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All the text and options right at the beginning was a bit overwhelming. I might not be the best person to review this game, because I don't really play a whole lot of games like this. For what it's worth, I'm on an AMD GPU and the trees and grass looked just fine.

The first thing I'll notice is the writing feels a bit off. The way the protagonist is talking doesn't really sound like how an actual human would talk. As an example: "It came from somewhere in that alley! I should check it out." That's not something a person would think inside their own head after hearing a scream. In my opinion, something like: "I blink quickly as I turn my head towards the source of the sound. That alley?" You could also work the character's emotions into the text. It sounds like he's unafraid and eager to help, so maybe: "Knuckles cracking, I step into the shady passage. Let's see what that was all about."

 And be sure to watch for typos:

The art is kinda ugly, but I'm assuming it's all temporary.

It took me way too long to realize I could open my inventory and equip the coffee cup. There doesn't seem to be any consistency about pressing LMB or Space or Z to navigate the inventory. I would definitely add some tutorials and quality of life improvements.

Looks like there are some places where the enemies can't reach:

I wasn't able to get past this part. I figured I was supposed to throw the coffee cup at the attacker, but that just stopped him for a few seconds, and afterwards I wasn't able to thaw the ice on the vending machine. I tried to grab the pepper spray out of the woman's purse, but by the time I got to it, the attacker was immediately behind me, so I wasn't able to use it before he grabbed me.

Is the grass supposed to be this tall? lmao

Obviously, there's not much to it right now. The health/hunger/thirst/fatigue meters go down, but nothing happens when they hit zero. I expected that jumping into a pond would restore my thirst meter, but nothing happened.

The night sky looks kinda cool.

The art, music, and sound effects are excellent, but it doesn't look like there's a whole lot of gameplay at the moment. I tried the bow, crossbows, gauntlet, and staff. I kept getting stronger with each gate, but I barely took any damage from enemies.

In the Options menu, there are left and right arrow buttons for increasing/decreasing the resolution, fullscreen, etc. You can press the same button multiple times in a row to cycle through the available options, but it doesn't look like this works for the "Retro Filter" button. I assume this is unintentional. You might be changing the position of the button so that it's no longer under the mouse.

CHANGES SINCE LAST DD:

==== FISHING ====
Updated tutorials.
Added decorations to levels 2 and 3.
Fixed a bug that could sometimes cause music to not play when restarting the level.

==== WIZARD DANCE ====
Rewrote much of the logic for loading and playing music, and moving notes down the screen. This should result in a smoother experience, regardless of the type of audio device the player is using.
Added a calibration screen in the Options menu to adjust the offset based on the current audio device's latency.

==== SHOOTING GALLERY ====
Added a sprite and sound effect for when you miss a target.

==== DECIPHER ====
The name of this game mode was changed from "Letter Editing" to "Decipher".
Updated map icon.
Fixed drop zones appearing in the wrong spaces in level 3.
Added a background to level 2.
Added some auditory and visual feedback to level 2.
Updated cutscenes.
Re-did level 3.
Added hints to level 3.
Fixed a bug that could occur in level 3 if the player let go of a word directly above the Submit button.
Fixed a crash that could occur in level 3 if the player pressed Submit without inputting a guess.
Updated Submit button.
Added a very easy problem to level 1 to help explain the gameplay better.

==== TOWER DEFENSE ====
The cursor is now visible while the buy menu is open.
Updated tutorials.
There's now a small puff of dust whenever an imp dies.
Imps become lighter when they take damage.
Swapped the circle's outline when placing a weapon with the full circle after it's placed. Hopefully this should make it a bit less "busy".

==== SHOOT-EM-UP ====
Updated tutorial.
Fixed a bug that could cause time to go into the negatives if the player died while there were only a few seconds left on the clock.
Enemies now arrive in waves.
Redid all three levels.
Fixed a bug that could cause some enemies to shoot bullets while the player was dying or dead.
Slowed the enemies down.
There are now three different possible death animations for the imps, depending on how they die.
Added a small explosion animation for when a bullet hits an enemy.
Fixed a bug that could cause the fairies to enter the "THIS IS OVER" state, even if the remaining enemy had more than one health.

==== TEAM BATTLE ====
The name of this game mode was changed from "JRPG Battle" to "Team Battle".
Updated map icon.
Fixed a bug that could cause the wrong character to blink upon taking damage.
Added a "Success" screen.

==== DRAGON RUN ====
Fixed a bug that caused the enemies to not animate in level 3.

