itch.io

hey, thanks for playing!

- I am aware that the scope is ambitious and there's a million corners that I've cut. My goal is to provide a sort of super condensed mini-dark souls experience. Which means a much smaller game world to keep the smaller amount of content fairly dense and a shorter runtime. 

- The colors are not too similar in my opinion but don't worry, they aren't final at all. the final colors will probably be a more cyan/teal tint for the health and an orange-ish yellow for the stamina.

- The attack combo expects you to press the attack button again after the swing starts (so when the hitbox of the attack is active) and before you're back to idle. I will be widening it significantly though since i've seen a lot of feedback on this.

- There are many ways to deal with the two enemies at the same time, and aggroing a single one is perfectly valid too. you can play footsies with them to lure them into a swing and then hit them yourself for example, or use your greatsword to hit both of them at the same time (i didn't really make it clear that you can use a different weapon to be fair). But anyway, i'll be adjusting how fighting groups works so it feels less prone to getting stunlocked.

- Those enemies aren't aggroing you behind walls, they're hearing your footsteps and inspecting what they heard, and then only aggroing (pulling out their sword) once they actually see you. But i'm gonna change it so they don't actually inspect sounds in different rooms from where they are.

- I plan on making this a very tight singleplayer experience. no multiplayer at all for now. Rigging and animating enemy types will definitely be the largest timesink but i have a few ideas on how i can cut down on that without sacrificing too much quality or variety. And again, the shorter runtime will mean lower enemy variety should feel fine.

well if you like demon's souls i hope you also like classic resident evil games, there's gonna be a bit of that in this game too.

I'll be doing some heavy tinkering to the way inputs get buffered between states.

yeah it's pretty funny how the characters go bald as they die but it was unintentional, the "real" enemies in the game will have more normal death animations.

i'm gonna rework the attack button so that it alternates between the first two swings if you just press it but if you hold it down you get the heavy attack which is the third swing in the current demo.

I'll be doing adjustments to enemy AI so they don't stunlock you as much and also i'll let the player get out of their hurt state after eating shit too many times in a row, kind of like ghost frames in old games i guess.

Glad you liked the way dodging works! it will be much more useful with the movesets of the proper enemy entities later on.

I have uhhh 8 bossfights planned and they will hopefully be very varied and won't disappoint.

I'm happy to hear you liked it so much!

Thanks for the feedback on the combat, i'll be applying similar adjustments to what you mentioned before the next DD!

I'm surprised by how many people played my demo with kb&m rather than controller and I'm glad to see that you all found the controls pretty agreeable overall.

holding down the block button changes nothing, it only cares about your initial button press. and the timing is not too far from what it is in dark souls 1 and demon's souls, which is that you have to press more or less when the enemy's weapon is about to collide with you, otherwise you get a regular block.

Doing both things with the same button but timing based is pretty common in action games, idk. Even sekiro works like that

Thanks! glad you enjoyed the audiovisual presentation!

the demo already has the same exact lock on feature as fromsoft games and it is bound to the same buttons both on controller and kb&m (R3 on controller, Q, or middle mouse button). It's shown in the controls screen but not really mentioned in the demo intro splash text i guess.

Were you using the lock-on feature? it's bound to the same buttons as fromsoft games both on kb+m and controller and works the exact same way as their games too. dodging while not locked on is always done in the facing direction too, just like in most games. A difference in my game is that pressing the dodge button with no directional input pressed dodges forward rather than back, but that's on purpose by design

Sounds like your controller is a bit drifty. I had incorrectly assumed that unity's default deadzones were working already since none of my controllers drift but i saw afriend experience the same thing you did when he tried playing at his house with his 10 year old 360 controller. I've applied the deadzone limiters that unity offers to the controls so it shouldn't happen by next DD

Glad to know you enjoyed it! honestly i don't want my animations to be too clunky but i'm ok with some level of jank. it's something that i keep going back to and every time they get more proffessional looking.

the footstep sound effect glitch probably has to do with the way the game blends between the walk cycle and the run cycle, i'll have a look at it at some point.

yeah the stairs in my demo are an old implementation and the current ones i have are actually just smooth slopes so that won't be an issue in future maps (i didn't have time to rebuild the demo level).

enemies walking off ledges is something i want to have but unity's navmeshagent has not been cooperating, it will be in the future tho

i'm gonna make my "next input windows" much wider in general soon

If the controls didn't show up you may have been suffering the same bug as a lot of other people, it's ok. one thing is that i tested my build of the demo before uploading it and it only seemed to work with xInput devices, dInput didn't work. i wan't to make sure that they work in the future but it's not a huge priority.

