itch.io

Good stuff. Some notes I took while playing:

- I don't think borderless fullscreen is working. I could still see a window border. It looked and behaved identically to windowed mode.

- The menu UI looks really clean. I like the animated background. The mc's eyes opening when stating a new game is a neat transition.

- The art in general is really nice so far. I like the character portraits and sprites. The environments might be a tiny bit too basic compared to the quality of everything else. It's also a small nitpick, but it looks a little strange that the main character's portrait faces right when she's already standing on the right side of the screen. Her portrait also seems a little rough compared to the rest of the art.

- You might want to make the head movement as it follows the mouse a little more subtle. 

- When I picked up the gun, just before encountering Lilith for the first time, the game became extremely laggy for a few minutes. I genuinely thought my PC was about to crash. I also got some serious lag when the mc pulls the gun on the goons and you can shoot for the first time. After that there were occasional lag spikes, seemingly whenever a bunch of enemies spawned or became active.

- Progressing dialogue with space feels a little unresponsive. I must be a fast reader because I often couldn't advance the text as quickly as I wanted. It felt like there was a mandatory delay before I was allowed to continue.

- +1 for being able to access the options menu at any time so I could check the controls.

- +1 for implementing quick resets. I also like that it'll give me back the gun I started with.

-  I like the dnb soundtrack, although I wasn't a fan of the main menu music after awhile.

- Diving to dodge feels really hard to use, but that might just be a skill issue.

- I think it would be pretty cool if unarmed enemies could pick up dropped weapons.

It's a shame my playthrough got cut short because of the performance issues. I only made it about halfway through the second mission before I got too frustrated with the lag. I really enjoyed what I was able to play though. For reference, I'm running Windows 11 with a mid range NVIDIA graphics card, so I'm honestly not sure what could've been causing the performance problems.

I played with keyboard controls only, so I can't really speak to how it feels with a controller. I imagine it's a much better experience since  the keyboard controls felt pretty rough. Having J to shoot and U/O to dodge is really unintuitive.

Some thoughts while playing:

- Why does the character only shoot in a spray pattern? The heavy reliance on auto-aim means the player can't really compensate for the recoil, so it just comes across as adding extra difficulty for no real reason. There were also quite a few times where the auto-aim locked onto the wrong enemy.

- The way the maps and enemy placement currently work, it's very common for enemies to be shooting at you from behind, so you'll often get hit without even realizing bullets were coming. With the current control scheme, there's no easy way to quickly turn around either. I think this visibility issue is one of the reasons most tank-control games tend to use a more top-down perspective.

- Dodging feels pretty awkward to use. The animation is slow, and it covers very little distance so it ends up feeling pretty unresponsive.

I like the idea of a flamboyant 1920s showgirl protagonist mowing down mobsters while dancing. It's a fun setting with a lot of personality, but I think it's currently being held back quite a bit by how janky the gameplay feels. Reading the other comments it looks like its based on a game called PN03? I never played that so maybe I'm just not the target audience.

cowgirl design is peak

my gpu fans started to get real loud while playing and I think I spotted a few warning messages from unreal engine telling me that video memory was being used up

worth it 

- The art direction already looks excellent. The tree background sprite probably needs to be billboarded or something though, because I managed to position the camera in a way where I could see the edge of the plane on certain levels. 

- I'm still a little skeptical of the main character's design. Her dress looks more like loungewear rather than something you'd expect someone to fight in, but I imagine it's probably a settled design at this point. 

- The spider enemy's projectile attack needs a bit more telegraphing. 

- The game is fairly easy right now. Most enemies need to get into melee range to hit you, while the player can snipe them from across the map. You might want to consider lowering the range of player projectiles, giving enemies the ability to strafe long-range attacks, or simply adding more ranged enemies that can fight from a distance. 

- Daggers are by far the weakest weapon option. I assume they're not fully implemented yet? Projectile weapons are just a strictly better choice at the moment, so there's not much reason to ever use them. 

- There's also a bit of a control scheme mismatch with melee combat in general. It doesn't really make sense to have to aim dagger attacks the same way you aim a bow. If you want to include melee combat, I'd probably make it work more like a typical action game where pressing left-click simply attacks the nearest enemy. You already have the dodge roll, so you might as well lean into some soulslike  gameplay. Then, if the player aims, they could throw the daggers instead. I think LMB without aiming could make a nice secondary input in general. 

I like what you have so far. The visual style is already very strong, and I think once the combat is fleshed out and the melee weapons have a more defined niche, it'll come together nicely.

I stopped in the middle of the second floor.  Here's some notes I wrote down while playing:

- The smaller brown crate asset is missing collisions so I can walk inside them.

- Does the shop work? I wasn't able to figure out how to buy anything.

- I got a lot of shotgun ammo but literally 0 pistol ammo, so once I ran out of pistol ammo I basically had nothing to do until I floundered around and found the flamethrower.

- Pressing Esc to open the menu doesn't pause the game, so I could be theoretically killed while checking the settings. The same is true for opening the inventory.

- There should probably be some sort of minimap. I got lost a few times.

- This might go against the design you're going for, but I think the movement is missing a sprint button or something similar. I backtracked a bit because I thought I'd missed something, and it felt like a massive slog at the regular walk speed. You could tie sprinting to a fatigue system during combat if you don't want it to be abused, or if the player has been running while out of combat for a while, they could automatically speed up a bit. 

