itch.io

This is cut off on both the left and right sides when played on a 16:10 aspect ratio display with a 1920 by 1200 resolution. I can’t see everything even though I have more vertical space on my display than needed.

Like I mentioned in the other thread, I played this on Windows and Linux today.  I got through the tutorial on both platforms and finished the forest mission on Linux (both bosses).  Here's some additional subjective feedback from my play session.

1. The camera is too zoomed in.  Often on bosses, I can't even see where they are, especially if they're below or above me.  I'd like to be able to zoom out to at least double the current camera distance, if not to an unlimited distance with a logarithmic zoom algorithm, to see where I am in the map.
2. The character is not always centered on the screen, which is problematic when using the mouse to aim, since the aim changes depending on where the character is.  The character being locked to the center would be better in my opinion.  It would guarantee correct aiming always.  It would also improve natural motion dodging since the player could be sure where the character is on their screen more intuitively without keeping track constantly.
3. The dodge ability does not follow the cursor, so it's hard to dodge exactly where I'd like to.  It can only dodge in 8 fixed directions, at least with a keyboard or D-pad.  Also, it can't go precisely to the cursor, but always goes a fixed distance which can sometimes be into bullets when there was clear space that was a bit closer but still through some bullets.  I would prefer if the dodge ability went directly to the cursor instead, personally.  I could control it a lot more easily that way.
4. The dodge cooldown is not among the other cooldowns, so it's in a position where it's not easy to see in my peripheral vision when I'm checking cooldowns.  In my opinion, it would be better if it was another icon beside the other cooldown abilities instead of having a unique cooldown bar in a separate location.
5. The cooldown abilities can't be used while holding the fire button.  Therefore, sometimes even if I go to release the fire button and use a cooldown ability quickly, the fire button is still registered and the cooldown ability does not get used, leading to a bit of confusion mid-combat.  I would personally prefer that using a cooldown ability simply interrupted the basic fire.
6. There's a hidden cooldown after switching characters where it can't be done.  This messed me up a couple times when I was relying on the expectation that I could tab through 2 characters instantly to get to the character I wanted.  I don't see a good reason for this cooldown and would personally prefer if there was no cooldown on this, so the player could tab through 2 characters to get to the one they want to play quickly.
7. The very first forest boss was extremely hard for me.  I consider myself a pretty decent gamer and I was close to giving up for the day because I had spent at least 20 attempts and more than an hour trying to clear it.  It was harder for me than even the necromancer boss that you're allowed to die to and still proceed.  That difficulty level is okay for a later boss in my opinion, but the very first boss feeling like such a wall could turn many players off the game.  I personally love the game anyway and have enjoyed seeing your development over the years, so it didn't turn me off the game, but this may be something to consider.
8. When a character which I'm not currently controlling is injured but the character I am currently controlling is not injured and I grab a heart, the heart is consumed but does not do anything.  I would personally prefer if the heart healed another character in that case instead of being consumed without doing anything.
9. I couldn't find a way to manually save my progress after getting something awesome as a workaround for a potential freeze or crash after I'd experienced 2 of them.  Obviously the freezing and crashing shouldn't happen, but I realize those rare issues are extremely hard to pinpoint and fix, so I would personally be happy with just a way to save my progress manually any time, even if it just means saving my equipment and talent points, and not progress within the map.  Maybe an auto-save upon receiving any loot, equipping any gear, gaining a level, and adding a talent point would be good.  I noticed that not all my progress was lost on a crash, so I have seen that there are auto-saves, so maybe adding those auto-save points would help.

I realize all of these points are negative.  The reason I'm bringing up these points, though, is because I love the game and am excited about its development.  Overall, it's an awesome project and I keep coming back to it and having another super action-packed fun play session.  Thanks for that.

I beat the first forest boss (extremely hard for me, by the way; took like 20 attempts) and then entered the dark forest.  While I was shooting flames with the fire mage (left mouse button by default), the game suddenly froze.  The music continued playing and I could hear some sound effects continue, like the flames, but then eventually I heard a sound effect like the right-mouse-button fireball hitting something, and then no more sound effects.  The music continued playing, but the game stayed frozen.  By "frozen", I mean there were no new video frames, and the last frame when it froze was on-screen.  My cursor wasn't present after alt-tabbing, so I had to alt-tab back in and kill the process with my handy-dandy xkill keybind, then kill the other two Marmoreal-related processes from System Monitor.

After doing that and resuming my forest mission, I learned that my characters were back to level 3 instead of 4 and the various level 5 items I'd looted were not present.  I was in the dark forest, at least, but had lost some progress.

