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Thank you for giving the demo a shot, and for the video too. 

That is a peculiar graphical issue...

I'm aware that the pathfinding has issues but you should've seen it before. It's a work in process.

I was not aware of Phantom Brave, I was mostly inspired by a game called Mordheim: City of the Damned, but I think I pretty much have to study that game now too. 

Thank you again for playing.

Thank you for the feedback. I appreciate the extra attempt despite the difficulties.

I think you ran up into issues because of an oversight of mine regarding the save system. Nevertheless, I figure I need to research ways to nudge players in the intended direction too.

Thanks for trying the demo.

I'm not married to the battle theme myself, but I haven't gotten around to changing it.

Knowing that players are having difficulties with the first battle is valuable feedback. I believe the player should suffer whenever there's combat but frustrating people too much risks alienating them. It's a difficult balance.

Anyway, there is a way to beat it if you are curious for next time, but it involves exploring the level and talking to all the NPCs scattered around before picking up the stick. 

Thanks for trying the game.

A lot of the issues you mentioned seem to be recurring such as the crash when loading the fortress map. At the moment I believe it might be an export issue.

I recommended polearms because I think that the fight against the soldiers is difficult if you don't have any armor pierce, but balance is an ongoing affair. 

I'm very happy to see Shining Force mentioned because I love that game. 

Thank you for the feedback.

Thanks for playing, and for your feedback.

The crashing issues will be fixed in due time.

The UI breaking is a good find, there must be a small frame window I missed.

Thanks for playing.

I'm aware of the crashing issue and the controls will improve in the future.

The barkeeper has a model and a portrait, but no in-game dialog yet. A lot of things are half-implemented, but I am glad that people are looking around the fortress, I take that as a good sign.

The game is already pretty fun.

In terms of difficulty, the combat feels very hectic but I managed to beat the entire demo without losing a single life. I essentially kept almost dying over and over.

Bomb spam is very strong, like in a game by Psikyo.

By comparison, strafing doesn't feel particularly useful.

I think the game could be really good if it had more enemy types and more interesting upgrades besides flat stat increases. The familiar that eats bullets is a good example of an interesting upgrade.

Keep up the good work.

Thanks for trying the demo. A 1+ hour long video is far more than I expected.

I'm afraid the game has some serious crashing issues right now so I'm sorry you had to deal with that. To make matters worse I believe the culprit is the main hub stage.

I also believe that the game needs more tutorializing, I'm just not sure how to do it right now.

The reason why you were missing so much is because enemies have a much higher chance to evade attacks if they are directly facing you, unless it's magic which never misses.

I also can't let the player place caltrops directly under a character's feet.

As for the jail, it's the building near the center of the fortress if you really want to see what's inside. It's just some more writing for now.

I'm trying to be ambitious and make a lot more content in the future

Thanks again for playing.

The animations look fantastic, and the gameplay is intuitive enough. My only concern is that it can feel a little floaty at times. 

I'm not sure what else to say because a game like this requires other people to play against to truly apreciate, I don't think playing the AI is enough if every character is essentially the same.

However, I think you could make a compelling gauntlet mode if you added some upgrades, new stages and forced the player to unlock skills along the way, as dumb as it sounds.

Keep up the good work.

Good for melee characters because they can run very fast.

The game looks good, but now the characters probably need higher detail now to match the background, textures and such. That's the downside of a graphical glow up.

I think it would be cool and add some flavor to the setting if you started with no equipment and received a set of gear and items corresponding to your starting class upon being prompted to pick one.  

Goblins are annoying. It's cool if you want small enemies that run away from combat, but be warned that this will implicitly favor ranged builds. All ARPGs have either a melee or a ranged bias.

Either way, I think I prefer the weapons that have fast, snappy animations. This is only my opinion but I think slow attack speed never feels good.

I think enemy health scales faster than the player's damage. By the time I started seeing warlocks it felt like me and my party were mercilessly kicking old men. Granted, this is also how you kill ranged enemies as a melee class in Diablo 1 but you usually deal more damage too.

That might have been my queue to grind, but I hate grinding, no matter how thick the enemies get. 

However, the biggest issue I found was that death is very janky. If a party member dies you can dismiss and then recruit them to revive them on the spot with half health.

Most importantly, I died 3 times during the course of the demo and the behavior was different in every ocassion.

The first time I was granted control of one of my party members but I couldn't find where to revive. I talked to the healer but she didn't help me. However, restarting the game brought my entire party back.

The second time I was prompted to respawn in town, and I did. This is probably the intended behavior.

The third time I died immediately upon respawning in town, and had to restart the game again. 

On a different note, I'm happy to report that I didn't break the UI this time around. 

Keep up the good work.

I don't have a lot of notes because the game seems to be progressing well. 

The gamepad controls work, the shop works, and nothing broke as far as I could tell. 

