Damn, you got me, that's totally what happened. Thanks!
blorbdev
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Very cute and soulful, get ready for some major nitpicks.
- The tutorial level seems way harder than the following level. Why not give a nice peaceful baby level to begin with? The very first seconds has you bombarded with enemies, just give us a breather first to figure out how the movement works. 90% of DD games err on the side of too hard rather than too easy.
- I guarantee you nobody will find the game too easy and quit immediately if you have a more gradual difficulty curve. The core gameplay of rolling around feels good, and it's ok to start out easy. You should introduce the basic rolling, then the jumping, then the enemies, etc. Could be in the same level, but there should be easy breather sections in between.
- Most of the difficulty, for me at least, comes from the enemies, which seems a bit backwards. I wanna roll, you know?
- The animations of the default girl (the one in the capsule art) are bugging me. Her feet are too often planted on the ground when moving slowly, even though I think if you were actually inside a ball rolling (I've never done it) your feet would constantly be moving in small steps, you know? In fact, you wouldn't be able to have your feet static because the ball is rolling.
- The lives UI element didn't read as lives to me until I first got a game over and realized, oh shit, there are lives. The little white balls should either be half pink like the actual player ball, or should be replaced with little pictures of the current character head. I thought the lives were powerups or something.
- Even more nitpicky nitpicks: the sound of breaking the crates sounds more like eating than breaking. On the first level, there is a bit where the floor flickers (3/4 of the way through). On the grassy level, area 1, there's a tree that blocks your view right next to a tiny rock, feels bad.
-Very cute, I love the little sealer
-I miss the way the seal would ragdoll off the edge, it seems like he usually just stays in place when hit (rip)?
-Is there some kind of meta progression? Because if there is, I missed it. It's pretty punishing, which fits the arcadey vibe, but it's a bit too hardcore for me.
-The bottle for the sharks is cute, I assume they are used as a currency? I only caught a shark once or twice and died soon afterwards; it's very hard to catch the shark and not die immediately afterwards. Perhaps the bottle could stay there as a trap until a shark hits it?
At last... I have finally... (a)woken...
My main problem is the performance. Maybe it's some quirk of my PC or it's like this for everyone, but it's really bad, sadly. Performance was somewhat better on the earthquake level, but on tutorial and first one it's abysmal. Notably there is often a stutter when starting to fire the gatling gun. I have no idea what it's like making a 3D game with Godot, perhaps this is merely the inevitable result of Juan's trickery, but do you have any idea what might be causing these performance problems? I know Godot is "heavier" than you might expect for a given level of graphics, but there's no way it has to be this bad. Sorry for complaining so much, but it really jumped out at me.
I should clarify that the FPS was fine, it was like 60-120 all the way through, but there are massive stutters that make it feel like 20-30 fps at times.
-Art gallery and model viewer? Pure, unadulterated soul. You could make it even more soulful though by unlocking new art through achievements. You know, "Level Complete! You unlocked concept art 11!"
-Mom art is always +100 soul, just the way it is.
-Here's my (very beautiful) mockup for how I think the weapon switching UI could work. Instead of having the name of the weapon, have an icon and the player loops through them. (Imagine a slick animation for the icons like... one of those things, I have no idea what they are called or where I saw it. Kind of like in a cockpit or something? I may have schizophrenia.)
-Very strong choice of Blorblehead, clearly this game is going places.
-I second that there should be more impact when hitting enemies, even just color changes.
Amazing pixel art and animations, truly. It avoids the pitfalls of many commercially released pixel art games that make me seethe and cry. The arcade area is especially beautiful.
10/10 intro, not sure if that could possibly be real, though.
Even though the art is so good, the gameplay doesn't really work for me. It's a hard thing to give criticism for, because it's so subtle, but the main character's movement feels off. Maybe there's too little weight and momentum? It feels like a flash game, physics wise. She comes to full speed too fast, and the jumps feel disconnected from the movement, if that makes any sense at all--like she just randomly shoots in the air or something.
Enemy designs are fantastic, especially love the moon boss--genuinely eerie. This is the best looking DD game I've ever played, so great job.
Main point is I agree with GasGod, it needs SOMETHING more to not be Yet Another Survivors Like. Even if you're not an ideaguy, try to think of something to set it apart. Free GimmickTM: what if the different weapons were different items of clothinng you would see on the protagonist: really lean into the anime coomer market.
1. Very nice pixel art, though I some nitpicks. First, I feel the protagonist is too detailed compared to the enemies, almost giving the impression of mixels. Maybe you could make her a bit more simplified? Second, I think the background is a bit too noisy. The screenshots look significantly worse than the actual gameplay IMO, and I think that's part of it. The enemies are the highlight for me.