==== PLATFORMER ====
Tweaked some hitboxes to make the projectiles less deadly.
Tweaked the jump height and camera to hopefully make the gameplay feel better.
You can now see your score during levels.
Fixed a bug that caused some platforms in level 2 to not check for collision.

==== IMP LAUNCH ====
Updated map icon.
Slowed everything down.
Increased the number of items that appear.
Added a big rocket sprite for when the imp is on the ground. It's not really good for anything, just felt appropriate.

==== MAP ====

Added a "drawer" that can be used to quickly navigate between levels.
Fixed a bug that could cause icons to freeze in their animations while navigating via the W/A/S/D keys.
It is now possible to scroll the map by moving the cursor to the edges of the screen.
Fixed a bug that could sometimes cause icons to become selected after exiting cutscenes.
Fixed a bug that could cause icons to freeze in their animations while navigating via the next/previous buttons on the level card.

==== MISC ====
Added some short SFX that play when a cutscene ends.
You can now press LMB to skip through the results screens of most game modes.

Thank you for the feedback! I'm still doing a lot of tweaking in the platformer mode. Hopefully by next DD it'll feel a bit nicer.

Simon Sayeth and Higher or Lower are both bonus game modes; they don't have any story and they rely on random numbers a LOT more than the main game modes. Eventually, you'll earn coins from them and you'll be able to purchase dolls from the doll shelf. This might take a very long time for me to implement, and it probably will not appear in the demo. Either way, I definitely plan to add some more visuals, SFX, surprises, etc. to each of them.

There's a circle that appears around the crosshair in the Shooting Gallery mode, which indicates when you're reloading. Maybe I should change the color or something to make it more obvious.

For the fishing game, you CANNOT move the hook horizontally while it's in the water, only vertically.

This was kinda fun. It reminds me a bit of this. I like the jazz music.

If all the spaces on the grid are already full, does adding items to your inventory do anything?

Thank you for playing! I've definitely thought about adding a list off to the side of the map, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.

You're definitely right about the platformer, and I've already shrunk the hitboxes of some of the projectiles to make it a bit easier. I might have to keep tweaking it.

In some levels of the spelling puzzle game mode, some words will be written in blue, which cannot be changed. There are practically none of them here in this demo, but they do exist.

Right off the bat, I thought this person was a woman with a beard, because the back of his seat kind of looks like long anime hair. But that's probably a "me" issue lmao.

I wasn't able to defeat all the red bugs. I tried a couple times, but all of my characters ended up dying. Sometimes they would be fighting enemies, then start moving in the wrong direction for some reason. Maybe I'm just not very good at this type of game.

F1 - F4 for the missiles felt a bit awkward to me. There might be some better buttons you could assign missiles to by default.

This was pretty fun. Lots of nice art and sound effects.

I was playing with an Xbox controller. Is it possible to aim in any direction besides left/right? Because that's where most of the difficulty comes from. When you're being swarmed by enemies and bullets, it can be hard to escape if you're not able to shoot up or down.

I'm not entirely sure what the little cat dude is for, but I love how he cries when you die lmao.

NNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO SO CLOOOOOOOSE

CHANGES SINCE LAST DD:

==== FISHING ====

Made the game mode a bit less difficult by increasing the distance that fish will attempt to bite the hook.

==== WIZARD DANCE ====

Fixed a bug that could cause a softlock if the player paused/unpaused multiple times quickly.

Added a gradient to the background.

Updated some cutscene sprites.

Made the tutorial look nicer.

Fixed a bug that caused one of the background elements to not appear in level 3.

==== SHOOTING GALLERY ====

Added some final artwork to the cutscenes.

==== LETTER EDITING ====

Added the ability to move up/down along the list of words with the W and S keys (although it's still a bit glitchy and I might have to add some more improvements)

Fixed a bug that could cause the player to lose the level, even if their accuracy was equal to the minimum.

==== TOWER DEFENSE ====

Tweaked some health and speed values to make the game more fair.

You can now see a weapon's radius before you place it on the ground.

Updated some sprites.

==== SHOOT-EM-UP ====

Re-did level 3.

==== JRPG ====

Animated some stuff.

"Correct" attacks (ones that the enemies are weak to) will display their damage in red.

Made the logs look a bit nicer.

Replaced some sprites in the cutscenes.

Added some sound effects.

Re-did the tutorial.

==== DRAGON RUN ====

Fixed (for hopefully the last and final time) a REALLY annoying bug that could cause the player to lose time if they pause during dialog.

The speed up potion now makes everything around the player slower, instead of making the player faster.