This was on the Linux build.  Maybe it's a Unity bug.  Thanks for providing a Linux build, and my opinion is that this doesn't mean it's not worth providing a Linux build.  It probably just means that Unity has some sort of issue that can cause a freeze.  Also, since I haven't tested as much on the Windows build, it's possible that this freeze issue also affects the Windows build.  I wonder if my save file is interchangeable between platforms.

Edit: I continued and beat the dark forest boss on the first try because I'd learned how to handle bosses a bit better and Hanako is a bit easier.

Edit 2: I checked the overworld node map again and the forest mission still says "Mission in progress", even though I saw the final cutscene with the 2 bosses hugging each other etc.  This looks like a bug to me, as if it didn't count my success.  I don't see any further nodes accessible that are in the story, if any exist.  Maybe there's a bug with resuming the mission and then completing it or something like that.

I played through the tutorial twice: first with the Windows build and next with the Linux build.  I saw some issues, and I have miscellaneous feedback not related to platform.

In Vania's tutorial segment (the red sword fighter), I saw 2 issues:

1. After going up the stairs to where a treasure chest room is, the character blipped to the top of the castle, so I was standing on the roof.  I could walk through walls there to go the right way, but it was just really weird.  I saw this twice: both in the Windows build and in the Linux build.  So, I think this issue is consistent.
2. In my second tutorial playthrough, when I was in the room with the treasure chest, I pressed space first instead of F and then pressed F and the game froze shortly, so I thought it'd paused, so I pressed escape, and the game closed (crashed, I presume).  I started the game again and the "continue" button brought me to the beginning of Vania's tutorial segment, which was nice.  I got back to the same room and tried to reproduce the crash by pressing space, F, and escape, and it didn't happen the next time.  So, I'm not really sure what exactly triggered the crash.  I doubt it was Linux-specific, but we can't know for sure without reproducing it more than once.

Aside from the second issue here, the Linux and Windows build performed exactly the same for me!  The sound worked perfectly in Linux as well: both music and sound effects.

The Z-fighting issue I'd previously reported with OpenGL was gone.  I noticed via MangoHud that you have switched to Vulkan, and that's working perfectly!  So, thanks for this and thanks for the Linux build!  This will work great for Linux users on itch.io and on Steam if/when you eventually put it there!

The keybinding system seemed to be gone, so I had to switch my keyboard layout to qwerty and use the default binds to play, on both Windows and Linux, which was a bummer.  The game's input is not layout-agnostic, so WASD are all over the place on Dvorak instead of in the same place.  Also, I personally prefer to use ESDF for movement since I've used that in WoW since 2007 and tend to rebind my movement to that in every game I play.  It has the advantage of having a little bump on the "F" key on my keyboard, so it's a bit easier to find without looking, and games that have lots of binds let me use my pinky finger for extra binds with that layout.  If you wanted to implement layout-agnostic input, it would require using input scancodes instead of keycodes, as scancodes are layout-agnostic and keycodes are not.

Edit: I've found the keybinding menu, and even binding the mouse thumb button works!  Thanks!  I could bind my movement to ESDF as well.

I noticed the necromancer started by raising some skeletons.  Nice touch!  She still seems to use mostly non-necromancy things.  It's fine.  It's your game. My feedback is just that most "necromancers" deal exclusively in raising and manipulating cadavers and have no other powers of their own.  That being said, her abilities are powerful and just enough to have an extreme challenge while still being able to win.

Even though it was insanely hard, I killed the necromancer by dodging literally everything she had and using the fire mage who does awesome damage.  However, I was disappointed that in the end, it just showed the same cutscene sequence except with my flames shooting out still, as if my character was still there even though it wasn't (minor bug).  I was excited to see what would happen if I killed the necromancer instead of dying, but the result was the same.  Implementing something awesome that happens if you do that would be really cool.  I felt like I'd mastered the pattern when I was able to beat her.  Getting back to her is not trivial too and most of her abilities one-shot, so I felt super excited that I could do it without too many attempts.  Here's a screenshot of the same sequence after I beat the necromancer, with the effect glitch.  It shows my characters as if they lost when they actually didn't.  (Edit: I can't paste the screenshot because of an inexplicable itch.io error that says "missing token")

OK, here's the folder from \AppData\LocalLow\ :

https://lex.clansfx.co.uk/requested/2021-09-08-bujumarmorealappdata.zip

Thanks for checking it out.

The Linux build is missing.  Is it just because of that person who posted downloaded the wrong build?  If so, that's too bad.  Most people know what OS they are running and download the correct build.

I installed the latest version and clicking my save files to continue does nothing.  Would you like my save files to figure it out, or is there a log I can send?  Thanks.

