, its something I quite like in games. Kind of like going back to town in Diablo to sell stuff and stock back up. The later levels can be a bit long too so I think its pretty nice to recover a bit. You kind of do it in Nuclear Throne too, choosing what gun to take with you (unless the portal sucks you in) and then choosing an upgrade. I should really have some sort of ambient sound at least, have been thinking about an option to enable for constant music too.
Right now there is only one character to unlock, but there will be more! They have some unique upgrades too, I should really add a way to see that...
It's possible that it's something with Vulkan for it not working on Linux. I do not have much knowledge about Linux unfortunately, but send me what you can and I'll look at it. Also, the Player.log would be nice to have too, for Linux it should be at: ~/.config/unity3d/Northwood Gameworks/The Gun is Good/Player.log
So juicy, so satisfying. The 'wild at heart' spread increase improved the boom stick in the best way for me lol, it let me do such a wide range of damage. Loved the enemy variety. I recall an enemy that turned blue when it was weakened and I thought that was the case for all the enemies and it seemed like really good feedback for the player but I tried playing again and I guess that's not the case for all enemies.
The blue effect is a status effect that's caused by weapons with ice damage, I made the effect ages ago though. I should really get around to improving it so it looks more like ice. And explain that it's actually a thing somewhere too...
Needs to be retitled to The Game is Good. 100% GMI. I have no useful feedback to give. It's really, really fun, super polished, and just an excellent time all around.
Game's still really good, the guns are satisfying, enemy variety and the variety of their behavior is nice. Only came across one minor issue where I spawned where a torch was and was unable to move before I shot first.
Unlocked the dude with the fortification ability, tried out a few runs with him but didn't really like him. I feel like slow movement speed and the fortification just doesn't synergize well with a slow RoF shotgun, the only time he was decent when I quickly got something rapid fire like an SMG/machine gun/AR.
The overworld paths feel like could use some fine-tuning as well. Lot of the times one option just goes off into a straight corridor with no choices where the other two comes together and cross each other next to it.
One thing that was constantly bothering me is the flash of the health bar's borders when I took damage. Since it's in my peripherial vision I always felt like I'm taking more damage than I did, because I just saw some red thing going quickly from full to zero near the health bar - only when I started actively looking at it noticed that it was in fact the border and not the health bar itself.
Mixed bag of notes from first time playing. Unfortunately I haven’t played long enough to have serious thoughts about balance. I had fun, I like the visuals, the name is (really) good and I would like to play more but I want to get through more demos.
This genre is dopamine-heavy and players’ receptors are all fried. I feel that this game’s hits could be stronger, I’d start by making juicier, shinier coin pickups with that silly pitch increase effect (or is it a Shepard tone?)
I can’t get used to critical info being all the way into the corners, game can be fast paced enough that time spent on the ocular round-trip affects your play and gets fatiguing.
Stereo not fully utilised, an explosion just left of the character sounds “as left” as one at the edge of the screen. If you can even work in some up/down spatialization it would be primo. A storm of bullets tearing through a fullscreen crowd of zombies should(!) sound crazy good and satisfying, use that as a test case to work on audio.
Have you tried falling casings sounds? Curious if it gets annoying or is too similar to coin pickups. Maybe only play them while not picking coins or change the coin sounds.
Not an expert on this so I won’t comment further but I would only pick 2-3 text sizes and 2 fonts and completely stick to them.
Map screen, the rune icons on lower levels keep flashing even though (I think?) there’s no action I could take about them.
Enemies should have names (not necessarily during gameplay but at least a compendium maybe) to facilitate players’ discussions. I think they’re unique enough to generate strategy discussions and fun anecdotes.
It’s “can hardly wait”, unless I’m grammar nazi-ing a pun in which case keep it, it’s a crumb that will drive at least 50 online engagements down the line.
Your comments about sound are all good. I've been thinking about casing sounds too, I think it'd make it a bit too noisy with everything going on, But I'll try it out and see what I think.
My thoughts about the UI have been to keep it to the sides so it doesn't get in the way of the limited vertical space. But you are hardly the first one to make the same comment so I'll look into finding a better solution.
