Really love the visuals but please, more levels!
Alenar Soft
Creator of
Recent community posts
Thanks for playing!
On controller, you can use RT/R2 or whatever you rebind it to to use manual aim. This will always start you aiming in the direction the character is looking towards, instead of locking into enemies. You will still rotate though, it won’t aim relative to camera. Perhaps I’ll try it out, I admit it’s done this way out of familiarity with old tank control games.
TLDR since we discussed in voicechat: The level is a massive step up since the last demo and I only dislike the overly long corridor on the top left, the amount of paths and structure around it feels appropriate. Going to the right first feels slightly easier. I wish I had some better way to not inadvertently try to fire an out of ammo gun. Update mouse sensitivity without restarting!!! Keep it up
I mean no offense but I’m not sure I understood half of what you said, so I’ll try to answer the question instead.
I understand that the game wants to have a layer of mystery over its mechanics that you simply intuit as you work your way through these first puzzles, but it needs to do something so that it actually clicks in. Doing the same thing five times and then hitting a brick wall is not exactly what I’d envision. By dedicated introduction I mean having a narrative/map progression clearly unlock or progress after you do a few of them. I see a lot of things around this first area but I cannot figure or do much with most of them, and the things I could solve led to nothing. I need something to grab onto so I can derive some meaning from my actions.
I hope this clears it up a bit.
Starting the game booted up a frameless window that was going off of my screen, but evidently could not be dragged in. After going to the settings i could fix it, but after playing the nightclub then going back to the menu this happened.
The game functions, I suppose. I wish I didn’t have TEXT TEXT TEXT all over the screen.
The tutorial is very badly paced. You’re thrown into a meat grinder style room (empty box, immediately surrounded) with enemies while controls still haven’t been explained to you, then on the next rooms nothing happens and you actually need to sit around for the very slow text before you can complete the tutorial. Afterwards, the game wasn’t displaying my mouse on the menu so I could not play the rest of the game.
After restarting I played a little, but it was hard to make it far without any cigs. Here’s some feedback;
- It’s hard to tell when your reload is done.
- It’s hard to visualize what your HP is at, maybe the face could change color too. The UI already having various colors distracts from it.
- The crosshair should be over enemies; there’s no vertical aiming.
It’s an ok base though so I’ll see it next time around maybe
It looks neat but I have no clue what’s going on. I did the first few “puzzles” by just drawing a circle every time. I have no understanding of “rules” after doing five or so of them nor a reason to keep doing them, meanwhile the next puzzles already don’t seem to be solvable in the same way but I feel no drive to do them. A more dedicated introduction could improve this greatly.
Not a bad concept but sorta just boring. The first time I had a melee guy so it was a bit interesting to try and maneuver around enemies to get nearby only when I could hit them, but after that run ended shortly I started another one with a cleric who would hit for sure, at infinite range, with a long long cooldown. Quit after a couple rooms. It would be more charming if the text was readable and the game used its own assets, and gave me something to do other than turn, or if levels were not an empty box.
Visually charming but I’m not sure there’s much to do so far.
The moon in the controls screen makes text in front of it unreadable. The game takes a while to load and lags at the start. I was a bit confused the girl’s sprite still showed up when it was (you) talking. I didn’t think I’d go down the chute immediately on interact, since the action wasn’t clear. I opened a window in the bottom floor but couldn’t jump out of it or do any other action. I entered a locker in the room next to the chute drop and no input got me out of it.
Vent movement seems to be extremely buggy, left/right do weird things and you often get stuck on floor openings. If you try using them, the camera glitches out?
Vertical view range could use more leeway.
Short bulletpoint summary, but my biggest takeaway is that the controls seem unnecessarily convoluted by now. I don’t understand why F is confirm but cancel is RMB, why you scroll through options… confirming “it’s locked” (redundant, also) dialogues is done with LMB though? (despite the intro dialogue action hint saying F) What does “hotzone” mean? What’s the compass next to it?
Thanks for playing!
I’m happy to hear rebinding was of use to someone. Cutscenes auto advance, so no “continue” icon there. Dialogues do show it. I do want to eventually add a skip confirm though.
The demo may remain as this but there’s a trailer for the full game in the game page if you’re curious!