This is no reason to avoid building for Linux.  Thanks for providing a Linux version!

Thank you for providing a native Linux version!  That's so awesome!

I tried the Linux version.  I was able to get past where I previously was stuck, where I couldn't turn the crank with Fiera.

I found these issues:

1. I could not bind my mouse thumb buttons in the binding system that appears before the game starts.  In the Windows version (including when run in wine), I could bind them if I hover over the small window that appears when binding, but in the Linux version, that didn't seem to work.
2. There was no sound at all: no music nor sound effects.
   1. In case it matters, for audio in Linux, I am using PulseAudio currently, and the whole Linux community is moving to PipeWire probably within the next few months or a couple years on slower distributions, so I will also be switching to PipeWire soon probably.
   2. I could hear sound in the Windows version running in wine on the same system.
3. The "necromancer" fired arcane stuff and didn't raise dead like a necromancer would.  Are you sure she's not a dark mage or a warlock instead of a necromancer?  A necromancer tends to deal in animating corpses.
4. I couldn't find where to disable v-sync, since Nvidia's compositing pipeline in Linux relies on v-sync being disabled for lowest latency.  I have an Nvidia card.  It works well for gaming when I can disable v-sync and set the frame rate to double my display's native refresh rate.
5. Many character models and walls exhibited z-fighting.
   1. I'm not sure what graphics option is set in Unity, but I suggest trying Vulkan for Linux instead of OpenGL.
   2. Here's a screenshot exhibiting the z-fighting during 1 particular scene, though there were several that exhibited the same issue:

I tried to load my save to see if the elevator cutscene still crashed the game in wine, and it started me with the wrong character (Elsa instead of Fiera), and I accidentally died because it's been a while since I last played and I got swarmed by the enemies while forgetting some of the controls.  After dying, now I can't rotate the crankshaft that makes the elevator go, so I'm totally stuck before the elevator part.  I've tried completely restarting the game and respawning manually.  Nothing re-enabled the elevator crankshaft, so now my save file seems to be in a stuck state.

Also, I found I couldn't close the game any way except alt-f4.  There doesn't seem to be a menu entry to quit the game.

Woah, nice!  Linux support would be awesome, considering I switched recently and I'm loving Linux (though getting through the configuration process until I felt comfortable took 2 months).

That being said, there was a huge DXVK release today (https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/releases), which has "Fixed a major D3D9 regression that would cause crashes in many games." in its change log, so I'll be trying that again when the new version is made available for my distro!

Wow, it's come so far!  I love this so much as usual.

I've recently switched from Windows to Linux.  Using wine with dxvk, I played until the cutscene with Fiera passing Arcana, Elsa, and Frank on the elevators, and then the game crashed.  Wine gave me a popup saying that it could be wine's fault, but I'm not sure.  Anyway, I saved the crash log.  Here it is: https://lex.clansfx.co.uk/dump/cbb3d49ebed246f37f96a35c1f9cd6c2/clip.txt

Everything worked extremely well in wine except the input latency, which seemed to be due to vsync.  Windows handles vsync much better than wine in Linux.  With wine in Linux, I have to be able to disable vsync and set a frame rate limit (which I usually set to 120 fps) to actually have vsync with low input latency in wine games.  If the game doesn't provide that, it's a bit laggy.  This isn't Marmoreal's fault, except that there's no native Linux build to play.

Thanks for the continued development!  It's sooo fun whenever I come back to Marmoreal.  I loved all the different characters' abilities, voices, and the various cutscenes.

1. I think there might be a bug there then (aside from the lack of a tutorial), because I tried everything I could think of to use the Ribbon.  I didn't see an inventory of any kind, except the character menu, and I clicked all the "+" buttons there, assuming they were gear slots or something like that, but none of them showed an inventory or the ribbon.
2. Oh, I think I miswrote in my original post here.  I think this was after the second crystal, or whichever one introduced the RMB alternative attack, which had the entrance to the next section in the bottom-right.  I don't think a cutscene is necessary, but maybe just a different zoom level instead, and/or better handling of aspect ratios (so taller ones like 16:10 show more instead of less).

I'm so excited to play more!  It's easy to be a fan of such a well-made game.  The technology you've already employed is excellent.  For example, the way the character can be seen through walls is just perfect.  The charge-up mechanics and cooldowns are awesome too.

1. The map doesn't always appear when viewing the character menu.  I wasn't able to see it for most of my playthrough just now, and only discovered it after running around a lot more and trying random things.  I'm not sure exactly what I did to make it appear.
2. The "X" button in the top-right corner of the character menu doesn't close the menu.  It looks like it's intended to.
3. I couldn't progress after opening the chest with Elsa.  I'm not sure if there was a bug there.  I explored every nook and cranny for 20 minutes after and couldn't figure out how to progress.  I also tried everything I could think of to interact with the ribbon that the chest gave me, but couldn't find any way to do so.

