itch.io

I am now incentivized to kill as many enemies as possible to maximize my gold gain. It seems inconsistent if I one shot or two shot enemies but I had all the upgrades after level 5. During level 5 however the VIP rolled off the edge of the map because the 5th level had no guard rails like I was suddenly playing Super Monkey Ball. 

It seems you have overwritten you previous build rather than creating a second download.  I thought we were supposed to keep the original but I'm now unsure about it. 

I think you achieved what you set out to do. Which was making it so the player isn't necessarily forced to engage with the main gameplay, but is more rewarding to do so. 

The gameplay is a little easy, but only because there isn't much balance. The enemies don't scale with you, and there's a limited amount of upgrades. Having more enemies doesn't change very much. The ones that target the VIP are free kills. The ones that target you are equally free because you can hold down block and not take any damage. 

The parry is not very satisfying to pull off.  It's hard to visually gauge when to block in order to parry. There's no sound for blocking or parrying. There's no sound for enemies shooting. If there was audio indication this would be easier. But there's also no point in parrying either because it's not like you need that extra damage or that it does something special when you do land one. The block animation looks incredibly similar to the attack swing except it lingers. 

Getting hit while blocking knocks you back, you could create more risk or peril with this mechanic. Such as parkour platforms if you get hit get knocked off. It would be interesting if not blocking a shot would void knockback so you can prevent getting pushed by trading 10 hp. 

The art and animations for enemies and the character look great. I think you guys would benefit from having some sort of indication that you are blocking or got hit. I think you should add some gaurd rails to your unfinished level so the VIP doesn't roll off the side like a marble and make the void a death pit so you can restart instead of having to alt f4. 

Add more upgrades. Add more enemy variation. Like maybe one you can't block because they're melee and you have to parry. Or some other variation in combat. 

This is an improvement but the mini game could use some more work.

It starts the moment you get into the interface rather than the moment you click on the dragable bar. You still have your inputs during and after affect the minigame or the regular game when exiting. Like if you're scrolling the bar up suddenly you're staring at the sky. If there was a buffer before and after you could probably get rid of this minor issue. 

I'm also confused on whether you can sniff the same plants twice or more. Is it time based? So you can sniff the same plants again later if you're careful? There were quite a few plants in the starting area. Wheat, cactus, corn, these all seem hard coded to only give you one sample regardless of how well you do in the minigame. I should be getting 4-6 but they always only gave 1 sample.

Also the speed at which you move in the open world versus the village seem different. It seems slower in the open world but maybe its just there's not much visual feedback on how fast you move or that the scaling is still a little off.  In the village jumping felt like moon shoes. In the open world jumping felt like trudging through molasses. I still slide down surfaces, except now the screen jitters if I try to fight it. As well as jumping while on a slope sending me laterally rather than vertically. There's something up with the collision. You made it less floaty by making the character heavier but it's created a different issue it seems without solving the original one entirely.  I found the movement in the village to be fine. Even if the jumps were floaty, I prefered it to the open world navigation still. 

It would be interesting to either have more variety in minigames, or having differences in reward and cost for different types of plants. I'm consistently getting 4-6 per samples so I'm not in any peril of losing the game any time soon. 

Ideas for minigame variation;

 A bar that fills and lowers and you have to time your click to land in a zone. The closer to the bullseye the better. It wouldn't be timed, but it wouldn't yield as much samples as the one currently in the game. Like 0-3. But it wouldn't take much energy either. 

Hitting keys that appear on the screen like a combination. The faster you input the keys, correctly, the more you get at the end. 

Filling up a bar while holding a specific key.  Another bar fills faster than the main bar. if the secondary bar fills you fail. So you have to let go of the keys in order to let the second bar cool down. The main bar fills slower but also empties slower. 

I didn't hear any music. Or sounds. If there is music and sounds the sound wasn't working. The sensitivity of my mouse was fine. 

Overall I liked this much more than the first version, and it retained my attention far longer before I grew bored. It was far less frustrating.

I don't play a lot of these top down types of games. Because frankly I can't stand the micro managing required to make efficient plays. But I cannot for the life of me get my troops to attack the goblins shooting the building or themselves. They just huddle around the last two goblins and just do nothing as they shoot down the building causing the game to close. I don't understand what I can do differently to circumvent this. I don't think I can do anything. It's completely random when they decide to engage.