- The weapon balance currently feels a little off. Grenades don't feel worth using over guns, and the pistol is pretty bad compared to the other guns. The flamethrower is absurdly overpowered. I'd tap left-click once and that was enough to essentially one-shot any enemy if I waited long enough. Very fun to abuse but probably not good for balancing.

- Feels like a missed opportunity not to have flammable propane tanks or something similar as environmental hazards that explode after taking enough damage. Something to add to the chaos.

- The blood and gore effects when you shoot enemies are really cool and satisfying.

Overall it's very clearly still a work in progress, but I can definitely see the vision. I like the art direction so far, and I'm a big fan of the shopkeeper's design. Very nice.

Good to see you back.

Some thoughts while playing:

- The window UI behaves as expected. Minimizing, maximizing, and running multiple programs simultaneously is pretty cool.

- For A(P)ONGKEN, it looks like if I have multiple windows open and click a different window so it loses focus, the game pauses. That makes sense, but neither clicking the desktop nor minimizing the window causes it to lose focus. Seems like a minor inconsistency, though perhaps that's accurate window logic.

- The forward button in the media player seems to skip very close to the end of the song, which feels like a pointless function since there's already a next/previous track button. The back button just restarts the song. The media player also lacks the ability to seek through songs, so if I accidentally skip ahead, I lose my place.

- Can't recycle folders.

- None of the Internet Explorer webpages loaded for me.

- Can't delete bookmarks.

- There doesn't seem to be a way to restore the Windows XP background without doing a complete reset.

- The "My Computer" section doesn't seem to do anything. The agdgOS-tan is cute though.

All in all, this feels more like a neat toy project than a traditional game, so I'd consider most of my critiques to be nitpicks rather than major issues. I had fun poking around and seeing what was implemented.

For context, I played a bit of the web version. I didn't get too far because it felt like I was mostly bumbling my way through the game. To be completely honest, I didn't really know what was going on.

Some thoughts while playing:

- The intro is pretty cool. I'd appreciate it if left-click sped up the text scroll rather than skipping it entirely.

- A fullscreen option for the web version would be nice.

- Overall the presentation is pretty good, especially the use of the 3D dice during rolls. I would personally consider making the battle UI a bit more retro-inspired like the dialogue boxes, though. Right now it feels a little too modern, which is a bit jarring next to the retro pixel art portraits.

- The AI-upscaled portraits used in the dialogue and map look great. Why not use them in the battle UI too?

- There's some serious lag during scene transitions, to the point where my browser would hang for a few seconds when entering and exiting battles. Even opening the dice menu would sometimes lag.

- Maybe it's just incomplete, but I found it a little odd how hand-holdy the tutorial was leading up to the first battle, telling me exactly which buttons to press, and then it just... stops. I get into the fight with the dark elf and suddenly the entire battle system opens up. I'm not familiar with this style of dice-rolling game, so it felt pretty alien to me. I basically clicked random buttons until I won. The dice gameplay felt a little too RNG-heavy, with very little player agency, but that could just be because I didn't understand the systems well enough.

Overall I liked the presentation and the world seems interesting. I think the biggest thing the game could use right now is a smoother on-boarding experience so new players can understand what makes the combat system fun.

Cool to finally get a chance to play this after seeing all the progress you've posted in the threads. I really like the art. I played for about 20 minutes but couldn't figure out how to reach the top of the tower.

Some thoughts while playing:

- You might want to get keyboard controls working asap. Controller-only support is enough friction to turn people away from trying the game.

- Does the dash button work? If I press and hold the right bumper, she does a little dodge/spin animation, but I didn't notice any speed increase.

- Ladder collision seems a little off. I have to climb a good tile above where the ladder sprite ends before I can get off it, so it looks like the mc is floating above it.

- The mc has a really slow initial run speed. You might want to increase that a bit so movement feels less slippery.

- When you throw items, the throw arc starts from the player's head instead of their front, which makes it really hard to hit enemies.

- It's very easy to miss what's interactable. I discovered the gun containers completely by accident while fighting an enemy. Similarly, it took me a while to realize you could punch the vase that you can jump on. I thought it was just level dressing.

- Enemies need to telegraph their attacks a lot more. The plant enemy basically insta-attacks as soon as you're in range.

- Sometimes I'd drop through platforms when I meant to do a crouch jump. Having those two actions mapped the way they are could become a problem.

- Okay, so I realized the idea with the crouch jump is to enter the crouch state and then jump. You're not expected to press both at the same time, and I guess dropping through platforms is what happens when you do. The biggest problem is that you're currently unable to crouch jump while moving in the crouch state, so every crouch jump kills all of your momentum unless you want to risk dropping through the platform instead.

- The previous point leans into a broader observation. I'm not really sure what kind of mechanical vibe the game is going for. The slow run acceleration and slide mechanic suggest a more Sonic-esque platformer where you're meant to build and maintain momentum, but a lot of common actions abruptly kill it. Punching, grabbing ledges, and crouching all bring you to a screeching halt. On the other hand, if you're aiming for a more precision-platformer feel, I wouldn't expect the running physics to behave like they do, and the regular jump height feels extremely short.

I liked what I played. I think the movement and combat could use some tuning, but the animation work is already very expressive. I'm looking forward to checking it out again once more of the art and assets are finalized.

For context, I stopped after beating the first boss. 

Some thoughts while playing:

- The character select menu is a lot louder than the main menu music. Had to turn down my volume.

- The hard drop with space input didn't work for me. Eventually, Z to rotate pieces left stopped working too.