Added some sound effects.

Updated some sprites in the level 1 cutscene.

Updated the tutorial screens.

==== PLATFORMER ====

Made all three levels slightly less brutal by tweaking the projectile emmitters' fire rates.

==== QUICKVENTURE ====

Added a handful of new cards.

You now level up (more health + damage + defense) after every round.

==== MAP ====

Added animations to some of the icons.

Fixed a bug that could occur if the user clicked the Back button while there was an icon directly underneath it.

==== MISC ====

Added an option to change the opacity of the dialog box.

Fixed a bug that could cause the Fullscreen button in the options menu to sometimes not work.

Fixed a bug that could cause levels to unintentionally replay if the player held down the Space key during outro cutscenes.

Updated the font again.

Pressing Escape in the Doll Shelf will now immediately return you to the map.

Fixed a bug that could sometimes cause a "??? NO CUTSCENE" screen when opening the Doll Shelf.

Controls for all nine main game modes are now customizable.

Thank you for the feedback! I didn't know that about holding space during cutscenes, I'll see if I can fix it. If you want to skip the cutscenes, you can press Esc and then Space. There's also a toggle in the Options menu to automatically skip cutscenes when pressing the "Retry" button from the Pause or Game Over screens.

Very impressive. Good luck!

Bruh, this intro feels WAY too intense for such a lighthearted game lmao. It'd also be nice if I could skip through some of the text faster, especially at the beginning. And is there a way to re-read previous lines?

What determines when you get a game over? While I was playing Challenge mode, the board was almost completely full, but there was at least one more move I could've made, but I still got a game over before I was able to do it.

Looks like it was inspired by OSRS?

For some reason, it won't allow me to type via my numpad.

The window is kinda small, and some of the text is hard to read, but I don't see any way to increase it. It's also VERY difficult to see anything once the screen darkens at night.

Is this all made in Pygame?

Very charming art and sound effects.

After a few minutes of playing, with several upgrades and autofire enabled, the entire lower half of the screen was just a chaotic mess. Enemies were dying really quickly no matter where I aimed, and at that point, my main concern was just avoiding enemy projectiles (and there weren't even that many of them). I made it to Wave 12 and defeated the boss, but the whole thing felt very easy.

This was actually pretty fun. I lost track of time while playing it.

What's the purpose of having to hold RMB in order to drop a ball? Seems like you could just press LMB, and nothing else would change.

sfw huniepop lmao 10/10 it's okay

Made it all the way to the end. It took me a while to realize I had to smash the mirror in the bathroom with the rock (I actually just discovered that by chance). I also kept dying at the explosive chest puzzle, I only finished it via trial-and-error. When I visited the library, it kept telling me to "invert" things, but I didn't realize I needed to open my inventory (is that what the "Primate Island" book was for?). Maybe have a sound effect or something that plays when your inventory gets updated.

Thanks for playing!

CHANGES SINCE LAST DD:

==== FISHING ====

Added new visual elements.

Added dynamic waves to the surface of the water.

==== SHOOTING GALLERY ====

Added level 3.

Added background art.

Added a sound effect when the level starts.

==== LETTER EDITING ====

Re-wrote the tutorial for level 3, and added an extremely easy problem to the beginning. Hopefully the instructions should be more clear now.

==== TOWER DEFENSE ====

Added level 3.

==== SHOOT-EM-UP ====

Fixed a bug that could cause enemies to come back to life if they died at the same time as the player.

Fairies will now sometimes shout "This is over" if the last enemy in a level is killed with a deflected bullet.

Added level 3.

==== JRPG ====

When selecting two abilities for a combo attack, the name of the resulting combo attack will now be displayed.

Fixed a bug that caused dialogue lines from previous level's cutscenes to show up in the log when they shouldn't have.

==== IMP LAUNCH ====

Fixed a bug that caused the ground to not shake properly when landing at a high velocity.

==== DRAGON RUN ====

Added level 3.

==== PLATFORMER ====

Fixed a bug that allowed the player to jump twice very quickly if they hugged a wall.

Added level 3.

The camera will now follow you above the upper edge of the level, instead of getting cut off.

==== QUICKVENTURE ====

New game mode: QuickVenture (a card battler). This game mode is still VERY early in development (in fact, it's not even possible to win yet). But feel free to try it.

==== MISC ====

Fixed some text spacing issues.

Added the Doll Shelf. Practically nothing has been implemented yet, but feel free to take a look.

Thank you for playing! I'm glad to know that it's improving.