When you build the makeshift towers, since they have no model, the goblins get stuck. the buildings take no damage and the goblins stand there till the end of time attacking them.  Also the cost to create new units and the time it takes to create them I don't really agree with. 600 meat for one unit? That's two full waves. That's not sustainable.  it should be less. 

It should also tell you the price of the unit. It should tell you how long it takes before you order one. 
I've been trying to get into this type of game because there are a lot of open world survival craft games in this style, but frankly this is missing the mark. It's inconsistent when my troops engage the enemy. Sometimes they'll immediately start charging into the forest to attack them as they spawn in, other time they just stand still and get wailed upon and die.

There's also like a hive mind type system which makes no sense. You have three distinct groups spawn, but if I engage one set of goblins the other two groups drop what they're doing and run to the nearest of my troop. 

Logically those goblins wouldn't've had a clue what my guy was doing and should've stayed shooting the makeshift towers but they didn't. 

The best I could do was make 3 units and die while a fourth was in progress. That's what? 8 waves? It got annoying. I had to like use one guy at a time as a meat shield and spam click troops one at a time to minimize the chance of them developing paralysis. 

The camera and rotation stuff works like a charm. Using the mouse to do so bugs out however. And If I pause the game, switch tabs, switch back, and press continue, it moves the camera to what I assume is the origin point which is not where the camp is located. I played for like give or take 20 minutes. 

If you want to have fixed building locations you have to adopt a tycoon style progression system. Or at least something other than 25 meat per kill and 24 required kills to make a new unit. This is horrible. 

Also quitting the game says the game crashed rather than closing the game and it made my screen go black and had command prompts pop up a couple times. 

Yeah, the level design makes the game pretty frustrating. The doors are annoying to travel through because the player slides around on the floor. The grapple hook actually makes you slower than just running around. It's pretty inconsistent, at least to me how much speed I gain and distance I travel using the grapplehook. 

The minigames are quite honestly annoying. You can only carry one pill at a time, and the placement of the pills is quite honestly unfair to the player. It makes it feel like you're just trying to run out the clock rather than adding a challenge via navigation. Also the pills are straight up bugged. The patients will ask for a pill and when you deliver it to them they will not accept it and stay there. I don't know if it's because the one patient is bugged, or because they're asking for a different pill and the game is incorrectly asking for the wrong one. I mean I delivered a pill to one patient, and the other one left instead of the one I cured. The music just gets annoying, and it feels like purgatory. 

You can cheese the typing minigame by pausing the game to type the word at your leisure. 

I couldn't get a score higher than 80. The patients would always bug out at some point where I couldn't do anything other than restart. The pill minigame is bugged. i don't really care to brute force rng to make it so I only get spelling diagnosis points which don't consume any time at all. 

The game was engaging until I got fed up with the patients asking for the blue pill and refusing to leave after receiving it. 

The game could benefit from utilizing the vertical space a bit better. Having patients on different floors. Having the ability to hold multiple pills so you can do a delivery run or something? The game as it currently plays has one level. Like as in verticality level, not level as in stages. Maybe also add some other forms of spelling mini games like a word scramble. Or maybe even a window pops up of a broken arm or something and you have to trace a shape with your mouse to apply a bandage. Or maybe even a math mini game for how much you bill somebody where you have to add numbers together. 

It's an okay game but not something you play for very long in it's current state.  It gets stale. Needs more variety. 

Here's some footage of me playing the game where you can see the blue pill bug and figuring out that you can pause while doing the spelling minigame. 

I thought I was losing it because I could not tell if the controls were responding because you have it where you slide constantly. It felt unresponsive. Like the game was moving automatically, which it was. The scale is like wayyyyy off. Maybe that's what you want because you're playing as a crow? But like it takes forever to get anywhere.  The world is not proportionate to the player, or the navigation is not proportional to the exploration. Like other people have stated. The game is slow. There's not much to do other than smell the same plant over and over. I have little incentive to traverse the area because it takes forever to travel. There's no jump. No sprint? Can't go anywhere if you fall in a canyon or valley. 

Also the controls are slippery. Tapping a direction is inconsistent how much you move. Because it continues to move after you've let go. It's like ice physics. Not a fan. 