Before playing version 0.3.7 today (which is what this post is about), I last played Marmoreal with version 0.2.2 in 2017 and loved it.  You may remember me from the YouTube video I made of trying to last as long as I could and the discussions we had in Steam chats.  It's clear the game's come an incredibly long way since then!  I ABSOLUTELY LOVE the progress you've made.  The potential for this to be my favorite game eventually is incredibly high.  Overall, the potential for this game and its engine for mass appeal is amazing too.  It could go in many directions and/or have many different game modes, including MMORPG, Diablo/PoE-like, PvP arena, arcade shooter like Assault Android Cactus, adventure like Zelda ALBW, a mishmash of all that, and more.  My personal favorite would include many game modes.  That being said, in its current state, I did find issues that you might be interested to know.  Here's my list.

1. In the dark castle area with Elsa, I'm not sure where to go.  I feel like I've explored everywhere and there's nothing more to do.  There's already a lot, so it makes sense if you haven't added more than this.  I just wasn't sure if what I've explored so far is all there is in the game so far, since there was no definitive ending or explanation.  I'd played less than 10 minutes total so far when I figured I was stuck or missing something.  A map and minimap with fog of war (though obviously tricky to implement for several reasons) would go a long way in resolving this for future players, in case I did actually miss something.  I see another poster having posted something about Frank, but I haven't been able to see Frank yet.  I'm guessing that either I missed something or there was a bug preventing the game from progressing for me.  I did spend a good 10 minutes afterward exploring around every nook and cranny I could find though.  Edit: I played a bit more and discovered that a map can appear if you press Esc in a particular state.  It wasn't appearing for me for whatever reason.  It appeared when the options menu simultaneously appeared with the Esc key.  There's some sort of bug there.  Also, this map didn't show me anything new, so I wasn't able to progress further anyway.  Maybe the treasure chest event didn't do something it was supposed to do.  Also, I can't move my character or play while the map is up, which is unfortunate.  I'd love to be able to run around while looking at my map like in Path Of Exile or WoW.  I have plenty of screen space for it.
2. In the tutorial, the visibility of the entrance to the next area after destroying the first crystal was difficult.  I didn't notice it in the bottom-right after destroying the crystal there (with a 16:10 aspect ratio) and ended up wandering around for 2-3 minutes wondering where to go.  I eventually found it.  This is similar to my first issue in that a minimap/map system with fog of war (or just darkened areas that haven't been explored yet instead of hiding those areas completely) would help tremendously.
3. Elsa's third ability stays around forever (maybe until an enemy touches it?).  I'm not sure if this is intended.  It could last for double the base cooldown's duration instead if you want it to last a long time and be able to place multiple while not being able to set up a huge trap room to kite all the monsters into (for later level design space).
4. I didn't find a way to disable the screen shake.  The screen shake bothers me a lot and I don't want it.
5. The cooldowns don't have visible cooldown counters on them, like WoW's OmniCC addon.  Those would go a long way toward making me understand how often I can use a cooldown ability, since getting a feel for it was difficult while I wasn't able to look at the icons often in the heat of battle.
6. An in-game keybind system similar to the Neuron addon in WoW would be amazing.  This isn't really an issue so much as a convenience improvement which would be good to have early on, for the rest of the game's/engine's life.  Being able to mouseover-bind abilities, items, movement, and maybe even menu binds would be incredibly awesome.
7. Being able to zoom the camera out more would be a nice touch.  This would improve the viability of the game as an MMORPG eventually, and IMO wouldn't hurt the potential fun or difficulty of the game, as it could increase design space to add more epic encounters of all kinds.  See how Assault Android Cactus zooms the camera WAAAAY out on many levels and is still super fun (though I wish that game had manual zoom and a more continuous world as well).
8. I didn't figure out a way to save and/or quit the game from the menus.  In the end, I pressed Alt+F4 which closed the game without saving.  Some way to close the game naturally would be a small improvement, and a clear way to save progress (that clarifies what progress would be saved) would be super cool.

Overall, the innovation with this game is incredible and I personally am excited not just about the current progress, but the extremely huge potential this game has.

Edit: By the way, I'd be happy to participate in some sort of issue tracker if you ever feel inspired to do some rapid development with QA testing, using maybe Trello, Asana, github, gitlab, Mantis, or whatever you'd want.

Can you post the demo here?