- +1 for being able to pause and view status effects mid-game.

- I needed to right-click to exit the Ratman shop. Shouldn't I be able to press ESC instead?

- The block preview would sometimes not show up in battles. Was that tied to a character / hazard?

- The game needs more juice, especially when lines are cleared. As a casual Tetris fan, my favorite part of the game is the satisfying visaul and audio feedback from getting Tetrises and combos. I think TETR.IO does this really well if you want some inspiration.

- Piggybacking off the previous point, if you don't have one already, I think a combo system where consecutive line clears deal bonus damage to enemies could be a neat feature. It would make chaining clears feel even more rewarding.

- Block collisions can sometimes feel a bit janky. Pieces would occasionally land in what looked like free space just after a block faded away. to be honest, I'm not really sure if I'm a fan of the fading mechanic. I'd either make it last longer or make it exclusive to a hazard type, but that mostly comes down to personal preference I suppose.

Overall I enjoyed it. I didn't get very far, so I can't comment on the roguelike progression, but I think with some more polish the game could definitely be something I'd buy for a reasonable price. 

Thanks for playing!

Glad to hear you managed to beat the boss. I was starting to worry that I had made the later waves too difficult.

I appreciate the fanart! I love the design of your game’s MC and had to include it as a cameo. Hopefully I captured her design well enough.

Thanks for playing!

Yeah, control remapping just missed the cut for the final release. I got really lazy at the end. I think in my next project I’ll make sure that’s one of the first things I implement.

Glad you enjoyed the cameo. Ethelyn’s design is one of my favorites to come out of AGDG, so this game was a nice excuse to draw her. Love the fanart!

Thanks for playing!

The cutscenes were made entirely with Godot’s animation player. It’s a powerful feature of the engine, albeit somewhat finicky to use as scenes become more complex. The source code is freely available if you’re curious and want to inspect the project.

The MC’s design is much simpler compared to the other characters because it was one of the first assets I made, back when I was stricter about emulating NES color limits. By the time I improved the game’s art style, she already had too many sprites for me to want to bother retouching them all.

Major changes since the last update:

- Reduced Arcade Mode's 15 waves to 10 waves and finetuned wave progression once more. It's not perfect but should feel a lot less tedious than last time.

- Added a new "How To Play" section so players can quickly read up on the mechanics of the game.

- Familiar agdg characters might show up in the game's intro cutscene. I was able to include 20 cameo characters.

- Fixed the bug where arcade mode and endless mode's high scores were shared, so now they should be tracked separately.

Known Bugs:

- Sprites will still sometimes have a weird graphical flicker. This bug is pretty rare and rather benign so I never bothered to fix it.
- Not sure how to describe it but sometimes when you throw a crab while a new one spawns the spawning crab will instantly die. This happens very rarily and not game-breaking so I never bothered to fix this either lol.

The "How To Play" section uses generic terms to refer to inputs like "Punch" and "Jump". This is because I originally planned on implementing control remapping. I got lazy though near the end and didn't bother with it. So you'll still need to read the controls to figure out which exact key "Punch" is map to. They're listed on the game page but I'll post them below:

Menu Controls:

• Z - Select
• X - Back
• Arrow keys - Move up, down, left, right

In-game Controls:

• Z - Jump

• X - Punch. Can be chained into 2 punches by tapping the button. Hold the X button for a bit to charge an even stronger punch.
• X + Up arrow key - Punch upwards. If executed beneath a platform while an enemy is on it, you can temporarily stun them. If executed beneath the "PYW" block you can kill any enemies currently on screen. You can only use the PYW block up to 3 times.
• Up arrow key - Pick enemy / item up. Enemies can then be thrown with the X button.
• P - Pause / unpauses the game.
• Left / Right arrow keys - Move left / right

Misc Controls:

• M - Quick mute button
• F11 - Toggle fullscreen

For context, I played at least the first level of all the minigames, but not much beyond that. I got up to the last stage of the fairy shoot 'em up

Here are misc. thoughts while playing:

- Being able to control the menu with just the keyboard would be nice.

- Higher or lower is a little too basic. The obvious optimal strat is to bet high on cards above 7 and low on cards below 7, with exactly 7 being a 50/50 . Beyond that it's pure RNG. The simplicity would probably be fine if coins were a currency that could be used in other mini games.

- Platformer should have the time in the corner somewhere if the intent is to beat it as fast as possible. I wasn't a fan of its physics overall. The jump is strangely floaty on launch and then you fall like a rock.

- I got filtered pretty hard by the letter editing game. It made me question whether I was secretly ESL or something because of how many words I ended up googling lol. I like the concept, though. Maybe it would help if it were clearer from the start what the final story is about, such as having a prompt at the top. I got up to 50% on level 1, and the correct text i managed to get did not seem all that coherent, which makes guessing feel a bit more RNG than it arguably should.

- Wizard dance being all or nothing makes it one of the harder ones. It should probably be more points-based rather than HP-based, where landing the input with the target partially in gives some points, and a perfect input gives the most. Later levels could be gated by a score threshold instead of what you currently have. This might be a skill issue, but it kind of sucks to get no feedback unless the inputs are frame-perfect. Also, the ASJK controls just seems... wrong to me.

Feedback for shoot em up specifically:

- Fairy girls are cute and their cutscene has very nice art. I like how their in-game animations show off their personalities.