I think the mini game is annoying because if you click too many times it just loops back around because you start the mini game again. It should have a cool down. If you want to have a mini game for harvesting the different plants, I think you should check out Munch Planet on itch because they have a lot of different clicking based mini games that are more than just spam clicking. Having to either time your clicks or even just having some sort precision based game would be more interesting than spam clicking to smell the flower. Like maybe do something like the hospital game guys are doing where you'd type the notes you smell. Like "Herb is Floral" or Acidic, Woody, Fragrant, etc. But that's if you want to do a smelling based mini game. 

Or why even have that? What if it was just a QTE where you had to cut the plant and if you mess up you don't get the full harvest. What exactly was the point of having all these different chunks if there's not much reason to go out there when the herbs are infinitely smell-able. 

It is unclear what I'm supposed to do because I don't know what its currently implemented versus planned to be. Is there a button that teleports you to town? Is there a button to view inventory? I ran my hand over my entire keyboard and nothing opened. You've got procedural generation down, now where's the harvesting? Are you going to add resource collection? Will trees have collision? Will there be distinct biomes where you can only find certain herbs? What's the progression? Are you going to eventually brew medicine for townsfolk? It is unclear what the end goal is. I did not record gameplay because I became bored and frustrated within minutes. 

I don't care that the trees are floating and have no collision. Where's the open world survival craft mechanics. 

I see the outline you guys are asking but I'm just going to free form it if that's alright. I'm typically not a fan of escort missions especially for games where you have an npc tethered to you at all times. But in this case, it really didn't have that strong of a baby-sitting element from the sounds of what you were aiming for. I think it's an oversight that you don't have to bring the VIP to the end of the level. The game only cares whether or not you reach the end of the level even if the VIP is stuck in the trees at the start of the level. The game allows you to abandon your prime objective. 

The controls were fine, I think you should implement a cool down or something for key presses. Spam clicking makes you attack faster than the swing animation. And you can basically b-hop if you spam space. Granted not as effectively, but going up slopes, you'd gain a lot of speed. 

Speaking of which I don't understand why the game takes place in a forest. Like thematically why you and this VIP are being hunted down by the pill creatures from the roblox game Blamo doesn't make sense. The main thing about the current game is that I can see where the exit is and just wade through the trees and skip the PVE.  If you don't want to have invisible walls, maybe just have literal walls and put the setting in a town where you have to escort a golf ball that has a monocle and a mustache to the bank and have all the enemies be muggers or something and put stripes on them and a bandit mask or something. 

The enemies don't switch aggro which I think is strange. Because they should be focusing the VIP should they not? Every level after the first played the exact same. I think this game would work better with a ramp mechanic where the game gets harder as you pass levels rather than having each level have the same concentration of enemies. I mean yeah, you need upgrades for like health, speed, damage, all that. But also have prevention measures to make sure you can't abandon the VIP and so you can't ignore all the enemies. Overall it's a strong foundation. 

I'd be more careful or at least attentive how detailed you want to make the player model given how low poly the vip and enemies are. I honestly think making everything look like pills or just slapping decals on the pill enemies to make them "different enemy classes" would be pretty funny. I don't think audio is that big of a priority for you guys, but it would be nice to have an indication on whether I get hit, or deal damage to something.

Extra notes:

Maybe put some art on the main menu.

the options on the main menu closes the game.

add a pause menu while in the game.

gameplay footage if you want to watch somebody play your game

I think the game is broken. 
The clicking was unresponsive when I clicked on boxes. If I cut them open I couldn't put the objects back into the box to click on the box. And getting the objects out of the way didn't actually resolve it. 
it seemed random when I could* and couldn't click on boxes.

So much so that I stopped checking every box.

This is compounded with the fact that I clicked the +speed a bunch of times after I let boxes pile up and I made 5 grand in the span of 3 seconds and bought all the upgrades on my first day with 8 seconds remaining because I figured I would just start over but turns out I didn't need to.

I don't think the penalty for wrong boxes is functioning. 

I have beaten the game. 

I do not lose money.

I only gain money. 

There's nothing to stop my reckless behavior and complete and utter disregard to checking for contraband. 

I don't even know what the upgrades did.

The metal detector is just a grey box.

I mean there's gotta be more upgrades, or at least more teirs of upgrades. Like buying more time. Or like buying insurance to protect against wrong box placements. 

Idk dude.

The game plays itself.

