itch.io

beautiful

You might intend for it to be an orblike, but, to me, this instead has a lot more appeal as a more or less feature-complete vertical slice for a Ragnarok-like. I'm interested in where you might take it, in terms of content. That being said, the current menus are a mess. The skill tree is especially bad. Just everything laid out as one indecipherable jumbled mess where the icons are barely descriptive and the text doesn't help that much either. It took me a while to figure out I had to specifically click on the tiny unlocked lock to unlock a skill, as opposed to the tiny locked lock which is barely one or two pixels distinct. I had to zoom in my browser window for the tiny text to be readable, too.

Perfectly functional breakout-like. My only problem with this game is ball visibility, especially with the coins. Overall, I think these coins being everywhere is just annoying and don't add anything to the game. The appeal of these games is to break blocks; distracting the player to pick up a thousand bonus objects with every single block destroyed is a constant diversion that detracts from the core gameplay.

Pretty neat for something made in a week. I could see a full game being made from this concept.

Enemies don't give chase and killing them nets no reward, not even the peace of mind of not having them respawn, so I felt no reason to fight them without the bow. 

It feels like the game rewards stalling a bit too much. Most of the time, the limited uses for sliding just force you to hit your head against a wall for a while to recharge with little consequence. The sliding mechanic itself is downplayed a bit by limiting the rows/columns you can use it on. You can often get stuck for a tad too long when you're surrounded by walls on non-slidable tiles as well.

There is some jank with sprites often not reading as what their mechanics are, and they often overlap in confusing ways, but the artstyle itself is polished. It is often not clear whether doors are locked. Tiles could use some visible seams too.

Weapons overwriting each other sucks. It reduces what you can get out of the already limited gamut of non-stackable upgrades.

The game is a bit short. If these stages are procedurally generated, the parameters could keep rising for a good while longer without breaking anything.

I like how there's less straight dungeon-like gameplay here than the previous one. The /agdg/ lore writing on these is fun, whereas the stock RPGMaker adventuring held back that old one. 

Unexpectedly seeing the gargoyle here was really funny and it took me by surprise.

It is weird how you can't light up the fire when you have a spell called fire, especially when there are battle system-related solutions like having the beast in your party. 

I was getting "don't know how to start up the caravan yet" text even after obtaining the tools. That being said, even with the text displaying wrong state, the caravan still started up when I completed the other requirements. 

I got out and then reloaded to finish the sidequest until I got the strongman the potion. I gave it to him, but seemingly nothing came of that.

This is a nice little demo full of variety; I actually wanted for there to be more content beyond the blockade. 

Solid game; you've nailed the aesthetic. I got to draw the curtains and then died when I jumped back down.

The crosshairs are hard to see. The text for ammo/health is too tiny to read and they look interchangeable

Enemies will just sit and get shot as if they had cover if there is a short obstacle between them and you.

Circle strafing is the answer to every enemy encounter, but that's fine for a first level.

Overall the only problems with this are the ugly UI and title screen.

I don't know the specifics of implementation to articulate what feels off about the controls, but it's generally when going slow or moving over/jumping on sharp slopes that it's not quite right. I could try to record it the next time around. Part of it is the camera too, I think. It could be moving around too much while trying to execute finer platforming.

Yeah the game looks great already so it's hard to tell these are not final levels.

Yes, from what I have played so far, I would prefer to control the characters individually. That could change depending on what ideas you have to do with the commands later, though.

The idea to use a key combination itself works well, but I intuitively try to use the directional key that would move the kid closer or away from the adult at that given moment rather than memorizing that left or right do fixed things.

What I mean is that the password I get by beating stage x and moving onto x+1 puts me at the start of stage x rather than x+1.

The tutorial works just fine as a showcase of mechanics for levels that are yet to be designed, but as a tutorial for an actual game, it's almost silly how eager it is to introduce complexity only to do nothing with it. Mechanics like the soccer ball and enemies in general appear multiple times without ever serving any use. A lot of the tutorial prompts and even the controls themselves could be simplified in too many ways to list; you should really rework those levels if you want the average player to see the rest of the game.

Chase/run being tied to fixed right/left buttons rather than relative to which character is to the left is confusing.

Besides the matter of ladders for some reason resetting command states and having special commands associated with them, I'm not yet sure what you're going for with this command control scheme that wouldn't be achieved by controlling the characters separately.