- I think the fairies move too fast for the amount of space available. I have only really played a bit of Touhou as reference for bullet hells, but those games usually let you move slower by holding shift. A feature like that would work well here.

- Enemy attacks aren't telegraphed very well. Got killed a lot by the sudden charges they would do. Some additional animations to indicate the start of an attack would help a lot. You already do this for the boss imp's fireball attack, where you can see him charge it up for a second. That one attack might be too telegraphed though since it's incredibly easy to wait out with the shield. 

- Is the boss currently killable? I gave it about two tries where I was able to survive the full minute and 30 seconds while landing fairly consistent hits, and both times I got a game over from running out of time.

Overall thoughts:

- The cutscene writing is charming and the better part of the game. It would be cool if the characters were fleshed out a bit more and stories were more connected to make the world feel lived in.

- You are probably spreading yourself too thin with the number of games you have included. imo, I would focus on a smaller subset that have the most potential and flesh those out first before starting new ones. Also it's neat that you're enginedeving for this.

I'm curious about the audio issues, do you remember what you were doing before it started happening? Were you playing the browser or windows version? I've tried spamming the pause key while playing today and couldn't recreate it. 

For the wave softlock issue, do you remember what the last enemy was that died and how they died? Did nodev-tan show up to gloat that wave?

I can confirm that the upward punch causing them crabs to change random directions is a bug lol. I never bothered to fix it because I thought it spiced up gameplay a bit. Your guess is pretty close to the cause, the way I coded the tile bumping feedback was really jank.

For WASD controls, which buttons do you think would work best for punching and jumping? The ability to remap controls was on the list but I didn't have enough time to get it in.

Thanks for playing!

I played the browser version. Didn't bother with unlocking level 2 since I'm a scrub. Best time I was able to get was about 47 seconds.

Some thoughts while playing:

- Currently the size of loaded ammo (magazines?) feels pretty inconsequential. Since you're able to shoot so long as your have at least 1 bullet, even while reloading, it's possible to always reliably shoot bullets. I think most games have it so you can't shoot while reloading for this reason.  It serves as a cooldown, adds more strategy around when to reload, and rewards higher accuracy since well placed shots => fewer reloads.

- The game lagged a bit when I used the rocket for the first time. Probably a classic Godot shader stutter.

- The music eventually stopped playing for me, as if it wasn't set to loop.

- I think I'd enjoy rocket jumps a bit more if  the timing was a little more lenient. But that could be a skill issue.

- Right now the magnum seems like the undisputed goat of guns simply because its bullets can travel through multiple targets before disappearing. The bounce behaviour is cool and should be expanded more. Maybe you could design puzzles around it or allow for shortcuts with well angled shots.

- Guns (aside from  the magnum) ultimately feel kinda samey. I think more varied bullet patterns could help here, such as some guns having a wider spread but less range, or the opposite, like a sniper rifle that shoots a single fast bullet that travels far but has a smaller hitbox and is harder to use.

Overall I like it. I agree with the other reviews that the movement physics could use a little more tuning to feel more satisfying to use, especially vertical wall jumping. I'll be sure to give it another try next time it's in DD.

I played for about 15mins. Used only the default character.

Some thoughts while playing:

- I do not see the point in ever picking an upgrade that subtracts a stat. Intuitively, it seems safer to always pick the upgrade that only increases your stats. I have also seen at least two sets of upgrades while playing where two of them increased the same stats, but one also subtracted a third stat so there was an obvious choice.

- I am willing to concede this one as a skill issue, but I am a terrible masher and do not enjoy doing it. I played on keyboard, though, so maybe it's not so bad with a controller. Usually when the prompt came up I would switch from mouse to spacebar so I could use two fingers lol.

- I am still not too sure what the endgame is exactly. Is it to rack up as many points as possible? To survive? After a while of bouncing around, the game kind of plays itself. It feels like it needs something to encourage more intentional play, like a wave system where you need to rack up enough BP points in time or you get a game over.

- I think the current letter ranking system might be too basic. For this type of game a more clear "number go up" feedback for scoring might feel more satisfying.

- It would be nice if the gained BP was displayed somewhere on the screen while playing. Right now, the main motivation for multiple playthroughs is to farm BP to unlock the other bros, but there is no way to tell how much I have gotten until after I quit / die. Also how long would it take to farm the 8k BP for the third guy? By that point shouldn't you have accrued enough levels with the other characters to make them more viable?

- Could be just me but I think the fullscreen option is easy to miss. Was originally going to write down how I would appreciate a fullscreen mode and then I accidentally pressed the "windowed" button and it turned on.

- I really like the character designs and aesthetics, especially the title font. 

Had a long day today, and watching the ball guy bounce around and obliterate enemies was surprisingly relaxing. Keep up the good work.

Major changes since the last update:

- The player's running physics have been tightened up (for real this time). Yesdev-tan should not feel nearly as slippery to play as in previous DDs.

- A new hitstop effect was implemented so punching should feel more satisfying. 

- Implemented some short cutscenes. You can skip them by pressing the "Z" key.

- Added a new enemy type, the pilot crab.

- Added items and a new hazard.

- Nodev-tan returns as the boss of arcade of mode and will show up between waves to laugh at you. You can knock her away to get bonus points.

Known Bugs:

- High score between arcade and endless mode are not separate. So if you play endless mode long enough you'll never be able to get a high score in arcade mode.

- Some sprites, most notably the crab enemies will sometimes have a weird graphical flicker. I'm 90% sure this is a sprite snapping issue (thanks Godot).