I've been meaning to look over the fonts and make all proper pixel fonts. One day...
I'll fix the map bug.
It's good that you've had the same thought as me about a "bestiary" I think. Been planning on putting something in the hub area (which is really empty now) which'll reveal more and more about the enemies as you kill them.
It’s “can hardly wait”, unless I’m grammar nazi-ing a pun in which case keep it, it’s a crumb that will drive at least 50 online engagements down the line.
It's not really a pun, and I can barely call it even a reference. It's the name of a movie which was the first thing I thought of while writing the description. I'll probably change it though.
The camera is too zoomed out (this game causes awful eye strain). Picking up the gun and immediately getting killed by a swarm is super lame (is it meant to be a Dark Souls thing?). Having four branches in the world map is too many, should be 2-3. Having so many cooldown/stamina bars on corners of the screen is not great, would be better with a centered indicator. This game seems to be Enter the Gungeon but with destructible walls, which I'm not sure is a good enough gimmick. The combat isn't very good in comparison to the competition (e.g., Gungeon and Hades).
I'll look into having a zoom option. The intro is meant to be a super short tutorial, you'll only do it once. But if people think it's lame that's not good... It is a bit of a problem I've had I think that the combat doesn't really "click" for many until they've played for a while. It's about fighting and managing hordes so a single unit won't be much of a threat at all compared to one of those games for example. I will try to improve it.
Discovered that 9 and 0 control the zoom while trying to find an auto-fire key.
Agree on the immediate death intro, thought it was just me being distracted for a second.
Mostly looking for feedback on things you think suck, are fun, too hard, balance like what guns drop and when, amount of ammo, difficulty of enemies etc, bugs.
Also I haven't tested the Linux version so if anyone does please let me know if it doesn't work.
Comments
apologies for the world's latest demo day feedback, i wanted to make some kind of progress before commenting but never got very far. i played a little on v55 but mostly on v55-1
Here's the world latest reply. Thanks a lot for the feedback, a lot of good thoughts.
You know how it goes, here's a video from me:
https://mega.nz/file/CIFzXJjS#nNMlR5hh0hUMQRvY9hvSzOEl2CF5rM3-vut80AaGMoE
It's always fun to playtest your game. Any feedback I got for you s mentioned in the video, but it is probably mostly for your entertainment. One thing that is probably the most important is that one weapon I found which kept dropping my frames.
Hello again friend, I always appreciate you taking your time to do this. Answering some of your thoughts:
There is a new version of the jolly purple horned lads that you can encounter later, basically the same thing but stronger.
I see you struggling with the awful gun tooltips, for example the one for frags do not even list the released projectiles so not very easy to know how strong they are... But I am currently working on improving them and I think its going well.
The different heals have gotten a bit confusing know that there are several, the ones in the shop are actually a lesser one that heals for less and it differs how many there are you can buy. The Ration one is a bit less than the one you can get in the Interstice as you can take it with you. I'll put in exactly how much each one heals, hadn't really thought about there coming up situations where you can choose between multiple ones for example.
Mass isn't really explained anywhere, but its just physics. So increasing your mass will slow you down a bit but also make you more resistant to being pushed around by enemies.
And then onto the slowdowns, I looked into it and apparently its a rendering issue. Most likely because of an inefficient shader I haven't bothered to improve. I don't notice anything at all on my dev machine, so its great you found it.
I think I have it sorted out, if you would like to do me a favor and help me even more here is a test version where Logan starts with a Sawed Off with twice the regular projectiles. If you clear the first level you can hold down the button by the portal and see if its still bad: https://file.io/XLkd3bnt0xeJ
Either way, thanks a lot for your time.
I am sure you are going to be able to improve your tooltips. Healing items with just "heals x % health" would be enough.
More importantly, here is the quick test on the version you uploaded https://mega.nz/file/OcNiWThJ#Ku2KxPDlZ5wV3p1WkjWdc1_u5CFS7maH6XDJZLwIzAo
Wow that was fast, thank you. Still not looking good though, really odd. I was trying it out on a laptop with an integrated graphics card and it didn't go below 90 FPS. Must be something else going on too, I will look into it! Have a nice weekend.