I'll look into the platformer bug. I vaguely remember experiencing something similar, but I guess I never got around to fixing it.

Imp Launch actually used to be a lot faster, but I slowed it down a while ago. Guess it's still too fast. I'll tweak the numbers some more and see what happens.

Yeah, I was a bit worried about the third Letter Edit level. "poing to pet" is 100% intentional, but it might be too difficult, since it's the first one of those types of puzzles. I'll see if I can come up with something better.

Thanks for the feedback!

Thank you! I'm glad you liked the humor.

walk in circles + mash M1 simulator

Very well made, but the difficulty is INSANE.

One suggestion I would have is to give the player the option to disable showing the death count every time they revive. Some players (myself included) might get discouraged seeing that number go up and up and up, especially since it persists across all levels.

Thank you for playing!

I definitely have a plan to tie the stories together, and for a currency system. But those will take a long time to implement, and they probably won't appear in the demo.

Hey, thanks for playing! There's still a lot planned for the shmup mode. Glad you liked it!

I did NOT have a controller plugged while I was playing. It might be because I'm using Firefox; sometimes in-browser games are better on Chrome or Edge.

Nice atmosphere.

I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to be doing at this point. Apparently, some guy wants me to go to his shed, but instead I found some old abandoned hotel. Fell down an elevator shaft, wandered around for a bit, but couldn't find a way back up. According to my emails, I'm also supposed to be taking pictures? I didn't see a button for a camera in the controls screen.

Is it possible to replace this vase in the corner? I can't seem to reach it.

I also kind of got stuck right here. I was able to climb up to this spot by pressing LT near the green wall, but none of the buttons seem to make the character jump, so he just keeps falling. I may have missed something during the tutorial. The game also crashed when I clicked the X to quit.

Right off the bat, the first thing I noticed was that the camera slowly moves to the right, even when I'm not touching the mouse.

Having to manually cock the gun is a neat idea. Reminds me a bit of an FPS game I used to play called Receiver, which had very realistic gun mechanics.

Very nice SFX.

It looks like enemies sometimes won't disappear, even if they get hit? This seemed to happen more often if I shot them while moving.

I think this is a really neat idea. Good luck.

This was really neat. The idea of your character's health determining their strength instead of EXP is a cool idea. Very simple gameplay loop and obviously there's not much to it right now, but I liked it. I will say, the character's movement speed is REALLY slow, but that might be intentional. I also noticed that if I camped or opened a shop, then exited, it'd prompt me to open them again immediately afterwards, even if I didn't press the Z key. A very minor annoyance, but something to keep in mind.

I'm looking forward to seeing more of this. Good luck.

It's hard to critique when it's THIS early in development.

Took me a minute to realize that the E key is for "Next" during dialog. Maybe let the player click the mouse where it says "Next". Apparently, you have to point your mouse at an object in order to interact with it? It feels like you should be able to just walk up to it and press a button, but that's just me.

Collision feels a bit funky. I don't like how you can't move horizontally if you're vertically colliding with a wall, and vice-versa.

I can't seem to attack with my sword. I have it equipped, but nothing happens when I press LMB. It looks like I can only attack with bombs. Or maybe I can, there's just no animation? There's also no indication of the sword's range.

I had a quest to gather some rocks, but I wasn't able to find any. Eventually that quest disappeared from my list. I guess I ran out of time? I also had a quest to use a slot machine, but I couldn't find one of those, either.

I AM WINNER! :D

CHANGES SINCE LAST DD:

==== FISHING ====
Re-did Game Over screen.
Fixed a bug that caused the hook to always be below the surface of the water, even when it should've been flush.

==== WIZARD DANCE ====
Fixed a bug that caused a short delay between missing a note and taking damage/losing your combo.

==== SHOOTING GALLERY ====
Slowed down most of the targets in the first level. Hopefully it should be easier now.
Added an outro cutscene to level 2.
Fixed a crash that could occur if you ran out of ammo before the level was finished.

==== LETTER EDITING ====
Completely revamped the first level. There are now 3, shorter problems, and the time limit is gone.
Added intro and outro cutscenes to levels 2 and 3.

==== TOWER DEFENSE ====
Added an intro and outro cutscene to level 2.
Re-did Game Over screen.
Re-did level 1 cutscene.

==== SHOOT-EM-UP ====
You can now hold L-Shift to move at half speed.
Enemies now wiggle before attacking.
Added an outro cutscene to level 2.
Enemies fall off the screen upon dying.
Fixed a bug that caused enemy sprites to be cut-off at the bottom.

