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
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
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
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
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
Extremely polished and feels very complete. I enjoyed it but there was something that started to really grind my gears. As far as I saw there is no way to avoid stuff auto-equipping when you pick them up with a free slot. And I actually wanted to keep blocking with my weapon instead of having a skill on my RMB. Which meant I had to constantly go into my inventory to unequip whatever gem I picked up. It was really annoying
DAMN I LOVED THIS. It's like playing metroid but controlling an elite from halo. Very weird mix but it feels good. Also I recognized that Demon's Souls music lmao. I skipped a huge part of the demo I think because I abused the wall jump to climb up that large shaft. Please don't remove that, it felt great to do. Other than that I don't have much feedback to give other than it feels weird that you can click and release quickly and you don't shoot the 3 burst. Like it cancels out if you release the button, it feels bad in a way. I'd prefer to know that whenever I click the 3 shots will come out every time.
I'm loving it so far! It's cute that you're recreating doom and quake levels, it didn't go unnoticed. And the hand drawn characters look charming as hell.
As far as feedback:
- The laser cannon very obviously doesn't go to the center of the screen. This is very easy to fix actually. Instead of shooting the laser in the direction of the cannon, spawn the laser with the same origin but with a direction towards the world position that the crosshair is hitting. Does it mean the laser might shoot slightly diagonally sometimes? yes. Will it be noticeable? 99% of the time no. And that's the way most big money games do it.
- Dodging and boosting on the same button makes sense. But only boosting when moving forward and only dodging in other directions feels awkward. Sometimes I want to boost sideways but for that i have to boost forward then change directions.
- Oh, the spark effect when landing makes it feel like you're taking damage, thankfully that's not the case but it's a bit confusing the first few times it happens.
Ah, I see, in that case maybe change the effect a bit after activating the checkpoints? they look very active and interactable since they keep spinning and are very eye-catching. Just giving them a visual cue that "this is now on but you can't interact with it anymore" would do wonders I think. And thanks for that clip, deflecting projectiles looks satisfying af.
Absolutely looking forward to the full game, hope it does well!
Feedback first: I was loving it but got softlocked when reaching the attic. The characters just stood there forever, no cutscene played, none of my inputs did anything, left a pretty sour taste. Other than that, holding [run] and [back] shouldn't put the character in a loop of 180° spins, it should just do it once. Also manual aiming with the D-pad works as expected but pushing the analog stick while aiming should turn the character in the direction of the analog stick, rather than simply turning the character clockwise or counterclockwise.
Now my impressions: Holy shit this is amazing. I was expecting something like Resident Evil with maybe some Megami Tensei but NOT PARASITE EVE. I am in awe, I kneel. Seriously though this is fantastic, I love everything about it. Visuals go hard, music goes hard, gameplay goes hard, demon designs go hard. 10/10
Zelda 1 is one of my favorite games ever, yet I've struggled to enjoy almost every other Zelda game after it. This game feels like Zelda 1, which is the highest praise I can give.
Beyond that, I love the sword crafting, the exploration, and the combat. Two pieces of feedback I'd give are that it reaaally feels like you should be able to block projectiles by attacking them (maybe a specific sword does it), and that the save-spot circles feel like they should heal you if you step on them again after activating them but they don't.
cool undervania. Only bad thing I can point out is the clashing artstyles of the Omori/Undertale inspired battles, the lowpoly exploration, and the clean style anime girl at the end.
Edit: good things are of course the setting, which is pretty interesting, and the combat which I hope develops into something truly unique.
I absolutely love the idea of a retro shooter in this setting and I think the game is on its way to do it justice. The two pieces of feedback I want to give are that optimization is needed since shotgunning a wall point-blank practically freezes the game for a second lmao, and that movement feels a bit unengaging. The game's levels are very big and I found myself wishing I could do anything to move faster. Bunnyhoping, just a sprint, anything.