- No sfx in cutscenes. Not really a bug just didn't have time to add them.

A tutorial is one of the features I also didn't manage to add in time so I highly recommend giving the game page's a quick read to get familiar with the controls.

When I died  I was still able to control and play the game as normal if I ignored the game over menu. Even managed to get an upgrade lol. 

The HUD disappeared for me after a few rounds. I'm not sure what triggered it.

Is it possible to exit the game? I couldn't figure out how so I had alt-tabbed out. Definitely want to implement that asap for a game that's supposed to be played in fullscreen.

There were significant shader stutters when no effects spawned when I first started playing so you definitely want to look into mitigating that somehow. A godot classic.

Some suggestions:

Have the heart hud have a recovery animation (i.e. its red color slowly climbing back up before can use) so players have a feel for how long they have to wait to dash again.

More dynamic splat effects and hit sparks. This is a type of genre that lives and dies on juice. I like the damage indicators you already have. The dash effect could also be a little more interesting I think.

Anyways it's very early but I like these type of simple action games so I'm looking forward to how this progresses. I like your cover art.

For reference I've never played Darkest Dungeon or any of its clones so if a lot of my complaints are established conventions of the genre you can probably safely ignore them. Incoming spam:

Not a fan of the grain effect in battle. The animation is just horizontal flipping. The layering of it could be better I think. It's hard to explain but since the backgrounds have a bit of perspective (so you can tell some parts of the ground are suppose to be "in front" of the player), the way the grain effect is layered makes the scene look more 2D than I think it should. I get why you have it like this, to keep important stuff less obscured but I think you should either have the grain effect only selectively cover things, (i.e. only the trees behind the characters in the forest background) or have it cover everything but with a reduced opacity. Also you should add more distinct frames for the grain animation to make it look more like an old film reel.

 If the last enemy is killed early in the turn, remaining characters still perform queued moves on nothing. Battle should probably end immediately after the last enemy dies.

There's no way to cancel a move selection using "BACK". Since moves execute only after all selections, you should let the player be able to cancel earlier moves to correct misinputs or if they change their mind.

I noticed the knight's spear sometimes obscures the action select menu. You should update your code to ensure ui elements always render on top. In Godot, CanvasLayer is really good for this if you're not using it already.

After selecting a move for one character, the cursor should auto-move to the next character who hasn’t acted yet.

You probably already know this but Rogue and Cleric portraits are the same in the character/details menu.

I think the turn order display is unclear. If its pre-determined by speed, maybe just display the full turn-order at the start of the player's turn so they can strategize around it instead of having it gradually display as each selection is made.

Pressing BACK on the party menu returns to the title screen instead of the battle / progress menu.

Pressing BACK from the equipment menu goes to the character/details menu, not directly to the party menu.

There's a minor ui inconsistency in the character/details menu. The bottom-right label says "Character" but the button that takes you there is called "Details". I feel these should both be named the same thing.

During the last battle I noticed character sprites were being positioned strangely around the place during their attack animations. Like the boss would suddenly appear behind the knight as they do their attack animation.

Anyways that's all I noticed while playing. The sprites and artwork are gorgeous btw. Very nice stuff.

Pretty good. Graphics are great as usual. My only major complaint playing this is that a lot of the hazards aren't clearly signposted. For example I was surprised when the frogs, hedgehogs, and jackhammers did damage to my character because they look fairly harmless at a glance. The frogs especially since they are small and blend in with the background quite a bit. The closest thing to a visual indicator is the white outline, but the birds also have that and those are harmless. I found myself instinctively dodging the birds since I had associated animal = dangerous. Perhaps give hazards a yellow / red outline instead? If you're worried about it looking ugly you could have the outlines change only when they dangerous (i.e. when the frog prepares a jump or when the jackhammer starts chasing you).

One-off notes as I was playing:

- Really cool to finally get to play this game after seeing it in the /v/ threads for so long.

- Music is really catchy. Reminds me of Freedom Planet.

- Graphics look exceptional. Though I'm sure you've gotten enough praise about it already.

- I felt Z and X should be swapped for shooting and jumping but eventually got used to it.

- Background needs to be darkened or something. The pixel art is great but it's so detailed that sometimes it feels overwhelming on the eyes.

- When the boss grabs you with their tongue I feel like there should be a moment of pause once they catch you to sell the impact. Right now it feels like I'll be moving around and then suddenly be pulled away without much transition.

- Why does pressing the space button shake the camera?

- If you run towards the edge of the screen the sprite will jitter. It only happens so long as you're running towards it though so I doubt many players will notice.

- Got visual artifacting on my screen as well. Have 1080p display monitor.

Overall thoughts:

Just from a aesthetics standpoint this game gives insane GMI vibes. I don't have many major complaints so I think you have something good cooking so far. You should try to get this into SAGE expo at some point if you  can. Would definitely be up their alley. I'll keep an eye on this one.

One-off notes as I was playing:
- I'm not really  sure what the objective of the game is. Is it just to survive? After around wave 10 the screen becomes really chaotic and since more items spawn level ups start happening increasingly faster. By that point you can safely let the game play itself since you've become so OP. 

- I'm not sure if the game started lagging halfway through or if the amount of collisions just made the hitstop effect so frequent that it felt like lagging. 

- When you move really fast I think some players might feel motion sickness because of the rapid camera movement. Maybe zoom the camera out a little at higher speeds?