The buttons are too small for the conveyor controls. I still don't know what the controls are or what counts as contraband. I'm not even checking the boxes because I don't need to interact with them to succeed.

The into dialogue is hard to read because some of the speech bubbles have more text than others. And also, the image is blown out. Like blurry, blown out. I don't think this was exported with the right settings. 

The art is great.

The title screen is great.

I think it's silly you can find bombs.

The post it note with all the lore related expenses is too small.

I think you guys need to work on the lore, and maybe add more stuff to buy. Like maybe after every shift you get more dialogue or you talk with coworkers or go home to your family so you actually see the impact you make with your hard work or no work in my case. 

Because you do have the timer in the top left which is tiny, but it became a non-threat because I was set financially for the foreseeable future that I quit the game and my job because I was no longer in need of work. 

I can't really say much because there's not much there. 
I tried walking toward the big doorway thinking that's how the game started but I guess I'm just stuck in a circular room unable to look up or down. 

My character really do be hexxed cus they stuck in purgatory. 

Maybe also have the zip file unpack into a folder rather than dumping the contents randomly in whatever folder I open it in. 

And also naming the executable the name of the game somewhere so it doesn't get mixed in with the other project folders that also don't unzip into it's own folder.  

Can't wait for a build where you actually get to murder enemies. 

For one, next time, I think you should name the zip file the name of the game as well as have it unzip into a folder rather than dumping the contents of said zip file where I happen to open it. 

The cursor does not match where the reticle to aim is. The closer the cursor is to the character the worse the aim is. Which makes fighting enemies that get in your face, or when you are close proximity to them very difficult/inconsistent to hit. Which makes the boss artificially more difficult because you don't get to have the range to shoot from the optimal distance as well as dodge easily as the ink shots have greater spread, your projectile dissipates before it lands so you need to get closer which lowers your reaction time to getting fired upon. 

I'm also disoriented whenever I enter a new stage because where I enter from doesn't always match where I spawn? Or at least it seemed that way where I would go up from the left and show up on the right side of the screen. Which also then resets my cursor which is hard to find on the screen because the art is inconsistent.

Do the enemies have outlines or not? Do the environmental objects have outlines or not? You can't have some with and some without. It should be consistent, so you know immediately what on the screen is hostile and where on the screen you are.  As well as where your cursor is. 

It's a clash of style because you've ripped assets from games like Stardew valley, and then you make the sprites of some of the enemies, and some of the projectiles, but not all of them, or if you did make all of them, you've got no agreed upon style choice. But it's clear you didn't make all the assets because the net gun fires fireballs instead of nets. 

And especially with roguelikes, you need to give the player a chance to react, you can't just spawn them already in a room with the enemies already agro'd onto you and attacking. It's very cheap. Especially with the birds. Several spawns can just spawn them directly on top of you before you can even put distance between yourself and the enemy. 

If you're going to go with a, 'rng, sometimes the enemies are already on you', add like a grace period or some form of dodge to avoid taking damage immediately upon entering a new area.  Or have those enemies deal less damage so it's less punishing. Also maybe add some invulnerability frames upon getting hit instead of allowing the player to get hit multiple times in quick succession by being ganged up upon. 

Which is to say I think this is a lot harder than it actually is because the RNG is what makes it difficult, not the game mechanics. I don't think it's fun to have claustrophobic levels with enemies that spam you with rocks in the way of sightlines that don't dissipate enemy projectiles but dissipates yours.

I think having set levels, rather than rng on what enemies spawn for each level would be better. You can maliciously place certain enemies to create specific enemy layouts with the only RNG being what level spawns rather than what enemies spawn on what level. There isn't much variation in play style to get away with having totally random enemy spawns. If you want to keep totally random enemies you need to make the levels less sprawled and give more attention to layouts on where enemies can spawn.

You shouldn't have 4 different level designs with the center of the room being inaccessible that all play incredibly similar. Maybe if you had a level with an enemy you can't kill but shoots in a pattern and you have to navigate a little maze layout sprawling around the screen to the exit or a button to open the exit. Or maybe like a room that's a figure 8 where you have to loop around enemies in the center of those empty spots of the 8. Just a little more variety because it's incredibly similar between runs the more you play it. 

Also I feel like the placement of obstacles are kind of annoying given that your projectile is so huge. It also feeds into your aim being slightly or drastically off.