Well getting parried in your game is like in sekiro, in dark souls and elden ring getting parried is a huge deal, and in my game getting parried will be pretty rare actually, most enemies will block without parrying you, so there's that.

about the ganks, i plan on doing two things, one is to let the player get out of it in some way by cancelling some animations or something like that, i'm not super sure yet. the other is that i might make enemies not attack at the same time often, they'll kind of pace themselves to not overwhelm the player too much.

the gun and absorb indeed do not work, don't worry. The absorb will be for manually sucking in the souls of dead enemies around you but i'm not adding that feature yet for quite a while.

no i will not just let you dodge sorry not sorry.

yeah the recovery frames will be shorter in the future, i might even do that thing where the recovery is shorter if your swing actually hits but if you miss then you have to wait through the whole animation.

glad you like the visuals :D

yeah the healing is literally just a lazy animation with a healing event when it starts, not representative of how healing will be later on, but i didn't want the demo to have no healing at all.

gun will be working in next DD stay tuned

LMAO do you mean more unique animations or ragdolls? 

The actual unique enemies in the game (that aren't just the player character but computer controlled) will have nice death animations, but i don't think i'll do ragdolls since it was pretty rare to see that on the ps2

Massive oversight on my part, i've already fixed it so next DD it won't be a problem anymore. I hadn't considered multimonitor setups lol. And yes ideally use a controller but it should be perfectly enjoyable with kb+m too

I'm happy to see people enjoy the audio of my game, since it's an aspect of videogames i really love but i have no experience actually working on audio at all.

Dodging is very undertuned currently and i'll buff it in some ways, but i-frames will never happen, sorry. The idea is that the player should see what swing the enemy will do and with that info decide to dodge sideways or back. but the NPC swings in the demo are a bad showcase of that.

Yeah the dodge is a really hard animation to nail down, i've tinkered with it a million times but i'm not satisfied with it either

Hi and thanks!

The enemies do in fact literally disable their tracking when you dodge. But currently I severely undertuned dodging (made it really slow and such), i'm gonna buff it up a bit soon.

Something i'm completely missing currently is letting the player cancel out of their recovery frames by just moving, i'll add it soon. but stuff like transitioning a swing into a dodge are already in my game, just that the transition itself is set to happen pretty late so there's not a massive difference between that and just going back to idle, thankfully this is all a matter of tuning what i already have implemented.

Personally i'm not a huge fan of how floaty and loose monster hunter games have become since World. If i take something from their character controllers it will be from the classic monhun games lol. but thanks for the mention of it, i'll keep it in mind

Thanks man. Glad to see people enjoy the artstyle and lighting since it was a hell of a pain to implement.

I do plan on adding a lot more visual feedback to actions before the next DD.

In this demo you fight player character NPCs but that will be exceedingly rare in the final game, i think i posted about it in the discord but yeah most enemies will be using a freakish tall humanoid rig or a short goblin-esque humanoid rig and they themselves will have a fair variety of attacks and all that (not to the level of a fromsoft game of course).

If an enemy keeps parrying you just shove them a few times until you break their guard, alternatively you can just wait until they decide to swing at you and punish them then

Hi!

- As of today i've made it so that the camera only auto-turns with the player's movement if they're using a controller, it disables itself automatically on keyboard inputs

- Yeah i'm gonna work on changing the way commited animations end to give player control earlier. I'm also gonna change how attacking works.

- If you remember ps2 games, it was the style at the times to have most if not all doors in games auto-close themselves after a few seconds (this is the case to this day in some games). But it's true that it can be confusing when first exploring a place, so I'm gonna set them all to stay open / stay closed for now and experiment with it again in the future when i have some more proper levels to play around in

oof i didn't realize this was going to be literally top-down metroid prime. it's great, seriously, i loved every second.

- her arms seem a lil too thin on the body

- the run animation is really goofy compared to everything else

- i'm not sure how to reliable deal with all those small swarms

- i love the green LCD look of the portrait but it makes my brain expect the character to also have some green on its design in the main screen

Game performs as well as i'd expect from Unreal Engine 5, my FPS never dipped but my GPU sounded like it was gonna take off with nothing happening on the screen. I'm assuming your game's not gonna target hyper realistic raytraced pubic hair simulations so now's the best time to sit down for a day and figure out how much stuff in your project came unnecessarily enabled and whether they could be turned off with no effect on visuals (or even positive effects) for better performance. 