I got stuck by falling here without the kid. Passwords take you to the beginning of the level that awards them rather than the next one so I'm not going back.

Overall, I don't see what you're going for with this game just yet. It's a bit of an amalgamation of props without any core idea to explore. If you want it to be about a narrative there didn't seem to be enough of that and I couldn't really tell what the props and environments were meant to convey in terms of a story.

I like that you didn't copy Sonic mechanics 1:1 as these games are wont to do, but, as a result, the controls feel a bit janky and inconsistent. Wall jump inertia is odd, you get insane momentum by jumping on a specific type of slope, sometimes you just bounce off stuff flying into the sky, you can wall jump-dash back onto walls to cheese momentum checks, etc. I think sorting these out to feel good is higher priority than adding content. I got through the available levels and I agree with the sentiment that some spectacle early on would be nice; it might be a good idea to have those machine gun sequences in the first stage. That being said, I disagree that the level design is bad. It's perfectly fine; it's really the controls themselves that are getting in the way.

There has been a lot of jank and glitches with game states in this game all-around. It looks like you're hard-coding a lot of things to check for conditions independently where a state machine/observer would be proper. Just something to keep in mind if you're starting another project after this one.

This looks and sounds really cool, but the camera wobbling made me motion sick in record time and I had to stop playing

Fun little game.

This had a lot more frontloaded complexity than I was expecting for a game called "Solitaire Battle".  I don't know if that's necessarily bad, but it did stand out to me. Even with it it's a bit visually busy and the animations don't show what's happening as well as they could. For instance, damage indicator text on damage would be nice, or free turns not looking completely indistinct. Passive, active, turn end, etc. skills could have different borders or something.

The shop should unlock automatically when it's empty

I beat the lich with the samurai. Hopefully there's content planned beyond that because otherwise the requirements to unlock the other characters are excessive.

The game's fixed. You've changed a lot since, and the gameplay is a lot more unique than the last time I played it. I enjoy the stealth/scavenge/drown focus, as it fits the castaway theme very well. 

The boring pipe redirection journeying is still the weakest link here. I think I might have softlocked myself by using a key on a wrong door, but I'm already too sick of this dungeon to scour it again for something I might have missed. I already crafted everything so I'm assuming the game still ends on the same boss anyway.

It's working just fine so far. Besides the teleporting around when clicking, there don't seem to be any issues. I think the environment might be a bit too flat and simplistic for the visual noise that this sort of hiding game demands, but I don't even know if you intend it to be final.

KINO gladiator

I'm surprised how much the art improved technically without losing that DOS/Amiga/TempleOS sovl. Navigating menus feels tactile now. The new portraits and other art add a lot to the atmosphere and worldbuilding. Lots of gameplay twists everywhere in the later rounds too. 

From the start menu, I went into the settings, then returned, and then couldn't go into the settings again.

There might be some jank with the password? Inputting it then going into the stats screen to respec, the level selector was disabled when I came back. Then inputting the code again,  the level selector was back, but there were no characters in the hub. Then I went into the stat screen and back again and everybody was there. I don't know if that's somehow how it's supposed to function.

Why can't I click anywhere to advance dialogue outside cutscenes?

Entering a shop and then leaving it when there's pre-round dialogue results in the dialogue being repeated

I feel the resurrection items should be more expensive. They are the only ones worth buying

Iker's Shadow is both a Carving Surge upgrade and a skill of its own, which is confusing.

This game looked from the start like it would end up in gnostic schizokino eventually and I am not disappointed that it seems to be panning out. 

The round 16 stat allocation screen flashes Finnegan's/Haydn't portraits and nags you about them on exit, even though they are not selectable. Something similar happens on round 17 with Finnegan and 18 with Haydn.

Pressing return on the stage selector does not work in round 18

Yes, your character names are very pretentious (and that's a good thing!)

I got this glitch at one point where a combat animation stayed frozen on the screen permanently, even as the battle continued

Looking forward to the ending! I love this game.

I like the idea. It's like turn-based Pogo3D. It feels a lot like Croc between the graphics and the sound effects, and there's not a lot of games that try to go for that.

Since you don't have control over the angle of your jump, the slipperiness is overkill. It limits the level design when you could just make smaller platforms to achieve the same difficulty.