2. Mouse controls are really weird, seems like it's centered a couple of inches to the right of the protag. IMO just scrap mouse controls, what kind of psychopath wants to control a survivorslike with their mouse?
Cinema. Love the JustinRPG (if I hear correctly) music.
-Can you backwards race? I tried it but couldn't, at least not by entering a negative number. But the guy's dialogue made me wonder if it was possible. It would definitely be fun.
-No reset button at the end, but I assume that's intentional. It makes it feel more... real. This is truly the 14th Nightmare Race.
-Love the dialogue, reminds me of sweet bro and hella jeff.
-Freeze when talking to the guy about nostalgia and the long shadow and shit at the end, but it might be an intentional freeze. Could have to do with alt tabbing for a second.
-Not sure what the emerald does, but I found it.
I will now thoroughly expose myself as a brainlet, and dare I say... a crapslet.
1. Tutorial kind of filtered me. I agree with what diabolodev said. "This thing wins on a 5, 7, or 9, but only on Tuesday. But THIS thing wins on seventeen, negative five, but if you roll frog you lose your bet". It would be way better to just have that information on screen, maybe when you scroll over the place you bet. I don't know how to visually display that, though.
2. Even though I was pretty much clicking random buttons, the feel of everything is really good, especially the sound effects. Neurons activated.
3. Obviously there's a wee bit of Balatro influence here, but aesthetically I feel it could be more distinct. I don't know why exactly, but something about the sounds make me expect a more skeuomorphic aesthetic--give me that nice velvet table or whatever. I don't know, maybe that's even more generic than Balatro though, but for some reason it feels like it calls for a more grounded and less dreamlike aesthetic. Sorry for schizoposting.
4. In the tutorial, the chip gets stuck to your mouse after you put it down. I understand there is a way to put it down, but it might make sense to just have it automatically dropped during the tutorial for the sake of the beginner.
Thank you for playing! I think I see what happened with the rolling for you.
Basically, the roll makes you move faster, so you can get around faster by spamming it, and gives you i-frames but only during the roll. You can roll immediately after rolling with no cooldown to zip around.
But there are the slug ghosts that have dark trails, and when you touch their trail, blorb gets covered in slime and can't roll for a few seconds. That probably was why it felt like rolling had a cooldown during the fight.
Thanks for playing! Maybe I should add a more clear "this is the point of no return" before the final boss, if I can't figure out a way to make the credits lead back into the game. I agree saving would be very nice, but I dreaded adding it because of the complexity / fucked up way I developed the game (originally, it was a game where you were on a 10x10 grid and would press a button to find a mushroom, and it morphed into this zelda-like thing) Excuses, I know.
Also you did find dark blorb at the right time, the portal unlocks once you have 30 mushrooms--but that goal is probably too easy, huh. I was trying to balance making it easy to get to the goal for demo day with making the player explore most of the world. Frankly, I was worried about people getting filtered by the dark forest and quitting before seeing the ending, but maybe I could raise the goal a little bit.
The shop is very much a vestigial thing--previously, you bought the axe and pickaxe, and you sold mushrooms instead of putting them in the museum. My current VISION is for the shop to have cool items you can buy for gold, like hats and different colors for blorb, but I didn't get around to it.
Getting a lot of blorb vibes from this...
Actually fun, even in its current, textureless state. The protagonist on the splash image is really cute, wonder how he would look in game. Main criticism is the balls that make you mash. I just don't like it, I would prefer if they just stopped your momentum completely and stole your XP instead of forcing you to mash (it happens too often so my hands were getting tired). Alternatively, maybe they could bounce in a different direction like pinball--but that might not be enough of a punishment.
Very impressive. Apologies to the real person I assumed was a bot so I rudely alt tabbed for a minute.
I never got into hearthstone so I'm not the best judge, but it's very impressive how accurately you replicated the mechanics (from my limited knowledge). I assume that this is a practice project for an original cardgame, right? So much of the card game experience is the bells and whistles to trick the monkey brain into activating neurons. If anything, it might even be more important than the quality of the gameplay strictly in terms of making it.
I know that's really obvious and lots of things could still be placeholders, but that's the main thing that comes to mind. Also I don't think pixel art has enough visual clarity for card games--not unless it's really high resolution.
Thanks for playing, and for the very detailed thoughts! The most recent web version has some altered movement mechanics where the focus is more on bouncing repeatedly to build up speed, but I'm not spending much time on it right now because I don't think improving my "platforming physics" skills will really have any benefit.
Thanks for blorblieving! The moving platforms were a true conundrum because the game is pixel perfect, and it's hard to make them slow enough to feel good without having them be very obviously jittery when they move. Thankfully it seems nobody really commented on the background jittering (phew), but the jitter overall is one of my biggest concerns graphics-wise.