itch.io

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.

Thanks for trying out my game again.

It's possible things got slower. I did a massive player controller refactor since the last demo so the physics aren't 1:1 as before. I also updated the punch animations so the delay might be from the extra frames I drew. I'll be sure to make combat snappier in the next update.

Hey, thanks so much for the feedback! The video footage is especially helpful.

I'll be sure to keep making tweaks to the physics. Player floatiness has been an issue since the first build it seems.

One thing I've noticed is that some players seem to not figure out that they can pick up and throw enemies after knocking them over. So they end up playing the game only by punching enemies which is a far less fun experience imo. That's on me though, I'll need to make that mechanic more clear by the next demo, probably with a short tutorial. I will also try to make punching more responsive so if players don't use the throwing mechanic they can still have fun.

The drawing pin icon doesn't seem to do anything. Is it suppose to lock the window position in place?

I think I encountered a minor bug where purchasing the "lofi" song wouldn't register as bought. The song would play but the lock icon didn't disappear. Resetting the game fixed it.

Her boobs move too much like jello. It's very easy to have them clip through the girl's body if you wiggle the mouse fast enough.

I'm not really sure how progression works currently. Is it just based on idle time? Maybe a progression system based more on interactivity would be better? Seems like a good way to encourage user engagement.

 She needs to be way more emotive. One of the first things I noticed is she does not even blink lol.

I don't think there's much point in having so many music options. The user will probably opt to play music from their browser or with a dedicated music player app.

Since the idea is for her to be a desktop waifu it would be cool if you could play games with her (within the app of course). I don't know if the backgrounds are 3D but it would also be cool if you could maybe enter fullscreen mode and look around /interact with the world she's in. Perhaps she could also do other basic assistant stuff like set alarms and reminders.

I agree with the other reviewers that you're better off not including much lewd stuff if you aren't going to commit to R18 content. Modders will probably add it in for you anyways.

Hopefully I don't come off as overly critical. It's very clearly an early build but I think it has potential. Especially if you add decent mod support.

Notable changes since the last DD:

- Added 4 new enemy types.

- Tweaked the physics, the player controller should feel a little more responsive.

- Reworked the enemy spawning system. Enemies now appear in waves with improved progression.

-  I normalized the audio so it shouldn't destroy your ears this time. Sound effects don't layer as much so you don't have to worry about the game being super loud when there's a lot of enemies on screen.

I didn't get nearly as much as I wanted to get done in time for DD60 but the core gameloop should be mostly playable. Some new content like an intro cutscene and an "arcade mode" had to be cut :(

There's no in-game tutorial so please be sure to give the game page a quick read  before playing so you can see the controls. Let me know if you encounter any bugs.

I really like Fels portrait and room art. Did you do them?

The Environment models are nice though I think the lighting needs to be tweaked. In the apartment specifically there was some heavy artifacting. The outlines for a few objects are a little too thick too. Pic below should show you what I mean about the artifacting. Notice how the shadows by the bed appear fuzzy?

Doing "Talk" -> "Need Anything ?" in the apartment repeats the same line about 3 times but I think this has to do with all dialogue responses playing all at once. Some of the dialogue has grammar errors so I highly recommend getting another pair of eyes to proofread it during development.

Has a lot of potential if the story is interesting. Definitely a game I'll be keeping an eye on.

Very cute game you have so far. UI and art have high GMI energy. I really like the loading animation between levels.

Doing smaller turns while sprinting is pretty awkward. I find myself entering the skid animation at times when I think I shouldn't.  If I had to guess the player controller for aggy will force her to enter a skid and stop if it detects the back button input while running forward. Which is fine, but this also happens when I do a back diagonal input (i.e. back + right).  In Mario 64, the player controller does something similar but it's very snappy and will send you back into the sprint state almost immediately. With aggy she goes from a skid -> a few seconds of walking -> running and it just feels so much less responsive.