Overall thoughts:
This game is pretty good so far, lots of juice.  I really enjoyed the music. I think it could do pretty well as a mobile game since the controls are pretty simple.

One-off notes as I was playing:

- I think you should be able to use shift to move faster while on the ledge climb state. The part in the test area where you have climb horizontally felt unbearably slow, especially on repeats if you miss the jump.

- I found a bug. If you spam ground pound + jump fast enough Mel will be suspended in the air for a little bit. After that you can't jump at all unless you fall and hit the ground. Give it a try to see what I mean. Seems to mainly happen on upwards slopes.

- With keyboard, ctrl for the ground pound felt a little uncomfortable to use. Maybe it's because I use a laptop.

- Running jump having less height than a regular jump is a little odd imo.

Overall thoughts:

Anyways keep up the good work, you made some nice progress since I last played.

One-off notes as I was playing:

- Updated ui elements + loading screen aesthetics look really nice.

- Advancement of the tutorial fight against Jin is a little unclear. I found myself pressing the prompted buttons, parrying when it told me etc. and it would not advance to the next prompt. I'm not sure how I ended up defeating him. I was spamming jumps and then he suddenly got knocked down and I could finish him off.

- Speaking of spamming jumps, if you spam dodge roll + jump along a wall you can sometimes do a really weird long jump. In Nia's boss room you can basically float along the ceiling if you spam jumps.

- After I died against Jin I respawned behind the invisible wall so I couldn't reach him. Had to quit to title and start a new game to re-fight him.

- In the mountain region leading up the Jin fight you can run up the side of the mountain to get around said invisible wall.

- If the fps displayed in the top right corner is accurate, the game doesn't seem to obey the fps set in the settings unless Vsync is explicitly turned off. I tried setting it to 60 and 30 but it would only use the full 144hz unless I turned vsync off.

- After dying to Louise once her battle music stopped playing.

- I was able to cheese Louise by essentially spamming kick with E to stunlock her. When her poise bar is set to max I would just jump away and the jump hurtbox will knock her down, giving you a free finishing move. Definitely felt like cheating but I'll take it because I know my scrub ass is not beating her legit. The good news is this strat does not work on Nia at all lol.

- Might want to increase the height of that small japanese-style house in the hub world. It's easy for the camera to clip through the roof. Or just make the roof turn transparent when the camera is over it.

Overall thoughts on the gameplay:

Maybe I'm just playing it wrong but this game feels a little too punishing. The bosses do a fuckton of damage while it feels like every attack the player does barely scratches their hp bar. I also don't like how bosses never really give much breathing room. They will throw out an attack and then throw out another a few seconds later regardless of where the player is. It would be nice if they would also move around the arena bit or run up to the player before throwing out their next attack. My only reference for similar arpgs is the Kingdom Hearts series and I appreciated how those games will always let you get at least one full combo in if you strike an enemy during an opening. In those games an enemy's retaliation timing is determined by a "revenge value". Here it seems like I can get in at most 2 hits in consistently before the enemy starts striking back, despite Kimiko's basic combo being apparently 4 hits total.

Parrying, blocking, and dodging feel a lot better than I remember. I also like how recovering from a downed position feels a lot snappier than the last time I played.

I think this game has serious gmi potential with higher fidelity art and animations. Once I got the hang of making stuff I had a lot of fun trying to optimize my steps. I really like the idea of buying more machines and furniture to increase scale.

Only noticeable issues I noticed was if you spam jump fast enough and in a certain way you can double jump / float around. Using the Escape key to open / close the menu on the browser is also kinda finicky with fullscreen mode on.

Maybe you could add some features like text chat, and multiplayer lobbies so we can invite others? I also think the moe moe kyun action could be a little more engaging, perhaps with a timing / rhythm component so it's possible to do bad, okay and great moe spells.

For reference I only used the default palette and played on normal difficulty.

One off notes as I was playing:

- Always thought it was cool how you have classic and modern soundfont options for the music.

- The green projectiles that the bird(?) enemy shoots are hard to see. Things important to the player like projectiles that can hurt them should always have an outline imo. I also think it moves really fucking fast but maybe that's a skill issue.

- It looks like the fountain can only be used once, but if you leave the room and come back its sprite will reset like it's full again.

- After dying, the setting's menu reset the soundfont option to "Modern" even though I had it on classic. The classic music was still playing like normal though.

- The orange flower and butterfly enemy having the same palette tripped me up. When I first encountered the butterfly I ran into it thinking it was some sort of item. I'm still not really sure what the orange flower actually does honestly.

- I don't notice much of a difference in speed from sprinting. From the game's itch page it says I should be moving faster if I hold C after twirling.

- Powercut doesn't seem to be visibly different from the regular attack. Looks like the range is the same as the regular attack so you're better off just  spamming the regular attack instead of wasting time charging.

- Continue seems to be bugged. If I try to continue after a death the screen transitions to a new room but the player does not respawn. Pressing buttons will play sounds as if they are there though, as if they are hidden somewhere.

- There really needs to be some sort of hit feedback. Even the NES zelda would at least knock enemies back when you hit them. Right now enemies will always perform their attacks uninterrupted which can make it really hard to attack and then dodge incoming attacks fast enough.

Thoughts on the overall gameplay:

I think the rooms is this game are far too cramped. I'm not sure what sort of resolution you are working with but you might want to consider shrinking the player sprite (or their hurtbox at the very least) among other things so we have more room to play with. Twirling feels unwieldy because it travels you so far with very little control. Since it's suppose to be this game's dodge roll maybe shorten the distance it makes you travel and allow the player to steer it slightly instead of being set on a straight path. The randomly generated props in the rooms are more of annoyance than anything else cause they have collisions and make the rooms feel even smaller.

