itch.io

Well communicating permadeath could be more clear. In other roguelites such as Noita you die, you get a big game over screen, you get the screen showing your run's stats and your personal records, and then you explicitly get a 'new game' option which takes you to difficulty selection. In Alchemickal you get a stats screen but I didn't think it was clearly a game over screen, and a 'retry' button which implies to me that you're just respawning in the same run.

I'm not sure about the time slowdown. If you don't engage with the alchemy the time slowdown isn't really needed as the enemies that I encountered are all ranged and telegraph their shots for a long time. Maybe have fewer elements to deal with earlier on? The tutorial introduces them one by one maybe the game should too? Or should they be randomly found and unlocked which influences your choices for what to buy from the big booba lady or whatever other sources of items are in the game.

Or maybe make the alchemical stuff a passive build that you tinker with during quiet times and use the right-click controls to add more twinstick combat mechanics and powers since the player will have more mental bandwidth to focus on combat if they're not trying to pick different elemental damage types on the fly. In Noita for example I only have to think about my wand  build when I'm between levels, during combat I don't have to slow time and hastily rebuild my wand to get a bit more damage against some of the enemies on screen, just point, shoot and dodge

Also just a thought if your central mechanic revolves around colour matching that's going to make the game inaccessible for colourblind people which, it's like 1/12 people it's not a lot but also not insignificant

I haven't tried this game before. I didn't get past the first level firstly because every time you die either it generates a new level or you appear in a different part. I appreciate some good procgen for extending replayability but I think if you're respawning in the same game it should be the same level... Unless this game is supposed to have perma-death and each respawn is a new game in which case there needs to be better messaging about that because I don't know what the stakes are.

The procgen also does entirely randomise the new player experience. The very first room I entered a large circle appeared next to me and a big turret immediately blew me away, this was the first enemy I encountered outside of the tutorial.

The alchemy system I'm honestly not sure about, I found juggling that while dodging a room full of enemies and playing a colour matching game in my head for which element each colour-coded enemy was weak to was a lot of mental load for so early on in the game, and I'm not sure there's enough benefit to interacting with the system when you could concentrate entirely on dodging and using default attacks. I get that it's very similar to and probably inspired by Magica but it seems more cumbersome to use while being less flexible than in Magica. 

It's very competently made game but I don't think it's for me. 

Runs fine on Linux. 

Very cool, I have only played up to mission 3 so far, I plan to play the rest later.

All in all I like the movement system and controls, I haven't seen it before and its very clean. I wonder if it's possible to queue reverse and forward movement orders? As in "back out of this dead end and then move forward this way" without having to wait for the reverse move to complete before drawing a new forward path.

Gameplay is great, my only concerns are the tonal inconsistency of having an anime girl, seems like the overall vibe of the game lends itself to a more grounded set of characters and the anime girl might not be the best for people I imagine would enjoy this game. 

Also it might also be nice to see what the game is like without dithering, maybe a CRT filter instead since the perspective of the player seems to be from some kind of distant satellite or drone. The infantry units being as small as a random dithered pixel makes it hard to tell what you're supposed to be looking at, you just see a healthbar and no indication of anything else. I also noticed the infantry have a habit of hitting walls or corners they're hiding behind with their manpads, which seems like it shouldn't be happening.

I ran this on Linux by adding it as a non-Steam game and forcing it to run through Proton, it ran fine though I noticed some slowdown when popping smoke. Not sure what the actual cause was.  Some attention to a Linux build might be good at least for the sake of Steamdeck support.

I had to switch relative melee off to feel like I had any control over the bat, but once I did it was fine. Could potentially use rmb to toggle relative mode on or off rather than it being a menu setting? 

Would be good for the game to be more selective for when the slowmo death animation happens, if there's one enemy in the corner and you just shoot to finish him off it probably doesn't warrant a slowmo moment. However if there's also too much happening on screen it can be very bad for awareness.

I didn't even realize the steam vents in the 3rd area damaged you. Here is the first time I got to that long corridor after the grenade launcher guy without knowing the vents were dangerous. I think this is because there's usually so much going on at any one time I don't know what is actually hitting me.

The character being white and the hat being white makes it hard to always be aware of when you're wearing the hat and when you're vulnerable. I guess you don't want to change the design to a different colour hat but maybe some other cue would be in order. 

Linux build runs fine btw.

Glad you liked it. 

Yeah I kind of programmed the asteroids because I get side-tracked by vaguely interesting problems, and then realised I didn't have much to do with them, I did consider making it into a mining game also. If I were to expand the game I'd probably use the same code for ablative armour panels on certain enemy types, or for doors in a megastructure dungeon of some kind, etc.

The cutscene is a result of me discovering tweens about 2 weeks before demoday, and there's a ton of signals going on for spawning the ship etc, there is an option to skip the intro in the settings but not during the cutscene itself

Thanks, I'm glad you liked it. And I much appreciated the stream too

Nice. I think it'd benefit from more warthunderlike mouse controls or controller support if it doesn't have that already. Is this enginedeved? Using floating origin? The view distance is concerning for an aircraft game as if you gain a modest amount of altitude your view is quickly restricted to a disc of terrain below you before range-based fog obscures everything. The walking mode at the beginning also doesn't seem necessary for the stage this is at. But all in all its a nice prototype

Thanks for playing. The repulsor is tuned so that you can only reliably hit the enemy when closing distance, which is meant to discourage kiting an entire fleet of enemies around the map and instead being a bit more aggressive. But I didn't put too much thought into balance, it is meant to be challenging since it's a very short level.

