So cool to be playing this after watching the game develop, everything plays just as well as it looked! It is immensely satisfying to chain actions together, especially movement. It's all intuitive and fun!
The amount of refinement put into everything is apparent, nothing feels janky or clunky. Different actions effortlessly bend from one to the next.
The animation work is great too, I can definitely see the inspiration from smash bros, particularly in the use of scaling to emphasize attacks. The screen shake and hit stop are well-tuned as well; they are chunky but don't slow down the pace of the game. I was especially impressed by the aerial animations; the backflips and jumps are really smooth and visually appealing. Having that subtle stretching while jumping, or the sudden squash when reversing direction makes it easy to follow what’s happening on screen.
In terms of feedback, I noticed these things while playing:
General movement:
(I played this using mouse and keyboard)
The general movement feels good in broad strokes, but the controls start to feel sluggish when trying to precisely adjust what angle your character is facing. The feeling of sluggishness mainly came from the turning speed being so slow. I can only guess that this is in place to make directional attacks possible on the ground, but then you are still able to get these attacks by inputting attack then a direction, so I can't really say. The best method I found for getting around this (without jumping) was inputting a direction and crouching at the same time to turn instantly.
The edges of platforms can feel slippery because you are immediately considered airborne when you walk off an edge. A possible solution is a mechanic called "coyote time" where the player isn't considered airborne until 1-3~ frames after dropping from a ledge.
The current control layout feels a bit limiting. Trying to use dash and crouch in quick succession/at the same time, which is needed for some advanced movement, when both are only in reach of the pinky is difficult and wears down my hand. I know that there’s not many options when designing a keyboard layout, but if there's a way to map one of these actions to the mouse it would make these actions more accessible.
One possible layout could be:
Dash on M2, lock-on on E, and aim on M3. This would allow the player to dash and crouch as much as needed. The downside would be having aiming assigned to M3, which might be awkward. There are probably much better solutions, this is just what I could come up with.
When trying to pick up the stop sign by sliding into it you often get polespin when at medium range.
I feel like a ledge drop option when ledge hanging would be cool.
Combat:
Hitboxes seemed inconsistent when not used from a standstill. Low poke and floor scraper were harder to hit if the target was on the character’s left side and had some blind spots when they were used point-blank. This may be the sandbag just barely flexing out of the way during recoil animations or my alignment veering during combos, because when used from a standstill they felt more consistent.
I didn’t really get any mileage out of the lock-on system throughout my play. It seemed to disorient me more than help in most cases. The only time I used it was when I wanted to aimbot the sign throw.
In the middle grassy area, I kept bouncing off the interior edges when trying to do floor scraper. I don’t know if this behavior is intentional as there is a small lip in that area, but it is an incredibly small lip.
Levers can be activated and then immediately deactivated when using multi-hit attacks like cross slash.
Bugs:
At certain times the UI would be out of frame when the player is at the edges of the screen.
There is extreme slow down when using any spin move.
When using throw as soon as the player touches a wall, the sign will be thrown through that wall. Occasionally, the sign will stick inside the geometry instead of going through it, making the sign irretrievable.
You can wedge yourself underneath the big pink cube.
Cool stuff I found:
-When holding crouch before air dashing you instantly move straight down.
-Normally when you crouch after air dashing you slide no matter what, but if you input an attack just before landing you can prevent the slide and instantly return to idle. Additionally, you choose which way you are facing by doing a forward air or back air before you land.
Examples:
-You can use the down dash to cancel your jab strings.
-You can cancel the first hit of jump kick by aiming to preserve your double jump.
-You can cancel the jump kick into spin.
I hope this is useful feedback. Good luck with the rest of the development!