Is there any reason you have chosen separate, tank controls for the jump direction, rather than using the direction the camera is facing? That's a bit cumbersome, but it doesn't really add any difficulty.

The camera feels a bit cramped. Does it really need collision avoidance?

I want to play this level as a regular Croc-like

Nice visual style and premise. I wandered around the world a bit. Although I appreciate the openness, the fact I was seeing nothing but very simple block-pushing puzzles everywhere was dismaying. With a lot of these, you can tell the answer straight away, but it takes like seven trips around the board kicking things onto walls to execute them. Sokoban-style puzzles are inherently a bit lengthy and procedural, but most games of this sort mitigate this by using tile-based movement that does not limit you through animation speed.  I don't know if children like that sort of thing, so it might be a good idea to playtest this with them proper to see if they find it it too tedious/easy or not.

The grass trio took me a couple tries to beat. If your target audience with this game is small children,  it is way too hard, especially for a first boss. Even though it's an action sequence, figuring out how to tackle it required more thought than the puzzles that preceded it all on its own. Arguably, the movement speed hurts here just as bad here as in the puzzles. 

The WASD control scheme is awkward. Feels like you could be using ctrl, shift and space to play without needing to use two hands.

Text glitch:

Soulful intro. If you're going to have the transition be static, you could try creating an animorphs-like transition between the static pictures.

The higher max speed and flap acceleration is great; it really feels like you can dare risk acrobatics now instead of always hopelessly racing down pedestrians. But the rest of the new physics is awkward. In particular, collisions are much more punishing in throwing you off-track now. And difficulty is way higher than it was before.

I'm not sure the Death Metal font fits the comfy music and vibe.

The UI in general is the weakest link in this right now, I think. Fix that and the game is ready to get some new content.

Neat little game. You've packed in a lot of twists for such a short level. 

soul

soul

I've done just that and now I've finished the rest of the available content.

The overworld gimmicks are nice at mixing up the round pacing, but they still don't do all that much for the variety of battles themselves. Almost nothing in this game forces you to change your strategy in any way. What does is the little alternate team sequence. However, that one drags on a bit and it's alienating to use different characters for so long when you've been leveling the same ones since the beginning.

I got a glitch at some point in combat where the combat text to the left turned "null". The game froze and then closed itself before I could screenshot it.

Overall I love this game for the lore and the aesthetics, but it does often feel like that's a carrot on a stick, with the battles getting in the way. I'm looking forward to playing the rest of it when it's done. 

It's fun so far. The theme is funny. Please expand it to deeper Fromsoft lore too. Scrolling serves as a nice twist to the game.

The difficulty curve is shaped like a staircase, which is no good. You spend a lot of time doing nothing and then it ramps up quickly and back again.

Many of the upgrades feel like junk. 

There is a clearly dominant strategy in herding everything at the middle-top section of the screen for collecting at the bottom and then picking off threats.

It is not even worth continuing if you don't roll the staff at the start. The staff is way too good already on its own, but having so many walls of rats that it is uniquely positioned to farm gives runs that get it early way too many gems. Most of the threats later on are frail glass cannon enemies that appear in awkward places, failing to give any other weapon an advantage. The creatures that look like actual bosses and have the HP of one barely do anything. They quickly dispose of themselves by lurking around the AoE. The way these layouts are designed currently rewards mobility and range consistently over melee and dps output, so upgrades that concern the latter aren't very good. 

I like how RTSR is just as OP as the one in Dark Souls. 

The way you have to go to the shop manually at the moment is cumbersome and doesn't seem to add any depth. Maybe each additional time you level up before shopping could get you a reroll? Also, you should have that bar be better positioned, such as by putting it right below the character, because it's annoying to look away to find it during normal gameplay. 

The playable character needs more contrast. I should be able to tell where I am while I look elsewhere to aim. 

Right clicking to open the shop would be a better solution than moving the cursor over to the other side of the screen, too.

There are optimization issues and they disproportionally stem from the lighting skill. Consider simplifying the visuals for that

I got to 20 million and thought that was a good place to stop. Surely that must be enough avenging for Zanzibart to forgive me.

I called it a prototype because it's just long enough to barely showcase the gameplay system. In terms of polish it's fine, don't worry.