Other than that game functions well, though scrolling the inventory is buggy and i couldnt figure out how to move stuff between character inventories

they were mainly screen transition bugs, like i'd go somewhere to the right and transition to a new room, then walk left to transition back and i'd get one of those blue screens with error text. this was all mainly in the "new" demo section, the door to the right

please remove the goatee from the main character i refuse to play as someone with a goatee, simple as.

if this is taking place in the US wouldn't people write dates by month first THEN day?

i did not understand why "2 C." was not the shelly apartment not gonna lie

vertex lighting is based, thanks for that

the atmosphere and presentation are immaculate and consistent. As i've told others i really appreciate your commitment to the system shock 2 / thief 1 & 2 graphic style. 

It can't be understated how good this level of fidelity is for this type of game since details stand out very easily from non-interactive stuff.

I'll make sure to run through the whole thing later but from what i tried i don't have much to criticize honestly.

Actually quick edit: i think a nice touch that would make the NPCs more interesting is if they had a more distinct unique pose to each of them (at least for important ones), just a unique idle, that's all

fucking awesome i love warioware. more games, i demand more.

more minigames about moving the mouse itself (or about picking something up and dragging it around), like the classic labyrinth jumpscare flash game and stuff like that.

MORE

also great music

So i tried doing a few runs and every single time i would end up with a game breaking bug of some kind. this build seems less stable than past ones. i love the style of the game in all senses and i think it's got huge potential but yeah currently it's too unstable.

It's the izuna drop grab. i'll try to record it tomorrow but it might be the case that it's what you say and i'm getting confused by another animation maybe

Pretty basic so far but also fairly solid, i have a soft spot for these ultra-retro RPGs. A few notes:

- some sound effects don't sound like they're from an old SFX chip at all, like attacking with the club.

- nothing is marked on the map and if that's an unfinished thing then ok but if it's intentional it would be nice to be able to place custom markers on it

- i wish the game was a bit more keyboard-only friendly, but that's probably a looot of work so it's unreasonable

fucking LOVE this swamp theme and the weird horze frog creature you control, pure unique sovl. It also feels like a disservice to call it a spyro clone. i can see the resemblance but this is so different mechanically.

- the biting effect shouldn't rotate along with the character, looks kinda weird IMO

- pretty sure it's lowkey VERY illegal to have the sony playstation boot up sequence so uh, that

- also i had to close the game due to being stuck on 2 occasions, one was trying to tongue-slap a fruit but i got stuck on the slapping effect looping. another one was also trying to do the tongue pull but on a fruit that was right next to me, my character didn't do any tongue animations and then i was stuck and could only slightly move once every 2 seconds

I've played this multiple DDs now and i still enjoy it so that's a good sign.

- there should be a way to go back to the previous text in the console like in original marathon

- i understand it's still in development but i hope you do plan to add music, the music in marathon 1 was amazing and it elevated the experience and the lack of music in marathon 2 and infinity really makes those games less cool

- the muzzle flash when firing the pistol is too slow, it should be just like 1 or 2 frames, currently it's too smooth

- control rebinding seems glitchy

- midair control is perfectly fine but it's not like the original marathon games at all. the low gravity falling in those was compounded with how easy it was to "skate" mid-air and spin around, if you can recreate that it would be great

- some assets like health regen stations have bilinear filtering, why

- i think you should be more brazen with your level design and have more schizo labyrinthine layouts

- sometimes the assault rifle makes a fire sound effect that's distractingly different from the rest

- it's not very clear to me what the spear is good for

10/10

graying out the selected button on the UI is a terrible way to highlight them

characters seem to have different abilities when charged up? a brief explanation of them would be great

when going up a curved ramp, the character in the ball rotates smoothly but then when reaching the floor at the end of the climb the character snaps 90 degress back to standing normally, it's minor but looks off

went through one of those black rings but nothing seemed to change?

other than that, great fundamental gameplay, keep it up!

I like those photo-based hand animations and the flamethrower is pretty good too.

One massive issue i've noticed is how rotation works, the more up or down you look the faster the camera turns horizontally, if you look straight up or down you spin at crazy speeds. this is really bad and obviously unacceptable for an FPS

There's a bit to learn here as someone who knows what a tamagotchi is but never actually used one myself lol.

I really like the concept and vibe in general.

Everything feels good as far as the character controller goes.

Shooting the gun has the weird quirk of how you can shoot again quickly but that second shot shoots upwards instead of to the center of the screen because of the recoil animation. Maybe this could be a feature to force the player to pace their shots or maybe it's just unintentional jank.

It seems like shooting the skellies from very far away means they don't react at all and you can just sit there shooting them to undeath.