==== JRPG ====
Fixed a bug that caused the logs to not show up.
Added cutscenes to levels 2 and 3.
Music now fades out at the end of a level, instead of stopping suddenly.

==== DRAGON RUN ====
Fixed a bug that could cause the clock to continue ticking down if you paused the game while talking with Esther in the first level.
Added an intro and outro cutscene to the second level.
Re-did Game Over screen.
Replaced some sprites.
Fixed a bug that prevented the special Easter egg cutscene from being seen after finishing level 1 without killing any slimes.
Enemies now fly off the screen after being killed.
See what happens when you skip the first hourglass in level 1.

==== PLATFORMER ====
Fixed a bug that could cause your time bonus to be negative if you took a long time to finish the level.
Fixed a bug that could cause the camera to move erroneously after exiting the Pause menu.
Added a clock. The text turns red if you've taken too long to receive a time bonus.
Added a short coyote time for when you step off a platform.
Replaced the first level.
Added a cutscenes to levels 1 and 2.

==== PILLAGE ====
New game mode: Pillage. A and D to move. If an obstacle is red, move out of its way. If an obstacle is blue, press Space right at the last second before it collides with you to gain a point. Colliding with either red or blue obstacles will cause you to take damage. As you earn more points, the obstacles will start moving faster.

==== MAP ====
Fixed a bug that could cause map icons to be selected if you clicked near them (but not ON them) while zoomed out.
The map is now zoomed out by default. This is helpful now that the icons are more spread out.

==== MISC ====
Fixed a bug in several of the game modes that could give the player extra time if they paused during a tutorial.
Fixed a bug in several of the game modes that caused an incorrect score value to be displayed at the end of each level.
Re-did many of the game's UI elements.
Added a credits screen.
Added a custom mouse cursor.
Fixed a bug that could sometimes cause cutscene objects to jitter.

Hey, thank you so much for the feedback!

- You can control the map with W/A/S/D and the space key, although it might be a bit buggy at the moment. It wasn't a super high priority for me.

- I actually do have a plan for coins being usable outside of just the Higher or Lower game mode! It will probably be a long time before I get around to implementing it, but it is coming.

- Good idea about the time, and I'll try redoing the physics in the Platformer mode. Maybe I can get them to feel better.

- I've completely redone the first level of the Letter Editing mode, but I haven't uploaded it here yet. In the new version, there are three, short passages, instead of one long one. I think it's a bit more manageable this way.

- In the Wizard Dance mode, you'll get a blue circle if you hit a note perfectly, and a yellow circle if you're close but not exact. And if you hit the wrong note, the correct note will turn grey, meaning it's too late to press it now. If you don't press anything, an X should show up. Originally, this game mode used W/A/S/D instead of A/S/J/K, but most people told me W/A/S/D felt wrong. A/S/J/K is what Clone Hero (by default) uses, so I figured it was probably the best option. Remappable controls are definitely something I'd like to add someday, but I just haven't gotten around to them yet.

- Yes, the artist did a fantastic job on all the fairies, the imps, and the cutscene. I'll pass your feedback onto her.

- Neat idea about being able to move slower. I'll play around with that and see what happens.

- Definitely a good idea about the enemies' attacks. I'm still finalizing how some of them move and attack, but I'll ask the artist about adding a few extra frames before they attack.

- I may have completely forgotten to explain it, but the boss can only be killed by deflecting its fireball attack. When you do that, it'll split up into a bunch of smaller imps that can be killed individually. Someday, I'll get around to adding a cutscene which explains this much better. You can see a video of this boss fight here: https://files.catbox.moe/a34vya.webm

- I'm glad you like the writing! I've tried in the past to write some "funny" games, but a lot of them did not land very well.

- For my next DD submission, I've already decided to remove many of the levels currently in the game, and only have two or three levels for each game mode. Hopefully this will allow me to polish up each individual level as much as possible.

Thank you so much for playing, and I'll keep improving it as much as possible!

You're definitely right about the RPG and the movement in the Dragon Run game. I'm still hammering out all the fine details.

Can I ask why you were having trouble aiming in the Shooting Gallery mode? It's basically just a point and click, but with moving objects.

You can skip the cutscenes by pressing Esc and then Space. There's also an option in the Options menu to automatically skip the cutscenes when you click Retry.

Thank you for playing!

Oh shoot, I thought I fixed that pause/timer glitch. I'll take another look at it. Glad you liked it, and thank you for the feedback.

Why does it say this is the wrong order? It's a bottom bun, 2x bacon, cheese, and a top bun.