It felt like I didn't really have to bother with the other weapons or items. As I mentioned before the regular attack already has decent range and you're able to spam it pretty effectively.

Aesthetics are nice but I personally didn't vibe too much with the gameplay. With a few small changes here and there I could see it being a lot more fun though.

Full disclosure I didn't get that far in the demo.  I somehow softlocked myself after the rat boss fight in the sewers. I exited through the door on the left that you need to use the bubble to get to and then immediately went back because I thought I was about to get lost. The door teleported me back to the rat boss fight room but my character was nowhere to be seen. Only thing I could do was move the camera.

Anyways the pixel art and animations are excellent. I also really dig the music, at the very least I think you have this game's general aesthetics already on lock.

I'm going to echo what blorbdev mentioned about the character controls though. The player can feel sluggish to move around. First thing I noticed during boss fights is how much lag turning around has. I think you should make it possible to immediately attack out of the turning animation so it can be comfortably used for spacing out enemies. I also wish rolling was a bit faster. It feels like it's easy to get locked into rolling in the same direction (i.e. if I try to roll -> turn around -> roll too quickly I just roll twice in the same direction).

The foot step sounds are obnoxiously fast and loud. They don't match the pace of the character's walk animation.

A very minor thing but it should probably be possible to heal at the save spot without saving the game. In a lot of rpgs just interacting with the save spot is usually enough to fully restore health. I also ran into the issue where reloading a save wouldn't put me at full health, almost as if the game is coded to save before restoring the player's health.

Could be the scrub in me talking but I don't think any of bosses I fought telegraph their attacks too well. The ranged attacks in the rat boss especially come out really quickly, like the one where he punches down and the fist comes out from below twice in quick succession.

There's a few instances where I couldn't tell what's part of the background or not. I walked straight into some sewer sludge coming out of a pipe because I thought it was a background detail. 

A very minor nitpick but I personally think it would be nicer if the staircases in picrel were implemented more like ramps so the player can walk directly to the doors without having to jump.

Pretty cool to finally try this game after seeing it posted so often in the threads. I'll be sure give it another try next time you submit.

On Windows I noticed that If you have another application open when the game boots up it's possible for it to trap your mouse into the bounds of the game window. The only way I was able to escape was with Windows + Tab. If you want to reproduce this, have a browser open, double click to start the game and then quickly move your mouse to the center of the screen before it boots up.

Pixel art looks great. The game's pretty damn dark though I would personally up the brightness a little or even add it as an additional graphics settings. 

I like the ambient sfx, a nice calm backing track would suit this game really well.

I can't tell if the pause menu is suppose to look like picrel or if it's some sort of graphical bug.

Gonna echo what others say about the controls, I found bouncing off targets too difficult and require too much precision. Inverting the controls made it a lot more bearable but it's still pretty tough to chain targets. I wonder if having the player slightly gravitate to follow-up targets would make the experience more friendly.  Also it would be cool if you could control the strength of a target bounce based on how far the mouse is from the player within the circle.

I'm personally not a fan of the wall jump implementation. With your control scheme, I think it would feel a lot better if all you had to do was press the jump button to jump off a wall instead of jump + some direction. I think an implementation like Celeste's could work really well here.

A more linear level format, at least for the tutorial, could make getting used to the controls a lot more digestible.

Anyways what you have so far is pretty good.  With a bit more fleshing out I can see myself enjoying this a lot. Keep it up.

I think the concept is a really cool idea with some serious potential but there's some things here though that make me skeptical of the implementation.

For a game with this level of graphical fidelity the hardware requirements seem too high. A game this modern should not have as many loading screens as it does. It will make navigation and exploration feel really tedious and I can see players getting annoyed by it after an extended playthrough. If these issues are engine specific then it might be worth switching over to a different one sooner rather later since I imagine it will only get worse the more complicated it gets.

I'm also not convinced navigation needs to be fully 3d with a free camera. The gameplay (so far) boils down to just walking to objects or people and pressing space to interact. This could very easily be done VN-style with mouse clicks instead. The demographic you're targeting would be more used to that format as well and it could make the game more performant in your engine. Alternatively you could try a fixed top-down perspective for walking around.

Rooms are too spacious and should probably be shrunk down. A lot of the walking feels unnecessary.

Games like these are carried hard by their character writing and designs so I really hope you can nail that aspect. So far, none of the designs really stand out to me but I'll chalk that up to them being placeholder vroid models.

I like a lot of the UI but it's very obvious to see their inspirations (i.e. main textbox looks ripped from Danganronpa 1. The choice menu is very obviously persona 5-esque). Not necessarily a bad thing but might be worth trying to differentiate them more for a more unique visual identity. I also don't like that Bianca's textbox look so different from the other ones but that's probably just a personal nitpick.

Hopefully I'm not coming off too harsh.  I'm really interested to see how this one develops.

Once I got the hang of flying its pretty fun but I feel like it's missing something to spice things up after awhile. I played a bit of endless mode and by wave 6 it didn't feel like much has changed between waves to get a sense of progression. Perhaps you need more enemy types? I know batty targets only people but maybe if there was stuff in the air to target as well gameplay could feel more varied.