Seems like a missed opportunity to not be able wall jump from a crouching jump to gain a little extra height.

Not sure if it counts as a bug but outfit changes aren't saved between level restarts. aggy will always start in her default outfit.

Never played the monkey ball games so I won't be able to make any comparisons or notice any shared quirks.

There's a noise that plays when the player seems to take a few steps? It's pretty annoying honestly and should be reserved to maybe only when you bump into things.

The fixed 90 degree camera turns took some getting used to. I don't think it's all that bad as long as the level design relies on sharp 90 degree turns for its geometry. Going up the spiral staircase in the tutorial level was pretty painful with it though.

The game is pretty hard and I think it has more to do with dealing with the enemies than the level design. I actually think this game would benefit a lot more from having next to no enemies. The precision platforming is already really difficult on its own and interactions with the enemies feel a lot less deterministic than they should be (I swear the direction and strength they bump you away feels random).

Enemies can die when they're knocked only a tiny bit off the ledge but this only seems to happen if you're able to bump them at a high enough velocity. It feels odd.

The push back mechanic isn't very well explained. I ran into the issue where I died on the tutorial stage and was never able to use it again. Maybe have a ui element that shows you when you can use it? I also don't think it feels as useful as it should be. The few times I was able to use it the enemies were barely pushed away.

The music and aesthetic you have so far have high GMI energy. I find it really amusing you went from the more basic NOVABREAKER to this. Once a few kinks are sorted it out I could see this being a game I'd purchase. Keep it up.

The mixels is most noticeable with the inventory interface. It looks like the weapon and armor sprites are scaled up there at a much larger resolution than everything else and it clashes pretty hard. Redrawing larger assets specifically for the inventory would be a waste of dev resources so perhaps you could try reworking the ui a bit so you can just use the weapon / armor sprites at native res.

I think corekeeper and minecraft's uis are good references to look at for something like this. Pic related.

On startup, the window opens at a weird position and not centered. I have to drag it a bit to the left to access the minimize / maximize buttons. My monitor is 1980x1080

Character sprite seems to jitter when moving. The parallax  background also seems to bug out a little while moving too. Probably has something to do with how you snap your sprite positions.

Combat is really OP. There's nothing stopping me from just spamming sword strikes like a mad man and obliterating all the mushroom enemies I see.

Mining is not as responsive as I feel it should. I popped open Core Keeper and Terraria to compare quickly. In Terraria it seems mining activates within a small radius around the player. While in Corekeeper, it doesn't matter where the mouse is on the screen is, so long as there's a wall block in the path between the player and mouse and the LMB is pressed, the player will try to mine in that direction. In your game it feels like if you're not precisely touching the block you want to mine then your character won't mine at all. I think it would benefit more if you borrowed more from either of the two examples and had the character mine in the direction of the mouse if the LMB is pressed regardless if it's hovering over a specific block or not.

Considering this game is enginedev (I think?) it's pretty impressive what you have so far. Didn't get the chance to try out multiplayer but I've seen your progress posts in the threads showing it off. Really cool what you have so far.

A lot of potential here. I remember seeing you post the excellent meteor animation in a thread. Really digging the pixel art and animations.

Pretty much all my feedback will be from playing with the melee girl since the wizard seemed a lot more wip.

Hitstun feedback from the basic attack is already pretty satisfying. Something about the timing of performing follow-up attacks with LMB seems a little off though

I think the mouse controlled camera is a little too sensitive. It's easy to accidentally move it around too much making combat a little nauseous to watch. I also don't think there's any reason for it to travel as far as it currently can from the player position since the character's attack range is so small

RMB attack is pretty OP compared to LMB attack. For the wizard, MMB attack would not work for me because the browser would eat the input for scrolling.

It's possible to get stuck onto the blue (water?) tiles in the first room above the spawn area. To reproduce this just move the player as far as you can towards it until they're touching it and try moving left and right.

