Great game! The atmosphere, the art, the gameplay, music... You're an artist!
Hi-Bit Fantasy Action Adventure · By
The game is absolutely gorgeous. there's a lot to do ( like a lot of quests ), the gameplay is not too complicated, and it isn't that simple either, and the crafting system is very well done. The only problem I've ran into so far is that the keybinds reset after closing the game, so I end up having to re-bind the keys back to what I'm used to after closing and the re-opening the game.
Hey, Adam,
Great demo, I've not completed yet but I have discovered a few bugs and have a little feedback-
- When running, dialog boxes popping up during running do not stop the run animation so character is stuck running unil you skip the dialog.- You can attack the hedgehogs through walls (most likely the same for other creatures)
- Unable to craft honey jar when pressing the forge button (it seemed to craft after clicking the cancel butotn though) - weird
UX Suggestion.
- When saving there should be a dialog box that appears, it's a little hard to tell if your game has been saved otherwise
- Moving the inventory menu higher in the pause menu list. I feel it's a little inconvenient to have to move down to the inventory selection 3 times to access it. (Maybe a hotkey for inventory would be a good solution?)
Gameplay feedback.
- All been fine for me, I would touch on the spider jumping though as many people have already mentioned. I think maybe wore of a delay before you have to jump would fix how difficult it is. I was fine after a couple tries and managed to get it perfect for the rest of my play through.
Fully support your development and i'm now a paid patreon of yours so keep going mate. I'm excited to see where this goes.
Hello, loving the demo but there is an issue. I got about 60% through it my save file says. I logged off and went to dinner when I booted it back up I cannot get back into my save file. when I press the button to select the save it does a loading screen and cycles back to the title screen. That is all. Like I said loving it and am excited to see where this goes in the future :)
After playing the game for an hour I encountered 2 bugs, 1 game breaking and the other is minor
1st one is when you talk to the bartender during the dog chase quest and the game softlocks, re-launching the game reloads to the last savepoint. The 2nd one I encountered was when I was carrying the lost kid on my back and going back to town, I quit to title and once I open the save slot menu it says "00_title", Loading the save takes me to the title screen as it says, so I'm unable to load my last save.
I certainly don't feel like spending another hour and doing all that again haha.
That being said I really enjoyed the demo so far and I'm looking forward to the full release :D
Hey Adam! I found the Insignia demo after watching some of your pixel-art tutorials on Youtube. Great stuff! The Insignia demo is really cool, and as someone with a burgeoning interest in game-design, I find it really inspiring to know that this game is being developed by a single person.
I just finished playing through the demo -- I guess it was v1.5.4. The artwork in the demo is beautiful, the music is really nice in a fittingly retro way, and the sense of world-building is palpable. It also seems like the story's probably gonna be good, although we only get to see a tiny bit of that. However, I ran into some snags with the gameplay, so I was compelled to offer you some constructive feedback.
1) The single biggest problem I had involved this jump-spider puzzle:
I intuitively grasped that I should wall-jump up and strike the spider with the -> arrow to get past the wall. But man, try as I might, I just couldn't get past that part for the longest time. Eventually, I became convinced that either I needed to find an item to help me jump higher, or I needed to find something which would unlock an "overhead strike" ability. Because, you know, your sword-strike animation never actually reaches up as high as that spider is. In whatever case, I left the area and searched around for 30 minutes, found nothing, and almost just gave up on the demo entirely, figuring that it had some kind of bug which rendered it unfinishable.
The only reason I didn't give up is that I found a walkthrough video on Youtube, which confirmed that my intuition was correct. After seeing that player wall-jump up and strike the spider, I went back and tried again, over and over. When I finally did get past that area, after probably 100 tries, it didn't feel like it was because I suddenly mastered the timing or anything satisfying like that. It just felt like a fluke, almost a glitch.
The spiders in general are challenging, although I like the kind of challenge they represent, at least in theory. This spider in particular, however, was too difficult by half. It would have made me quit the game had I not found that video. My advice: Lower that spider-track and/or the ledge a bit, or set-up another spider which will launch you into the -> spider. This is a weird place for a player to get stuck and not know how to advance.
2) I was gonna mention a few other things, but I think they could basically all be described as "issues with the control mechanics." I feel like you've designed a game around platformer action-challenges which require careful movements from the player, and a keen sense of timing -- only, the game's control-mechanics, as presented in the demo, don't seem very well-suited for those kinds of challenges. Let me describe a few of the gameplay areas I'm talking about:
2a> The combat. I like the animation, but its stylistic "low-framerate" quality doesn't marry very well to fast-paced action. The movements always felt a little laggy to me. Therefore, combat never quite achieved the twitchy "strike/parry/dodge" feel I think you were going for. Instead, I often felt like I was being thrust into a battle where quick and precise actions were expected of me, but the control-mechanics were incapable of delivering such actions -- and so, every fight just degenerated into me pressing my attack button as fast as possible, rolling away whenever I actually had the energy to do so, and eating every time my energy got low. It never felt like fluid or elegant fighting might be possible, and it never felt like it might be possible to fight without getting hit. So, this was frustrating. I wanted to enjoy the combat more, but it just felt kind of sloppy.