I am on a laptop, but it has GeForce RTX 2080 with Max-Q Design.
Processor is Intel Core i7-9750H CPU @ 2.60GHz x 6
Memory is 31.1 GB
My reply was fast because I just noticed it. Normally it might take days until I reply during the week. If you got another built to test after you figure something out, then I can test it for you when I got the time.
With a computer like that there shouldn't be any perceptible slow down at all, very strange.
Anyway, here's another test request when you get the time. Same procedure as last time, you can press F5 to instantly kill all enemies.
https://file.io/WTYIzVPWkkms
Here you go https://mega.nz/file/mF9yhTLK#H9wThQ8agn17ETP9TI_Qj3DGDzJx0cO-7-23jL0QgJk
I am curious what got changed. I also added a small message if there is ever any need.
Thanks for the quick test again! It looks like it worked too, although I'm reminded that I still need to figure out why the bullet casings going left are black for you. Have even less of an idea why that happens.
The problem had to do with the way I handle animations, in short its all flipbook animations handled in shaders in an attempt to optimize it for the CPU. Now this is all speculation but it seems like trying to fix what I think the problem was fixed it; the way I had it set up with handling different properties for different projectiles created a massive amount of branches that caused the slowdown. How shader branching is handled seems pretty dependent on hardware, drivers, etc so its possible that how its handled on some systems caused it. Could be because of some difference between Linux or Vulkan or something, not sure.
So I made a change to avoid branching that is much more convoluted and probably ~80 more instructions per frame but if it works...
I don't use Discord much but I'll add you for sure.
It makes sense. Branching in shaders can make huge differences the more convoluted they get. I am happy you managed to solve the issue. As for discord, I was in the same boat, but everyone I know uses it.
From a gamedev perspective good job. The game seems very polished and well designed. One small bug I ran into was when I had a gun on the ground and a portal spawned too near it so I couldn't see what it was because when I tried I got teleported.
From a player's perspective I'm not a fan of tight corridors for bullet dodging. My run ended when I was met with a huge group of eyeballs and no space to dodge the projectiles. The weapon upgrades seemed rather unsatisfying. Maybe I had bad luck but I kept getting the no piercing upgrade when all my guns had 0 pierce and the other upgrade was always something minor that didn't feel like it made much of a difference.
Also checked out your Steam page and I have to say it is nice. You've done a good job with that.
Thanks for playing!
That shouldn't happen so I must've missed something. Will fix.
Yeah the tighter maps are a common complaint, I will look them over.
Gun upgrades are very work in progress, will improve it too!
Thanks again.
The gun is great!
Is there a way to see what kind of ammo a weapon uses when looking at it in the shop? I seriously couldn't figure it out and didnt want to just buy them to see it. I guess theres some logic to it after playing a while: blue for most automatic weapons, green for kaboom guns and red for the rest. Still, i felt like i was missing this info somewhere on the tooltip.
Apart from that i cant complain about anything. No lags/crashes/bugs for me, death animations are great, music and sounds are fitting and satisfying. Its already on the gonna-make-it-highway, just needs more content.
Maybe a question since i had the laser in my last run: what are some of the upgrade effects for it? I got a -5% spread modifier on it, so it obviously had less aoe, but did it "focus" the damage too, or was it a straight up downgrade? Also not sure if the powerup from starting the level that gave me more projectile range affects the laser. I doubt it, since its not a real projectile?
Thanks for playing!
You can see which ammo a gun uses in the tooltip, but they are pretty confusing and I am right now in the process of redoing the tooltips. I believe it will be easier to tell.
A lot of the upgrades are a bit undercooked at the moment, especially for laser type guns. Increasing the spread of the laser will cause the beam to go in a different direction every frame. The spread is so small on it that its not very noticeable unless the spread is increased a lot by a flat amount. Having it change AoE would be much better though...
If you can apply an upgrade to a gun it will also affect it, unless I've made a mistake. Increasing the range will increase the laser range too.
Video Feedback:
Thanks for the video! You're right its great just seeing people play. You bring up some good points - several I've considered myself too actually. Will definitely take into consideration, thanks.