I'd like a visuals settings menu although the default Alt + Return works for the window/fullscreen toggle. Moreover, suggesting a settings menu feels like recommending a save menu or replacing the placeholder graphics. 

Good work all around. I hope one of the future male characters has robot parts because robot parts are cool.

I went on parade, but perish I did not.

I beat the demo stage without much difficulty. The combat system is intuitive and I think most people would figure out that skeletons are weak to blunt damage and slimes are weak to elemental.

Nevertheless, I'd like to see more inventive enemies since the playable characters are so good. You could probably recycle some of the art and have the party encounter enemy rogues or dark knights, as an example, or maybe skeleton versions of the party. I don't know.

On that note, the animations look great, as always. 

Moving on, it's been a while, but the sprites look a little more pixelated than I remember? I believe I prefer the sharper look.

The UI is also more utilitarian, which is probably a good change, but the art style is a big asset and I think it's important not to waste it.

The dungeon interface is a good idea but it might need a degree of contextualization because white blocks floating in the void might be too abstract. 

As for the music, it's very fitting.

Overall, the game seems to be coming up great. Keep it up. 

Cool boot up sequence, all mech media needs a cool boot-up sequence.

There's some odd behavior with the mouse pointer when you change the screen resolution, as in, the point doesn't remain on the tip. Might be a UI scaling issue.

Also, the mouse pointer defaults to center of the screen when opening the settings menu.

The "it's not frozen, I swear" warning was only on screen for a few seconds at most so whatever was worrying you wasn't an issue.

There's a stutter whenever you use a weapon you haven't used before, but only the first time you play the game. It's not a big deal, probably just shader cache.

The menu after a game over doesn't work, can't retry, go back to the main menu or quit. However, the same options work fine in the regular settings menu. The menu after finishing a stage has similar issues.

I like the new cockpit with the 3D wireframe model in there, but some kind of rear view camera would be more useful. Also, maybe a little radar animation and higher range because enemies kept sneaking up on me. Maybe they are too quiet.

I couldn't get any weapons besides the starting ones to work in the arcade mode but they work fine in the stages. I could select them but they wouldn't fire. It would be nice to have a loadout screen regardless.

I got better at the arcade mode over time but my high score was only 18.

Overall, I'm sad to say that the game might need a refactor of some sort because the menu, weapons and inventory work differently depending on the stage when these should be modules that behave identically everywhere. 

Either way, keep up the good work.

What's new since last time: Too many things, it's been 6 months and one day.

There are 3 side quests to complete: they are started by recruiting Katrina, talking to Mosca and completing Mosca's quest respectively. 

There are also 3 main quests that can be started, but only one can be finished.

The demo ends when exiting the jail.

If you get lost, that's good feedback too.

I recommend using polearms.

I'm getting the same warning as Branno, and I'm spooked.

That intro reinforces the negative stereotypes I hold about people who play hard platformers after 2018 so it's not for me, but the target audience might like it.

The spritework is good, and the gameplay is functional although it's much better with a controller, especially because you have to hold down buttons. You should probably have a "real bunny androids use a gamepad" disclaimer.

Keep up the good work.

I think the game is pretty self-explanatory from the perspective of someone who doesn't usually play roguelikes.

My only note is that the resource nodes could stand out more.

Keep up the good work.

Thanks for trying the game and providing feedback.

I think those suggestions are reasonable, especially the skill description because otherwise you can only read them outside of combat.

First time playing the game. 

The golfing is actually kind of fun. I sorta forgot I was playing a horror game and that I was aiming the business end of a shotgun towards my face. That might be a bad thing depending on what you are going for, but the golf works.

The only issue I encountered was that the ball clipped through the ground close to the hole in the first round of level one and I got softlocked. However, I didn't have the same problem after restarting and it was only the first hole so it wasn't a big loss.

Someone else already commented this but saving should also save level progress. It doesn't change the gameplay any since it's basically the same as saving the game at the start of the next level.

However, I admit I'm biased because I have mixed feelings on limited saves as a whole. I've always found them annoying more than anything, and anger is an excellent antidote to fear.

Keep up the good work.

I think I had the older version because I downloaded the game again and the sound works fine.

Good game. I like the big selection of sprites and color palettes.

I'm not sure what to comment when it comes to the gameplay because everything seems good to me.

I've found one major issue with the audio. It sounds like some sort of static or perhaps a short portion of an in-game track that keeps looping non-stop and gets worse over time until you go back to the main menu. Dropping the sfx and/or music level doesn't stop the cacophony either. It doesn't sound intended.

I recorded one level to show the issue.

https://files.catbox.moe/o2ucgf.mp4

The game is an effective time waster.

I like the population mechanic but it feels too punishing because you can never get it back and every additional guy costs more than the last.

The only technical issue I encountered is that the tooltips are a bit fickle and would sometimes refuse to pop up. They can also pop up outside the FOV.

Keep up the good work.