The floating LCD screen when you aim clips into the word. This isn't necessarily a bad thing but it looks obviously rough right now. My guess is you could make it so it doesn't clip into the world ever (like a gun in an FPS) or you make a shader that does a static effect on the parts that clip into geometry or something like that, could be cool

Running with L1 is fantastic, no comment

This is more of an architectural/environmental storytelling thing but there's a lot of debris in the shopping mall with a lot of it looking like floor that collapsed from above, but the actual ceiling of the place seems intact. Might be something to consider if you wanna go full into having believable spaces

Great as always. Haven't played everything in it yet. Two little bugs i noticed:

- in the first boss (the praying girl) she killed me at the same time her posture got broken and then in subsequent attempts there was a floating shinobi execution prompt in the environment.

- in the second boss (vixen) sometimes i interrupt the startup of her command grab but then as she does the animations for getting hit i get snapped into the command grab anyway, like the animation can be cancelled but the grab hitbox still shows up a second later

game is showing me controller bindings for stuff like interacting and skipping tutorials even though i don't have a controller plugged in

Making a new save lets you save it with no filename which seems wrong.

the sound effect for landing is bad, idk, it should sound softer

Seems like falling speed doesn't count for the melee damage bonus, which would be cool.

That's about it. Forge on, enginedev!

when i entered the first room that locks you in with enemies, i got hit immediately and the hat flew away through the closed door so i could never recover my hat. 

the black arrow that points to your hat or to your objective could not be less visible sometimes lol.

those squares with red edges that activate and shoot you near the end of a level got glitchy visuals (turned into black squares for some frames)

Aside from that it's great man. looks and feels great, levels feel different, all good

Unbelievably good. Not my type of genre so I don't know how much useful feedback i can give on the combat system itself. Something that didn't sit right with me is that at least from what i could tell you can't select units by clicking them in any way with any buttons right? you either hold click to command them or click on their profiles on the left of the screen (or press the number keys but i'm concerned with mouse controls here).

Being able to select them with a click would feel good i think, even if it's with the middle mouse button lol

Wow this game got a tremendous glow up since i last played it. much better overall.

- It's too easy to mash the sword swing and stunlock most enemies

- The forge zone is just a bunch of same looking cubes and is a pain to navigate. just bad overall, it also has the wrong puzzle pacing. You're exploring a samey looking massive place activating those totems but you don't know what for. you haven't seen that there's something blocking the exit or where the exit even is yet, it makes no sense.

- Jumping still feels weird and it's too easy to jump against a ledge and stay floating against it since the game neither slides you down nor lets you slide up and stand on it

- The tutorial guy's accent is somehow probably more offensive than Lo Wang from shadow warrior

- The interact button is a mess. I managed to interact with the sidequest snake lady by pressing E even though the game was paused. I could also re-trigger the talking cutscene by pressing E multiple times during said cutscene. Also the same button being used for switching to combat mode is bad, if you aproach a totem to light it on fire you get the "hmm i wonder if i light it on fire" cutscene and have to actively move away from it to enter combat mode then aproach it again to set it on fire

- Please for the love of god add the settings menu to the pause menu, quitting to the main menu to make a slight adjustment to the camera turn speed makes me go suicidal

- The trees in the forest really should have some transparency on their leaves

- You really need to work on some texture resolution consistency. it wouln't hurt the artstyle, it would make it better, if there weren't 4K textures next to other that seem 16x16.

- After i died once pressing ESC didn't pause the menu and i had to alt+F4

Anyway, besides all this ragging, game is in much better state than last i saw it man, keep at it.

VAE VICTIS

Every level is a violent explosion of vertex chaos and then i die. Fix your shit (i'm on windows and AMD gpu)

fucking FRESH AS FUCK metroidvania. thank you so much. My only relevant feedback is that the boss at the end kinda fell into a loop for me so most of the fight was just repeating the same actions until he died. 

Very solid demo. My main feedback is that the camera when not locked on is waaay too low. Souls games usually keep your character's head exactly at the center of the screen. But here it seems like the center of the screen is more or less her bellybutton? IDK, but it's too low and uncomfortable to use. It works well when locked on though.

And also I haven't really found a reliable way to recover my posture? Sekiro let's you hold down L1 and stand still to recover it over time

The visuals are my only gripe with this demo, because everything else is FUCKING AWESOME.

I felt real clever when i checked under the sunk boat and found another revolver.

This format of riding a boat and stopping on sort of "minilevels" works great I think. It would be interesting to see a slightly more open map (not like a massive open world, but maybe a level that isn't completely linear).

Going back to the graphics, they're the only think that doesn't click with me, but maybe these are just programmer graphics, idk. But if I were you I'd focus on either the simple lowpoly stuff or go full into the 2d sprites

Can I has cheeseburger? (seriously this is really cool)