P.S Lea is a chick but thank you for the fanart :)
Thank you for playing!
Please know there’s camera-relative controls as well, in case you missed it. They can also be set on keyboard but are not binded by default, as it seems rather unwieldy to me, and there’s not really anywhere good to set them by default (I’d set them to the current WASD keys instead if I were to use them myself).
Thanks for playing! I will consider making the last tutorial room a bit easier, I like the combo those enemies create but perhaps it’s a bit too fast as an introduction to multiple enemy fights. Ghost in the Shell font… I’m not sure, it’s called Onyx, just like the resolution and layout they’re things I’m carrying over from the game this is spinning off of, Digital Exorcist.
Thanks for playing! I’ll try to answer everything:
- Demonic Anomalities Termination Agency, in the future an intro establishing the setting will play when you launch the game.
- The dialogue sprites are WIP, just concept art.
- The game scales to match the window pixel-perfectly (base res * int), but you can toggle pixel perfect mode off in the video settings (can only be accessed through ingame pause right now).
- I’m not sure I understand the backgrounds feedback, which rooms do you feel suffered from this?
- Bad acting. It’s explained in the end cutscene.
- This started out as a short jam project, there’s a longer mission which the full game will have, but future demos will have more challenges and short missions. I don’t really plan on having a lengthy story for now, maybe in a future game.
- Yeah, it started as resident evil and ended up being quite parasite eve 2 haha. If you’re talking about the challenge, this one is quite gimmicky and hard on purpose, future ones will have a smoother ramping up of difficulty. In the “main game” rooms tend to be far wider and feature cover. Regarding aiming: If you hold RB you will autoaim, RT is manual aim. While autoaiming, you can flick left/right on the left joystick to switch targets. From what you’re saying it sounds like you were only manual aiming all along.
- Currently there’s 0 environment interactions. No time! Will be there in the future.
- Maybe. It is designed this way atm to be more in line with Digital Exorcist. It would need quite some work to make sure everything works right, so at least not for now.
- We’re going more for action, so there’s no inventory management or backtracking like that. HP is simply shown all the time. In the “main game” you do pick up items and navigate some more, but they simply display on the left side of the game screen.
- Answered this earlier. Adding emotions would be very late production polish so not really a consideration right now.
- You get 7 bullets and I like the challenge of keeping count, personally. Thanks for all the feedback!
I’m interested in seeing where this goes but at the moment it feels a bit too simple and aimless, I need something to tell me what the goal is or how puzzles are related. Also, I felt the rooms were a bit too large for the gameplay, however, whenever I wanted to walk past a zombie by doing a feint I found the corridors were far too narrow and zombies turned too fast. I feel like the UI for the text could use being a bit tighter - text feels too big, and there’s too much empty space.
I did however like the cutscene pixelart, I hope you continue working on this!
Spoilers
I liked the setting and mood, though I didn’t care for the endless referencing. I thought the setup was kinda neat, but I kept thinking that I wanted to know what was actually going on, but felt it was being purposefully withheld from me. So I sorta realised it was going to have a conclusion of this sort before getting to it. Once I saw the ending, it got me to try again and see if picking “nicer” (hardly) choices could lead to a better conclusion, but soon realised there was no avoiding it.
That got me thinking; I feel like what we see in this VN would work remarkably better if it was reframed as a conclusion of a longer project that I actually got to play: the “wanting to try and make things better” part of it (even though that was more Bee’s thing than the protagonist’s) yet inevitably reaching this terrible (lore-wise) conclusion would be pretty amazing if we had seen the escalation of events that lead to this point. That said, as a videogame and not another form of media, it would still make little sense if it wasn’t us, the character as well as the player, that wanted to try and make things turn out well, too.
Basically, this is a great ending to a third act, I just sorta wish I had seen the first two.
Pressing Enter after starting a game starts one again, seems like the main menu's button remains selected or so.
There's no Ctrl skip, so I was a bit disappointed some of the (confusing) choices led to the same outcome after clicking through it again.
I thought the concept was interesting, but I wish the framing was different; I didn't really care for the corpo bit, but the climax of it was cool. I think you should do more with that part of the concept.