And also the rewards, or drop rates are fine, but I think you should just reward the player after 2 rooms or however many rooms with a choice that directly buffs the player. Because the spawn rate or drop rate of upgrades rather than healing items is really annoying on some runs where I got a lot of drops but they were all healing and not even max hp +1. 

If you got a buff after defeating the boss would cool too. The Kraken is a textbook roguelike boss, it was well implemented. It's strange however the tentacles that divide the area into quadrants seem meaningless and creates wasted space. IF you could dodge roll or something to those other areas it would make more sense to do it like this. I mean you might as well just make the kraken larger and put them in the corner of the screen and have the tentacles break up the larger playing space rather than the smaller one. 

The Crustacean Sensation However I found hard to reach. The tiny maps, and rocks that eat my projectiles made it so incredibly difficult that I wasn't very motivated to reach it again. And speed buffs did not make the game easier it made it harder to control the character. It isn't consistent what tiles you can and can't stand on and found myself clipping into the ocean where I subsequently perished to a shrimp as I found myself unable to make it back to walkable land.  

Standing in the slowing ink of the kraken made it easier rather than harder. 

Sorry for the essay. I don't know what comments would be helpful or not really because you're already aware of said problems:

I find having a "Game Over" with music that suggested I lost rather than defeated the bear a very cruel joke. The fight is very much just spam clicking as close as possible to the bear without getting hit. Because how fast you attack is based on how fast the arrow respawns rather than any other form of reload mechanic. 

No offense but it's piss easy especially since the bear moves at a constant speed and you can easily outmaneuver it by walking in a circle. I speed ran the game a couple times and found myself beating it in about 30 seconds average with 12 attempts. 33 clicks doesn't take as long as you'd think it might. 

I wish there was two separate screens for failure and success instead of lumping them together. For it's not very satisfying of a reward.

The random generation doesn't really feel all that diverse. More often than not, running straight up I'd find the bear cave. Sometimes close, sometimes at the edge of the map. The river honestly was the most diverse thing I would immediately notice. How close to a bridge I am, how long the diagonal bend of a river is. A bridge that takes 4 entire seconds to cross.

I did a run where I just combed the map and found there's not much to do. If those "unique" landmarks like the Lookout Fort, Mound, and Lakes had other enemies or something else there'd be more to do. But the game as it currently stands, ends the moment you spam click the bear to death. 

Navigation wasn't really a challenge unless you count walls of trees blocking a straight and succinct path to the bear. Especially since betting on the bear being directly up from you is a good one, or at least it was for me. I didn't really need to use hunter's call once I found that out. 

The animation of the bow drawing doesn't really line up. You either need to have delay when firing so the animation of the bow being drawn does line up with the arrow being fired, or have the animation happen when you click so it lines up better. 

Or compound that with just having a different fire mechanic all together because it's overpowered being able to shoot as fast as your shots can land when there's nothing that forces you to keep your distance from enemies or rabbits. 

There is a funny interaction where if a rabbit tries to get away as you dash into it, where it makes the rabbit fly at light speed off your screen until it gets out of range. 

Is it intentional to spawn the player at low health? To force them to heal? What if you had a hunger mechanic that drained health that required you to hunt other prey to force players to heal instead? There isn't much peril of dying. Might as well make that the base health amount. The only thing that can damage me is the bear. 

What if there were deer that charged at you requiring you to dash out of the way if you shoot them? What if the bear lunged at you or summoned backup? What if there were wolves actively hunting you? What if there were traps laid by other hunters that activate and damage you if you run into them? 

This is a strong foundation for something more. The theme is great. The art is consistent. The music fits, the world gen is a little iffy in terms of how the Lookout Castle Gate thing fits in thematically with the elf archer character or why there would be multiple of them spawning in a forest nobody stationed there? One of my spawns there was like 6 of them in close proximity and even overlapping one another.  I don't recall what you guys said you were going for story-wise.

I assume the "King" is the bear at this point in time? There isn't really much of a kingdom so the speak. I dont even understand why it's called the blood bear.  The only subjects in this King's Royal court is a bunch of rabbits that seem to ignore collision on most objects. I recall you guys saying you wanted to add more enemies or objectives for some form of variety, which the game really needs because there isn't very much replay-ability. 

I was playing melee as a ranged weapon character. Something needs to force me to keep distance. Something needs to encourage me to heal. Something needs to delay me or distract me from my main objective.