The slowdown in the beginning is concerning though, it shouldn't happen.
I haven't played this style of game since I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MBIES 1N IT!!!1 It's the type of game where playing too many of them makes them all feel the same, so when you play one, it needs to be good. And this is really good. I've wishlisted.
Thank you very much, I'm glad you liked it.
Very fun, its almost at a point where it would be ready to ship. Needs a little more polish, but seriously i had a blast
Thanks for playing! I saw your recorded gameplay too. Yeah it needs polish, content, and a lot of balancing.
The gun is indeed good. I feel like this just needs juice at this point. (sound effects, screen shake, etc.) Some smaller feedback:
Thank you for playing! I'm not much of a screen shake enjoyer, but I have planned to add some - have to decide exactly where I want it to happen.
The upgrade allows you to dash through enemies as well, upgrades aren't final of course so I'll keep on tweaking.
The displayed controls should change according to the last used input device, so during gameplay too.
Yeah the gun tooltip infodump has been a bit of a problem I've been holding off trying to fix. I have some ideas.
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2079036389
Your sprites are super awesome!
Gameplay is good. Idk, it felt a little hollow, but maybe I wasn’t in the mood. Compared to Nuclear Throne, the special ability cooldowns are so long, it makes the game feel way slower and more tactical in a way. Throws me off, I was just wanna shootan. Same when picking the upgrades, I am quite impatient, the music stopping does not help, I wanna go on and shoot more and have banger soundtrack playing again, instead I am prompted to figure out if any of my weapons is an Assault Rifle so it would benefit from option 1 of 3.
I did not initially understand that I need runes to buy upgrades, I thought they just came for free after finishing a level. The runes are another thing making this game feel very tactical. It’s not enough to beat the enemies, it must be done so that runes are picked up. Paired with the over-the-top guns, this actually makes the game appear more like an ore mining (or lawn mowing, if you will) game than an enemy fighting game. This is a neutral statement.
All that being said, this is ofc. very much "a game," and a fun one at that, and I appreciated all the little details like items drops flying towards the portal on level finish. I gotta unlock more of the characters, usually in games like this there are 1-2 I really love, and it’s not the starting ones.
Last thing - I tried to play on Linux at first, but the game just hang without ever painting anything and needed to be SIGKILL’d. I can send you an strace or stackdump if you care, but since it’s Unity I guess you don’t have much control/insight. (I had no problems with other Unity games though.)
Thank you for playing, and streaming it. Helps a lot just seeing people play.
I think the beginning is a, I don't know if hollow is the best word but sure, and it gets better later. But I need to strike a good balance of having the start being easy enough for new players and also somewhat interesting to replay again and again. I don't think its good right now and it seems most players get caught off-guard by it suddenly getting harder.
The characters ability cooldowns aren't set in stone, I do want the starter character to have a moderate long one though because people get overwhelmed as it is. And the Items have long ones because many are mean to be "oh shit" buttons, or supplement you in some way, so not really be anything you absolutely have to use.
The stopping and resting part is very intentional though, its something I quite like in games. Kind of like going back to town in Diablo to sell stuff and stock back up. The later levels can be a bit long too so I think its pretty nice to recover a bit. You kind of do it in Nuclear Throne too, choosing what gun to take with you (unless the portal sucks you in) and then choosing an upgrade.
I should really have some sort of ambient sound at least, have been thinking about an option to enable for constant music too.
Right now there is only one character to unlock, but there will be more! They have some unique upgrades too, I should really add a way to see that...
It's possible that it's something with Vulkan for it not working on Linux. I do not have much knowledge about Linux unfortunately, but send me what you can and I'll look at it. Also, the Player.log would be nice to have too, for Linux it should be at: ~/.config/unity3d/Northwood Gameworks/The Gun is Good/Player.log
Thanks again.
So juicy, so satisfying. The 'wild at heart' spread increase improved the boom stick in the best way for me lol, it let me do such a wide range of damage. Loved the enemy variety. I recall an enemy that turned blue when it was weakened and I thought that was the case for all the enemies and it seemed like really good feedback for the player but I tried playing again and I guess that's not the case for all enemies.
Thanks for playing!