There probably should be another visual indication on the player when they are out of stamina / energy to do attacks. Maybe make them flash red or something? I agree with Hap.dev that glancing to the left to track it can take a little too much attention away from what's going on the screen.

More of a nitpick but the mixing of pixel art assets at different resolutions is bothering me. I'm also noticing a mix of pixel art fonts and smooth anti-aliased fonts. Sticking to one resolution + only pixel fonts would help a lot with visual coherency and more appeal.

Hope you found my feedback helpful. Looking forward to see more from this project. Keep it up.

Was curious to see how much has changed since the last demo. I really appreciate having easier difficulty options for scrubs like me. Would appreciate a life system on top of that though. Nothing kills my mood more than getting hit by a stray laser during the first boss and having to restart the entire level. Speaking of which, that laser needs to be telegraphed better for how fast it moves. 

I also still don't get why you have to move the arrow keys to have Hilly start shooting. Her starting position should just be her aiming upwards. As far as I can tell she'll never otherwise enter the non-aiming state so it's just a pointless input.

For some more minor nitpicks:

• It doesn't seem to be possible to go back to the main menu or stage select from the game over screen. 
• Hildengarde's arrows are too dark and blend in a little too much with the background
• Lombard's sword is still pretty unwieldy to use with its awkward angles. You are also still pretty much defenseless to bullets heading your direction from a more horizontal angle.
• Story could use a little more substance but I'll chalk that up to personal taste. If the dialogue doesn't really add much to the experience then I'd rather not have it at all. Appreciate that it's skippable.

Hope you find the feedback helpful. Looking forward to further updates.

Yea I got filtered pretty hard by this. I have no idea how the puzzles work and was only able to start the game by bruteforcing. I wanted to start over to figure it out but it doesn't seem possible to delete your save data.

Needing to press enter at the main menu to start the game is weird.

Needing to hold ESC to use the settings menu is weird. Why not just have it as a toggle.

I'm not a fan of the tank controls. If you need finer camera control you could try tying it to right click + mouse move perhaps. I think this game could work really well with point and click movement.

At the start of the game when the camera is in a bird's eye view, it's pretty hard to tell what direction the player is moving because of their hat.

I really like the aesthetics you have here. Unfortunately I was too much of a brainlet to figure out how to play.

Writing another review since the recent update fixed the framerate issue

I think it's weird that you have to angle Hildegarde's bow at the start before you can start shooting. It'd make more sense to have her pointing straight up from the very beginning.

I can respect the difficulty but having only one life is pretty brutal.  A bomb mechanic where you can clear the screen in a pinch would also be nice. Not sure if this is what the charge mechanic does. I always die before I'm able to figure it out.

It's possible to be in a situation where a bullets is moving horizontally towards the player below Lombard's range. As far as I can tell there's no way to way to survive this. I made a shitty drawing to show roughly what I'm talking about.

I think Lombard's sword could use a buff in general. The sword collider is really tight and awkward to control especially when moving backwards.

After I got used to angling Hildegarde's bow the game overall is not too bad. But I found it too difficult to get very far. Looking forward to further updates.

Is the physics framerate uncapped? I couldn't really play it cause the game moved really fucking fast for me and I'd die instantly lol

It's not possible to go back to the main menu from the game over screen

Managed to complete the demo. Combat is really solid. I like the lightheartedness of the story.

Pressing "OK" while the text in a dialogue is being typed out skips the entire message instead of just skip typing like most games. Can get annoying to wait for the typing animation to finish if you're a fast reader.

The player's sprite jitters when moving. This is most noticeable in the overworld.

I think there's a minor text bug If you open a chest when your inventory is full. You get the message: "String not found:  Not enough inventory space"

Seems like a missed opportunity not to have Cyan heal you before entering the first dungeon. I got almost softlocked on my first attempt cause I entered the dungeon with half health.

I'm a massive fan of the older Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games so I'll be sure to keep my eye on this one. Keep it up.