First time trying the game.

The hat is a fun idea. Makes the game less punishing since you can take 2 hits and the hat can be picked up again after dropping it.

The portrait does the "you have huge guts" meme pose. Classy.

The game feels quite polished already. I like how the circle around the crosshair represents how many bullets you've got left.

The sound design is good but I think that sometimes the bat will do a metallic sound when breaking something that's apparently not made out of metal and I'm not sure why. 

Parrying projectiles with the bat is pretty cool but melee combat feels very chaotic.

On that note, the later levels get very messy. I take it that's the point but I fear what will happen later on.

Keep up the good work.

I started the game, shot the enemies and lighted the NPCs on fire. Good.

Blond video game women with pigtails remind me of VtM:B so that's good.

How come there are costumes already? That is very thinking emoji.

Keep up the good work.

Great game, looks fantastic.

The gameplay feels polished too. It's quite intuitive and you can discover that some walls can be destroyed or that ledges can be grabbed even by accident.

I did get lost after a while but that's probably part of the intended experience since the environments are so open.

Keep up the good work.

It's been a while since I last played the game. I think it was before the remake.

The biggest issues I found were all UI related I'm afraid. I'm not allowed to equip a 2-handed weapon without first unhanding the shield, but I could equip a shield right away afterwards. Reloading the game removed the shield from my inventory altogether.

I also managed to softlock the game at the blacksmith by buying a weapon, equipping it, and then directly selling the weapon I had previously equipped without placing it in my inventory first. This made it so left clicking did an attack instead of letting me move. Talking to the blacksmith again hid his store and opened my own inventory.

I can only speculate but it seems to me like you are flipping a bool to open/close menus and this might be causing the issue.

You should consider implementing a button that closes all menus at once. I recommend ESC.

Keep up the wood work.

Thanks for the feedback.

The targeting system works much better with an analog stick, that's true. Regardless of that, I ought to come with some kind of auto-aim. Speed settings are also something I should add at some point. A lot of quality of life mechanics from Afterlife Gladiator are still missing despite the fact that the codebase is already significantly larger even at this stage.

I'm not sure what I can do with the UI. I've made it big because I like big UIs that are easy to read, but because of this it also needs to be semi-transparent in order to not obstruct the playing field. Then again, it's all the same color so I could add a setting to it. I have a lot of settings to implement.

Thanks for playing.

I could make the turn queue a bit bigger. Also, other encounters won't have 8 of the same enemy and I'll try to come up with a way to differentiate better in the future. Maybe a number/letter next to their name or something.

The number on the lower right represents the turn order so if it says "WT 3/8" that means that the unit will take the third turn that round out of 8 turns in total. Units only take one turn per round. I stole this from Final Fantasy tactics but if I could make it clearer that would be great.

I will keep up the good work.

Thanks for the feedback.

I'm still learning to animate and I'm hoping to improve over time. I realize the game is lacking juice at the moment so any juice related advice is appreciated.

Your impressions about the characters are surprisingly accurate.

Thanks for the detailed feedback.

Potions can only be used in combat by characters with the logistics skill. I'm planning to add more items in the future and potions will have a particular advantage over magical healing too so I'm hoping this limitation will make more sense in the future.

Adding tooltips to skills is a good idea. I can't expect everyone to remember what every technique does. A button to highlight all hp bars is good too. 

Your interpretation for all of the characters is pretty off the mark but that's ok too. 

It was a physics issue. 

Thanks, man.

Alright, I know what's broken then.

I'm not sure why it's broken then. It's the exact same system the player units use. 

Thank you for the feedback.

So I take it the enemy aims but never resolves the attack, is that it?

Thanks for trying.

And the game gets locked? The timer should kick in and end the turn right away.

Thank you.

What's new this time around?

This time I've elected to submit a short combat oriented demo. Just talk to the snake at the store counter and she'll give you the details.

It shouldn't take more than a few minutes and I hope to finally iron out the basics of the combat enough to start making some proper content.

Please don't hesitate to share your thoughts about the game with me.

Thanks for playing.

I forgot to add the mule noises.

Good atmosphere, very Dark Souls 1/Demons Souls-esque, down to the sound effects. The armor with the armet/shawl combo vaguely reminds me of the Alba set.

I defeated the doppelganger at the church. He had it coming. 

I think what you need the most in terms of gameplay is a lock on feature. You can totally play the game without it but the sword has a 3 hit combo and I think you need a lock on in order to connect that last hit.

Keep up the good work.

I'm afraid the game is getting stuck for me too.

Nevertheless, I think the issue might be the framerate because the 120 cap doesn't work (the fps counter shows around 300) and I even managed to load in the first mission once after capping it at 60.

Sadly, I restarted to confirm my findings and couldn't get it to work again because the framerate cap in the settings gets reset every time now and there's no appy/save settings button.

I wish I could be more helpful but that's as far as I got.