The pixeljitter issue I've noticed too, and is one reason the star background doesn't move because if it does it's the pixels become very obvious, I will investigate solutions, thanks for the link

Very neat, not much gameplay but I know you've been enginedeving this so I'm sure it'll come together.

Did encounter this weird ground texture in the altar(?) room, not sure if intentional, also some wind particles stuck in the wall.

https://streamable.com/6wseae

Ah ok, I didn't even realise that was an input

Thanks glad you liked it.  And the projectile thing was one of those little details that I probably would have forgot about if you hadn't asked for it

Thanks for the feedback. I put up a new version with fullscreen so hopefully that helps with the stuttering. It might be an issue with Godot not having physics interpolation, but it doesn't happen on my machine so its hard to debug.

Thanks for playing and giving reasonable criticisms. I've never encountered the crackling audio but I've heard it's an issue with Godot that should be fixed so maybe I need to upgrade

Getting filtered by the menu and can't start a game

https://streamable.com/afswh9

The first one. The corners of blocks and the protagonist are both round, but both have square hitboxes, it made me misjudge the simplest jumps. The acceleration also makes it feel pretty mushy

This is really cool, great effects and destruction, reminds me of desert strike somewhat

I did have some trouble reading what was going on since the colours all blend in. It would really benefit from some icon overlays for enemies and yourself, or just different colours for the mechs even if its just army green

Awesome, thanks for playing

You can set the cutscene to skip in the settings, but not currently while it's playing... and I meant to add menu pause but completely forgot

Neat puzzles. Though the level with the 3 pulleys seems possible to get into an unwinnable state, I'm not sure if you can unwind the pulleys, I could only hit them to lower them

I got filtered.

Very nice, lots of potential.

1. Holding right-mouse to aim the whole time seems like it might need some thought since I'd say you spend more time wanting to look around and aiming than you would wanting a forward-locked camera. 
2. Probably a good idea to consider controller support if it doesn't already have it because this could be good on console, might be hard to get right with the manual aiming though.
3. Aerial controls would be nice since there are ramps, it'd be nice to be able to magically tilt your car so you land on your wheels.
4. I have no idea what the pickups were doing
   

Just tried playing but I have no idea what the controls are, how to cut trees, dig or attack. Can you give a quick summary of the controls

Damn. I removed the fps limit because the whole screen started stuttering for me, but only when I had my screen recording software open, which is weird. Also made it fullscreen, maybe that'll help? Thanks anyway

I can't reproduce the jitter reliably on my machine. Someone in the thread said it might be a Godot problem where the physics step is out of sync with the idle step and that Godot 4.3 will fix this... In the meantime I've uploaded a new build which caps at 60fps, if you could let me know if that solves the issue that'd be great.

Glad you liked the destruction physics. I'll see if I can do anything about the jitter

Thanks.

I hadn't seen this jitter before, but if I agro the entire map it starts happening for me too, so must be performance issues. I'll see if I can do anything about it.

I played the first level twice, got swarmed by a hoard of skellys.

First impressions, feedback and suggestions:

I couldn't use the spell wheel at all, my keyboard doesn't have function keys and trying to click on the icon with the mouse while something's rushing towards you felt clunky.

It's kind of annoying that the projectiles you fire are so slow, as enemies can walk out of the way, and you can't lead them because you have to click the enemy to fire at them.

Items that you can pick up could always have the outline effect applied, they're easy to miss and walls can obscure things easily.

Enemies that you have line of sight to could have their outline on if they're obscured by a wall, currently they only have it if your mouse is over them. You can be in the same room as an enemy and not see them because you're not close enough to a wall to make it fade out.

Moving, interacting with objects and attacking an enemy are all left mouse actions, so if there are enemies clustered in a doorway and you're trying to shoot at them, if you click on the open door your character will start walking towards it to interact instead of shooting at the enemies. I'd suggest either having another interact control or not making the player walk to a distant object to activate it, only activate if they're in range.

Walls fading out can make it hard to distinguish where the boundaries of rooms are because the floor texture continues uninterrupted underneath. I'd suggest having a shadeless black object at the bottom of each wall piece which isn't affected by the transparency shader, then where the player can walk should be much clearer.

It'd be nice to access the keybind menu during a game session. I wanted to check the controls again after starting and I couldn't. Also rebinding would be good to have.

All in all, impressive, very nice.

I liked the part where you blow apart the cubes.

https://files.catbox.moe/pgx36o.mp4

Yeah from the looks of it, it's detecting the left and right throttles as axis inputs. It must have ignored them for most of my playthrough but then there was an input jitter or something and it picked the hotas up, since it wasn't an issue until level 5 or so.

It's not a big deal and I don't think it's something you have to worry about. I encounter this problem with various games that have controller support, though Noita had a specific option to disable gamepad input altogether so it'd be nice to have but again not a priority especially at this stage in development.

I liked the part where you poke toads. Good game.

Though at certain points my fairy started walking to the bottom right. I have a HOTAS plugged in so maybe the game was detecting the input from that. Strange that it didn't detect it from the very beginning if so.

Nice art style but movement feels slow and clunky which might just not be my preference. The mechanic where you shoot upwards and drill down mostly gets triggered unintentionally because all the enemies are above me and I'm just trying to shoot at them. Might be worth having a separate action button for certain things like that.

Good start. I appreciate procgen. Not sure about getting swept away by fast current in the middle of the river. The rest of the gameplay seems sort of turn-based, as in things only move when you move, but when in a river everything's moving and you sort of have to just click and hope you get to the banks again. Seems like a bit of a disconnect there.

Hope to see more.