2b>Jump-puzzles. The jump-puzzles generally felt far more difficult to me than they should probably feel -- and not for good reasons, but for "I can't do this with these clumsy controls" reasons. The stylistically-choppy animation of the character is probably largely at fault here. Wall-jumps, in particular, never quite worked right for me. There are a few sections where you ask the player to ascend up a narrow passage by wall-jumping back and forth. In these moments, I never could tell whether there was supposed to be any particular timing involved or not. The only thing that ever worked for me was just to rapidly press the jump button as fast as possible as I bounced back and forth between the walls.
2c> Wall-grabbing is frequently too sensitive. In some areas, one has to stand atop a narrow ledge and drop-down to another narrow-ledge to then make a jump. In those cases, I often found after dropping down that my character would keep grabbing the ledge behind me, from which I had just dropped-down. That caused me a number of frustrating falls, as I fought to keep him from grabbing the ledge and to turn the other direction.
Lest that seem like to much negative feedback, let me tell you some of the specific things I did like:
> In general, I liked these characters and the world they inhabit. It feels alive. It feels like the kind of place I'd want to spend more time.
> I liked the way that the game's backstory appears as "panels" of graphics that appear in the background as you walk toward town. That's a neat little device.
> Despite my quibbles about combat, I did actually like the Parry technique, and I really enjoyed the little vignette in the tower where Wilhelm teaches you how to use it. The timing of this technique was tricky, to be sure -- but it never felt like you were asking me to use Parry in a way that the controls couldn't handle. The Parry challenges always felt pretty fair.
> I did actually enjoy the fight with the Librarian. My quibbles about the stiffness of combat notwithstanding, this boss-fight was really creative, and I enjoyed the way that it asked me to occasionally parry an arrow in order to proceed. It felt like the best kind of boss-fight -- the kind that forces you to use a new move, and thus helps you to get better at using it.
Ultimately, I liked the Insignia demo a lot. It just seemed a little rough around the edges, in the control-mechanics department. I hope you're able to iron those issues out. This game looks great. I'll be following this project, and I hope to see it eventually released for real. I'll happily purchase it when it's released.
This is feedback about the Shoe Inn actually, I haven't played the demo yet. There's a pun to be had in the sign out front, if you want it. I sketched it poorly on my phone while the video played in the background:
Please forgive the bad colour match, my phone's default sketching app doesn't have an eyedropper OR a custom colour storage feature.
Hey,
I am getting a weird issue. I start the game and get the instructions with the keyboard commands but once that is done I get a pink screen. I can hear the intro music but just get a pink screen the entire time. This is specifically after I get the auto save feature information. I will assume it probably has to do with my M1 Mac
Specs if it helps:
- Macos Monterey version 12.4
- chip apple m1 max
- memory 64 gb
Hi, some feedback within the first 5 mins of play :D (First of all, thank you for your awesome YT content!)
Hey there! I googled your demo after I watched your vids on yt. I know it's old. It doesn't seem to work on the latest MacOS 12.5. After the two black intro panels the soundtrack plays and the screen is bright magenta. Are you still supporting or should I wait for a full release?
I paid $5. That's a small thanks for enjoying your channel. Hope it buys you a good coffee.
Hello there, I watch your Youtube channel and you have done wonders for my knowledge of Pixel Art. Thank you for all you have done there. Also, I recognize this is older and you have probably tweaked most of this but figured I would throw my thoughts in anyways.
I looked over several bits of responses just to make sure I wasn't repeated too much but here is my feedback:
The good:
Suggestions:
I will buy when it comes out if nothing more than to support you but also, I REALLY want to play this now. Keep up the great work!
Hello! I just started playing Insignia and I'm at the part where you need to fix the bridge and cross a bunch of paths using spiders that have arrows on their backs. Anyways, I just saved manually via the menu and quit, and when I was sent back to the title screen it looked like this. I'm on a Macbook (2019) running Monterey 12.5.1 fwiw. I'm assuming that this isn't normal since it's really hard to read the text.
Update: I completed the demo and really enjoyed it! Like others have mentioned, the librarian fight was great, and the spiders were a little difficult, but the overall game seems pretty polished. I know you've been updating the game and that this version is really outdated, but I like what you had done at this point. I remember a video on your channel where you mentioned that you updated the character portraits, and I'm glad that you did. The ones in this demo made the eyes seem a little too big in my opinion. Fwiw, the title screen issue that I mentioned popped up again once I beat the demo. I'm looking forward to seeing more on your Youtube/Twitch channels!
Hi,
I really enjoyed the demo first of all. It gave me a good couple of "Aha!" moments in the time that I played with the platforming mechanics and the level design in how it flowed together. My only concern was that if, as an avid gamer who plays a variety of games, the platforming required to unlock the bridge was difficult for me, then I can only imagine someone who is more intermediate in game experience really getting frustrated with it. So if you could tone that down just a tad bit for other players upon release, that would make the game, I'm sure, a little more accessible if it's your intention to hit the intermediate-to-hardcore gamer audience range.
Also, is there a point to crafting another sword after receiving the one that is from the old man earlier in the game? I may have missed it, but I wasn't able to find a recipe for the great sword blade and therefore unable to craft the great sword to test out the differences in weapons. And then to pair that with the end of the demo which tells you the sword you got from that old man is super important, I felt the great sword was a missed opportunity to demonstrate more of the combat system while hiding the special abilities the Graile is supposed to grant the player. Very small nitpick though.
Overall 10/10 demo and would love to purchase this game on release! I am going to continue to tune into your YouTube videos and Twitch streams. Cheers!