The help menu extended off the window in fullscreen for me so some of the information was obscured. You should probably be able to scroll with it if it's going to be that long.

The hitbox / hurtbox feels a little wonky? Sometimes I would fly over the heads of enemies when I feel like I should've hit them. Almost as if batty's hitbox extends only above her model's body and not below it at all. Also it's really hard to dodge the enemy that shoots orange balls at you.

There should probably be some sort of invisible wall at the bounds of the level. For fun I tried seeing how batty far can fly away from it but since the render distance is really small the level disappears from view pretty quickly and it becomes really hard to orient myself without any reference to try and get back.

Voice acting is pretty funny. I enjoyed the overall lightheartedness of the game. Music is comfy.

I overall enjoyed the soundtrack. Having song variants for the day / night cycle was a really nice touch. Though I thought the forest's day music kind of grating. It looped too quickly which made it sound repetitive. Also nice sound design on smaller things like chopping wood and mining.

 Graphics are soulful but the mixels with the fonts and other ui elements were kinda ugly.

I thought the map design was pretty good. I like how you used upgrades to unlock new / paths. Very natural feeling progression. I personally found navigation fairly simple but an in-game map that reveals itself as you explore would be a nice to have when you have to backtrack.

Shop items should have some sort of description somewhere. I got the zanzibart ring but I don't really know what it ended up doing. Increase the roll time?

The game would benefit from some sort of save system for its length.

Dark blorb "secret" boss and ending was pretty kino but I think I might have discovered it too early? There was still a bit of the map that I hadn't explored yet. Things like finding a book for the witch and the brewing system I never ended up interacting with. When you get the end card after that fight the only way to exit is to close the game so if there's stuff you haven't done yet you're out of luck once you reach that point.

I really enjoyed this one. I like how the gameplay organically changes and becomes more NES zeldalike once you get the sword. Makes the journey more satisfying. Good job.

Cute witch designs. 

I'll focus more on pointing out the few bugs I encountered since I can barely last more than 3 seconds before I get wiped lol.

The restart option doesn't seem to function properly. Enemies never respawn. If you go back to the main menu and start the game the level starts as normal though.

I experienced a crash the first time I used the bomb with rosemary. Unfortunately I didn't think to copy the error code and I haven't been able to replicate it since. I do recall the error message mentioning something about a function not existing though.

Pressing Z on the "Back" button in the jukebox menu won't take you back to the main menu. You have to press X twice. The options menu lets you do this so it's a bit of an inconsistency. I'm also not sure what exactly the jukebox does since the music does not change no matter which option you press Z on. If it ends up being a music selection menu maybe have it so you can preview the song?

Pretty solid base you have but I feel like it's missing a gimmick or something to make it stand out from other platformers.

I wish the air dodge was a little faster. It feels a little too much of a momentum killer for me right now. Maybe you could make it so some of your speed could carry over after landing from one? The way it works currently is mostly fine though if you're level design will focus more on precision platforming.

One thing I noticed is that the wall climb feels a little finnicky. I got stuck on this one area (screenshotted below) and it took me awhile to realize it was because I was trying to do a running jump -> wall climb. For whatever reason I get less height when I do this. The only way I was able to climb up the ledge is if walk / run up to it first, and then jump on it. If anything I'd expect a running jump to give me even more height. Something to consider maybe.

Anyways I like what you have so far. Nice work.

Pretty good. The graphics and game-feel feel pretty polished already. At this point it just needs more content and I think you got something good here.

Crouch jump still has no real use currently. Can't chain it with the dive move either so it's not really possible to do any fun movement shenanigans like some of the 3d mario games.

The vending machine ui should probably have a short description somewhere for the items.

Battle area looks gorgeous. I really like the graphics for this game. Character designs are cute.

Didn't get any where close to beating Louise but it I still enjoyed slowly learning her movement patterns. Spark effect for well timed blocks are really satisfying. It was cool to figure out the kunais can knock her out of her power-up animation.

Dashing feels kinda useless. Doesn't cover enough distance to avoid a lot of her attacks. I sometimes found myself jumping away instead because it covers slightly more distance quickly.

I feel like the camera should be either zoomed out a little or position slightly higher above the player and angled downwards. Sometimes Louise can be obscured by the player character because of how level the camera is. You will probably need to implement some sort of dynamic zoom based on how close you are to enemies too.

Getting knocked down does not feel good. It feels like there's a lag between it receiving my inputs and the character getting up. Doesn't help that the input buffer window seems to be large too so sometimes I would get up and immediately do a basic attack because LMB was pressed once while I was down.

I like what you have so far. I'll definitely check it out next time you submit.

Wow thanks so much for the footage. 

The whole not being able to pick up a stunned crab thing seems to be some sort of collision detection bug. I thought I noticed it while play testing but I wasn't too sure so thanks for pointing it out. Extending the stun of an already knocked down crab sounds like a good idea. I'll add it to the todolist.

I find it amusing that lombard is the easier of the two to use now with his homing shots vs having to manually aim with hildengarde.

I got as far as stage 4 this time before I got hard filtered by the pentragram enemy thing that shoots red bullets towards you. It ended up camping at the bottom right corner of the screen and shot horizontally towards me. Not sure what I could've done there.  Also felt like there was a drop in attack pattern quality between stage 2 and 3.

I had a lot of fun though. As a complete casual to the genre I thought easy mode was pretty fair and I especially appreciate the addition of lives + continues tyvm. The music is nice and I thought the story was charming.