Doesn't seem to have changed much from when I last played, but it's a good prototype. The diorama model looks appealing, though it runs the risk of aggravating pixel hunting with contextual camera angles. It might be interesting to let the player cycle through all available choices in a scene, or otherwise use a special shader for selectable elements. It's interesting to imagine how this might scale to more complex cases, because that will probably create a bunch of other issues too.

The game looks incredible. That's all I was expecting, really. I will skip most of the redundant feedback.

If you are going to shake the screen with every jump, at least don't rotate it around the forward axis. But preferably don't shake it at all.

The performance issues, especially when you hit enemies, stink of some terrible optimization mishap. Are you instantiating prefabs from assets to create each of those particle effects? Do they have unnecessary components in them? Are you using vertex-based cloth physics? This game is running at least an order of magnitude worse than it should. For the immediate future this would benefit a lot more from a visit to the profiler than to a 3D modeling program.

>I see what you mean.  I shouldn't reject the idea out of hand. It sure seems like it's a lot closer to being a funny ha-ha game than a serious action game.

The two are not mutually exclusive.

>But the problem, aside from my wounded pride, is that since I'm not trying to be funny, I don't really understand what people are laughing at. I seriously doubt I can do it reliably. 
There's nothing to be wounded about. And happy design accidents happen. Once it's there, you can look at what makes it good to try to understand it. Or really, here, I think all you need to do is develop the gameplay properly and model the game's aesthetics around the inherently over-the-top exaggeration it entails. Maybe something Jojo-ish?

>Like, I've never heard of something that managed to be so bad it's good on purpose, y'know? 

IIRC Five Nights at Freddy's was made because the developer had been making games with models that were supposed to be appealing, but found by players to be off-putting

I love the UI and the skill design. Is this going to be a Ragnarok-like? My only complaint is that the arrows have some jank in how you can hit yourself when you fire.

This game is a decade too late to be topical, a decade too early to be nostalgic, and a couple years of controversy bait games too late to cause an outcry.

Going into Options freezes the entire tab.

This has no business having so much slowdown. I guess it's accurate to the Adobe Flash standards of optimization.

There's no real gameplay, so the game gets old fast. Large zones are annoying for finding stuff you missed and maybe those should be split up. 

The screen shake is obnoxious and made me quit the game before the end.

Overall this is fine as a shitpost, but it's barely a game. It's arguably already too long as-is and overstays its welcome quite a bit.

Currently, this prototype is very funny. It's way funnier than most games that try to be funny, and even most full games that are popular for being funny. It seems that might not have been what you were originally going for, but it's worth considering embracing that direction and incorporating it into your vision somehow instead of trying to get rid of it, because it's genuinely unique. 

Wow, this was unexpectedly an amazing game. Would buy/10

The combat and level design are both really really good. So many clever twists everywhere. You've nailed the Zelda 1 system of tiles and no-diagonals dynamics that the later games discarded, which nobody but me seems to ever care about. Lots of original enemies too, and every screen is unique. You've added enough to it that the game does not play like a ripoff, even though it looks like it. 

The forest area is incredible. Attacking the trees before they activate feels great. The bloodoaks are absurdly threatening but can easily be played directionally on open spaces, or by getting them stuck in closed ones, which fits the forest theme. The recipe screen there is clever, as is the cave entrance. You have captured the essence of how Zelda 1 communicates secrets without their questionable and inconsistent design language. I felt like I was playing The Witness there for a second. I love that one screen with a tree grid where you have a bloodoak, but you can bait and then run past it (unlike the previous one) or even awaken and kill it at range before it has a path to get to you. 

Good job getting rid of pointless ammo resources, too. Those must be tempting as a money sink, but even without it, I never felt I had too much money at all. All items for sale are useful and feel like they are worth the price. The pickaxe is a great replacement for the bomb.

I don't like how close the graphics are to the Zelda 1 artstyle at all. I know the retro spritework itself might be due to artistic limitations, but copying the themes for zones themselves and many tile models 1:1 is soulless. That being said, it's at least nice that they are cohesive and reasonably accurate to the NES itself instead of going for a faux-retro frankenstein style. 

The music is mediocre, but so is the original Zelda's. This is the sort of game I'd normally play with sound off, so this is a nonfactor.