I tried to start the game and I could see the process open in Process Explorer, but no game window ever appeared.  I had to manually kill the process.  I'm running Windows 7 SP1 64-bit with an Nvidia GTX 960 GPU and an Intel Core i7-6700K.

This is feeling pretty good so far, but I found some minor issues.  The acceleration/deceleration should be disabled if you want it to feel like Aria Of Sorrow / Dawn Of Sorrow / Portrait Of Ruin, which are all great games that seem to inspire this one.  They have 0 acceleration/deceleration when walking, so you have total control over the movement of the character.

There's a similar issue with jumping.  In those games listed above, jumps' vertical momentum stops immediately when the jump button is released, which allows for very precise attack points in mid-air.  In Forsaken Castle, jumping floats beyond the target point.

Another issue is that the back of the whip doesn't deal damage.  In Portrait Of Ruin, the back of the whip deals damage.  This can be helpful for quickly attacking something approaching from up and behind.

Switching directions in the air doesn't work quite the same way, but this might be due to the horizontal acceleration/deceleration.

Played through it; very fun game!  As a fan of Aria Of Sorrow, Dawn Of Sorrow, and Portrait Of Ruin, I'm excited to see where this game goes.  I would buy it with the right feeling of character control.

I tried using Levitate and Ethereal form, but neither worked.  I tried being in several positions around the area and it seemed to fill the entire area, so I really have no idea how it's done.

I beat the game, including the dude summoning the maelstrom and all the quests in the world.  It took me about 15 hours.  It was really fun.  Thanks for making it!

Baal was impossible for me.  It did its inferno for 10000 damage and even ethereal form didn't prevent the damage.  I'm not sure what to do there.  Everything else was beaten though, so that rocked, at least.

Ah, I figured it out.  There's a trainer in the top-right area in the first town.  Somehow, I'd missed that building in my exploration.

I just started playing the game and beat up a bunch of orcs.  I leveled to level 2, which gave me 5 attribute points and 2 skill points.  Now, I see in the character menu, "Unspent Skill Points: 2" and "Unspent Attribute Points: 5", but there is no obvious way to spend these.  I don't see any keyboard keys in square brackets on this menu.  How do I spend these points?

I made a video of getting to wave 18!

See the video description for some feedback.

Very fun! I got to wave 15 before dying.

What do the stats mean? I just stacked only "Power" except for 3 points in "Ferocity".

Edit: I got to wave 18. I'm uploading a video of it right now!

I just beat seemingly the last puzzle in the game, as it looped to the start screen after. It is a fun little puzzle game! I enjoyed it, and it had the perfect length for me.

This comment has almost all the feedback I had in mind. The only thing I would add is that I wish there was some non-random set of choices within each run, like how in Dungeons Of Dredmor, you can build your character based on a set of skill trees, and consistently make the kind of character you like to play. Even though it doesn't have persistent progression, it is endlessly replayable because of the custom builds.

Persistent progression would widen the audience, as well. Currently, the audience for this game is mostly limited to hardcore players, as it is very tough to get reasonably far.

Is it possible to do better than 8th place? It seems like the computers have better ships that accelerate more than doubly as fast and have much higher top speed than the player's ship. They ram into walls and still just accelerate out of it like it was nothing. Meanwhile, I can turn almost 180 degrees to avoid ramming the walls because of the space physics, but still get wrecked by the bots smashing into the walls and accelerating away at overpowered rates.

Nice 3D engine, by the way. It's great to see such stuff being made in D.

Edit: Oh, there's a "boost" key that must be held. I held it at all times and got 3rd place.

Thanks for the explanations! Yes, Doggo speeding up when there are no enemies is great! It's nice to get a feel for how many enemies are moving around by seeing the speed, and to know that no time is being needlessly wasted.

Regarding handling inventory items, please make Doggo just drink the potions like before. The good point of the previous version was that there was no interaction other than choosing a stat build strategy on the fly. Equippable items should not have negative stats, also, and Doggo should just equip any with higher total stat points, with luck determining their spawn rate, which can be much lower than currently at the lowest luck. With these changes, inventory management will not be manual, and it will feel as nice and relaxed as before.

By the way, in the previous version, when I got to luck values above about 45, the game started lagging extremely on every new floor generated, until at 50 luck, I let it run overnight and it had remained hung, I'm assuming forever.

Hi! The previous version of Doguelike had doge moving at a normal pace, but this one moves slowly. I want to get back to level 144 like I had done in the previous version, but the slow moving makes it difficult to bear. Can you please add an option for doge to move like it did in the previous version? That is, the one in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cfgno6ilMZc

Also, please no full inventory! I liked the previous version more, as it never paused.