The blue effect is a status effect that's caused by weapons with ice damage, I made the effect ages ago though. I should really get around to improving it so it looks more like ice. And explain that it's actually a thing somewhere too...
Needs to be retitled to The Game is Good. 100% GMI. I have no useful feedback to give. It's really, really fun, super polished, and just an excellent time all around.
Thanks son.
Game's still really good, the guns are satisfying, enemy variety and the variety of their behavior is nice. Only came across one minor issue where I spawned where a torch was and was unable to move before I shot first.
Unlocked the dude with the fortification ability, tried out a few runs with him but didn't really like him. I feel like slow movement speed and the fortification just doesn't synergize well with a slow RoF shotgun, the only time he was decent when I quickly got something rapid fire like an SMG/machine gun/AR.
The overworld paths feel like could use some fine-tuning as well. Lot of the times one option just goes off into a straight corridor with no choices where the other two comes together and cross each other next to it.
One thing that was constantly bothering me is the flash of the health bar's borders when I took damage. Since it's in my peripherial vision I always felt like I'm taking more damage than I did, because I just saw some red thing going quickly from full to zero near the health bar - only when I started actively looking at it noticed that it was in fact the border and not the health bar itself.
Thanks for playing!
Great points, I think what I was going for with Logan isn't really clicking for people, gonna tinker a bit with the UI.
You already know I love this shit, just writing to give you some POINTLESS VALIDATION.
Haha well I do love pointless validation...
JESUS CHRIST, it's fucking good. Visuals, audio, feel, it's all really well put together. Excited for full release.
Thank you so much man.
A good vampire survivor clone; music was cool, work on linux,
This type of game is called twin stick shooter
It differs from VS-likes by having control over both shooting and moving, whereas in autoshooters there's no shooting control.
Thanks for playing! Good to know that it runs on Linux.
Mixed bag of notes from first time playing. Unfortunately I haven’t played long enough to have serious thoughts about balance. I had fun, I like the visuals, the name is (really) good and I would like to play more but I want to get through more demos.
Thank you for playing!
Your comments about sound are all good. I've been thinking about casing sounds too, I think it'd make it a bit too noisy with everything going on, But I'll try it out and see what I think.
My thoughts about the UI have been to keep it to the sides so it doesn't get in the way of the limited vertical space. But you are hardly the first one to make the same comment so I'll look into finding a better solution.
I've been meaning to look over the fonts and make all proper pixel fonts. One day...
I'll fix the map bug.
It's good that you've had the same thought as me about a "bestiary" I think. Been planning on putting something in the hub area (which is really empty now) which'll reveal more and more about the enemies as you kill them.
It's not really a pun, and I can barely call it even a reference. It's the name of a movie which was the first thing I thought of while writing the description. I'll probably change it though.
The camera is too zoomed out (this game causes awful eye strain). Picking up the gun and immediately getting killed by a swarm is super lame (is it meant to be a Dark Souls thing?). Having four branches in the world map is too many, should be 2-3. Having so many cooldown/stamina bars on corners of the screen is not great, would be better with a centered indicator. This game seems to be Enter the Gungeon but with destructible walls, which I'm not sure is a good enough gimmick. The combat isn't very good in comparison to the competition (e.g., Gungeon and Hades).
Thanks for playing and the feedback!
I'll look into having a zoom option. The intro is meant to be a super short tutorial, you'll only do it once. But if people think it's lame that's not good... It is a bit of a problem I've had I think that the combat doesn't really "click" for many until they've played for a while. It's about fighting and managing hordes so a single unit won't be much of a threat at all compared to one of those games for example. I will try to improve it.
Discovered that 9 and 0 control the zoom while trying to find an auto-fire key. Agree on the immediate death intro, thought it was just me being distracted for a second.
Mostly looking for feedback on things you think suck, are fun, too hard, balance like what guns drop and when, amount of ammo, difficulty of enemies etc, bugs.
Also I haven't tested the Linux version so if anyone does please let me know if it doesn't work.
Changelog since last DD submission: Update 55: Battleground and hearth, patron and demon - The Gun is Good - DEMO by SPECXHT (itch.io)