The game does a great job of teaching the player without being overbearing about it. The trip for the sword is nice. It's there as a backup for players who don't realize it straight away. Please don't put the NPC in the same room, or you might as well just have it give you the sword. 

I like how the tree at the start teaches you about the other ones in that direction the first time you see it, but also serves as a passive target dummy as you come to craft different swords.

The staff book was cool and made complete sense as a reveal within the game's mechanics. It visibly clearly looks like would make more sense to have the jewel at the bottom, though. And the weapon itself is useless. Maybe there could be a secret stronger variant with the gem at the bottom? That could double as a funny implication that the sorcerer got it wrong.

It's too easy to get stunlocked by repeated hits when you're not even up against a wall. Judging by that one loading tip, you seem to know that knockback should be used strategically. I don't think there's a single situation where I found that to be viable. It's an unexplored design space for the future. Maybe increase the knockback distance and speed for various enemy types. Not the trees, though. It's flavorful for that trapping that arises organically through the mechanics to be their defining feature.

Death tips take too long. If that's supposed to hide loading, then give the player a button to read through multiple tips in one go. Reloading every death adds up in a game where you die a lot. This game is lightweight enough that it shouldn't take that long to load. If anything, you should afford to respawn objects without reloading a scene at all, since the world barely has any state data in it.

Splitting vertical and horizontal behavior in enemy types is very clever. It makes me think it could be interesting to experiment with further direction limitations.

Some of the sword tier balancing seems off, like how you get tin and bone in the same area but the bone sword is strictly better. But nice job balancing ranged attacks vs melee with different damage. And at some point I thought using nothing but ranged with full heals was flat-out better. Then I got the ghost sword, and that made me switch back to full melee all the time. By the time I was done, I would pick between the two approaches depending on the enemy. So that dynamic between the two types seems balanced. The ghost room is one of the best memorable ones in the game and that sword is a nice reward for it. Since some of these swords have unique mechanics, it would be nice if there were some way to get them up to speed with higher-powered swords eventually. Weapon upgrades would work as long as it's designed as a catch-up, instead of forcing you to stick with a single weapon throughout the game (like in Dark Souls).

I like how you implemented attacking speed as swords unfolding. It adds more depth than a windup animation.

I like how the healing is instantaneous instead of embracing the estus flask meme. At least with how the game is right now, you don't have a lot of health, so pressing the button on time is still a challenge and you have to worry about panic-overhealing.

I don't like the UI overall. Zelda 1's UI was not good.

I like how I can peek into a room before being trapped. Bonus points that you can't cheese them with ranged attacks.

Skrek enemies are not in a swamp area. I think this might be a glitch.

I want to be able to inspect item names on the forge and item screens. The icons are too simple to be self-explanatory. Also on the topic of items, the coin icon looks more like a log than a coin, which got me confused on the two at the start.

Hitbox size sometimes feels inconsistent across enemies, mostly with questionable accounting of the 3-dimensional space behind characters. 

I guess that goes with the UI, but weapon selection is needlessly cumbersome. If you want weapons to have multiple uses in the future, that should be redone entirely IMO. The Zelda model for item selection is just bad. We have more buttons and computer memory to work with now. But, if you just want the player to swap between a melee and ranged sword, it should be a hold/release selection rather than a switch trigger, so that you don't have to look anywhere to avoid the risk of mixing them up. However, I myself already ran against the limitations of that, as I would often want the bonesword for ranged at full health and another one for when I'm hurt.

The seemingly useless coin debris on enemy death is distracting for a game with a simplistic visual style. Maybe get them to go into the player and quickly disappear.

Healing points being single-use is a great idea. It makes resource acquisition less stale. I don't like the death punishment mechanic of losing money, though. Shops are so sparse (I think there's only one so far) that you'll just end up not caring about money at all ever, and then mindlessly grinding to get items when you find one. Overall, I don't see what behavior you're trying to incentivize with that design decision, as it discourages exploration away from shops until you've toppled them. Letting the player cache money at save points and then losing a much higher % on death feels like a better solution. That would also help by letting players freely suicide in dungeons to start the gauntlet over, as that's one situation where the current one-use checkpoint is detrimental. 

The optimal strategy in dungeons is to go in with full health and then use the start checkpoint midway through to recharge. This might be an oversight, where you meant to reset the dungeon such that it always starts on the save point.

It feels wrong that you get penalized for dying in situations where you could not have won or even deduced that a victory was impossible, by which I mean going into the seasnek ambush without access to a ranged attack. I think that fight would be better if there were a secondary (if hard enough to be implausible for a first-time player) way to hit it as well. If that's already in then I got filtered, sorry.

There should be some sort of signaling that indicates whether an enemy respawns or not.

Options are not saved when reopening the game

The difficulty is fine, honestly. You have so many zeldalikes out there with amazing art and mediocre gameplay that I feel if you're going to make one with art like this, the people who are going to play it are the ones who want tighter gameplay in the first place, and you clearly know how to deliver on that. The difficulty is what makes exploration viable as a playstyle. If you ever want to make it more accessible, it would be prudent to try first just being more direct in clarifying to the player that you're supposed to explore around, as most players have been conditioned to try to play these sorts of games the wrong way.

This is all I've found to do so far. If there's more please do give a hint or two, as I seem to have hit the dev roadblock on every front. 

I like the elegant introduction but clicking things fast with small variations is ultimately not fun. Respawning does not work properly -- you can often see icons coming back when they are not fully hidden

Very early build. I'm unable to tell much about wherever this project may be going.

It looks wonderful and that's really all there is to say at the moment. I guess I shall be spicy and strongly oppose the suggestion of spamming bullets, because this feels like it's heavily benefitting from a visually grounded presentation. You can clearly design properly animated combat with attacks, knockback  and attack animations and that's something to capitalize on.

The gun mechanic itself is clever and fun to play with, but the level design is too generic. Going around platforming through generic hallways activating switches. Would be nice to see less of that and more complex puzzles and combat. It would probably be a good idea to zoom out the camera more so that there could be more complex scenarios happening onscreen. At the moment it feels there's only just enough screen space for you to jump on your platforms over and over again.

Armor feels overpriced. Why is there a cooldown on the Switzerland flags?

I don't know if it's intentional but it looks like MapleStory. I've always found it odd that there's not a proper singleplayer clone of that game, because it has lots of potential to work. That is to say, it would be wise to fully commit to such a style of pixel art for the graphics. The control scheme is currently confusing and I couldn't find a way to progress after running out of MP to use the spin attack. Z and X as zooming keys feels very very wrong

Genius theme. I find this game hilarious and I'm not even sure exactly why, as all the funny stuff is happening in my head rather than the game itself. This combination of mechanics creates incredible opportunities for parody or commentary, even though these are not fully tapped into. There's plenty of room here to go over the top and exaggerate the randomness even more with gambling skinner box nonsense. 

Instead the focus is on the real moment-to-moment gameplay of timing slots with tight failure states, and that's not as interesting. The rolls get really repetitive and I think that might ironically be due to the fact there is not enough gambling. The variability between a god jackpot roll and a dud is just not there.

Excellent and soulful graphics. I have no idea what is even going on with the combat system. It needs more indicators of what is happening and what you're supposed to be doing. It doesn't seem to be fully functional anyway though, since I could not get the battle to end.

The UI is great, the visual style is solid and it seems these are where you spent most of your effort so far. Nice touches like the shader for characters behind objects.

Low movement speed with a large map makes the gameplay itself nearly unbearable at the moment.

Diagonal input should not make the character stop moving. Just keep it going in the same direction. Also if that's a limitation for combat it would be nice if it were disabled while you're just moving around but that's really low priority in comparison.

I accidentally fell off the map by walking behind something.

You have most basics down but the available content is not good in its current form.

The game is easy even on max difficulty. This could work as a design decision if the pacing was good, but currently there's just a lot of empty stretches in stages and then a few bottleneck moments that could be actual challenges. It feels like a formerly hard game that was algorithmically stripped down of its difficulty rather than a properly designed easy game. So much time is spent just holding fire with no threats.

The second boss just makes me think this would instantly be a far more interesting game if you could flip your fire from left to right, with multi-directional scrolling. Right now I have no idea why the presentation is even horizontal. 

For both characters laser is completely busted and shot is comically useless in comparison. Either their damage needs to be adjusted or you should add some delay between the two so that you meaningfully hurt your mobility by using the laser. There is no visual or audio feedback on whether it is hitting bosses either.

There's waaay too many bombs. When you lose bombs on death this sort of design tends to incentivize players to not try to play the game.