Pretty fun game, I suppose this is just designed to be more of a proof of concept to get some experience for larger projects later (like how april fowl was) and in that vein I think it's really good, it's very well done technically and would be a good start if you wanted to keep working on it or do something else similar.
I did find a bug, if you build something, and then cancel the building, then the game won't let you build something in the same spot (although saving and reloading fixes this.)
The only other small request I have is a way to increase the UI size, as someone with a somewhat high resolution monitor the UI is really small and there isn't much you can do about it, especially since you're using it so often. I think adding some hotkeys might help as well if you were able to.
I also have some more complex (and critical) thoughts on the game and it's general game design and controls that I may or may not write out and put here later.
driftcatch
Recent community posts
Whenever I load in I'm just hovering over the middle of an ocean and can't do anything. Is this a bug or am I missing something?I see, both those characters are a little hard to play and awkward at times. For the Noah Jumbo matchup I found using your arrows while in the air is a pretty good move, Jumbo can easily use his ground pound if you charge on the ground (unless he's otherwise occupied) and dashing into him is going to get you grabbed, I find it's best to summon and then fire some arrows, if you hit him then either use your lvl1 super arrow or rapid fire arrows to keep pressure up. Up closer your uppercut is really great, as are all your HK summons.
For Jumba, just spam orb of love, you throw it at the perfect angle to catch her in the air, it deals solid damage for a projectile, grounds her and can be followed up with a number of moves (low HK summon is great), your uppercut is also a great anti air and deals solid damage too. Generally as Noah, you also want to try and capatalize on grounded enemies as much as possible by timing arrows to hit them when they get up, even if they block it still buys you time to reposition/summon/fire more arrows. Also be wary of your wakeup uppercut, it's really great, but try to only use it if someone is right on top of you, it's easy to start spamming the buttons, whiff the wakeup attack and then get grabbed or comboed all over again.
As for Ra, I found just using his really long heavy attacks to be great against Jumbo, I've won against him like 5 times in a row just spamming HP-HK. He can't do much about it since it's too much damage to approach, it knocks back quite a bit and, he can't reposition well.
Ra does really struggle against Jumba though, I'd advise mostly using his light kick DP to try and hit her out of the air without going too high yourself, as you have zero chance of contesting her in the air, also the light unstable nebula is really great with the black hole it leaves, as it damages her and can be detonated to stop her in her tracks. Comet is also great if you need to rush in, try to avoid warping unless you need to dodge something and she's besides you, it won't let you outrun her.
Jumba is just a matter keeping your anti air options open and keeping track of where she comes from. Jumbo is difficult, try to approach him from the air in order to not get grabbed as much and if you start a combo that's getting blocked have a plan to get out so that he can't grab you once you're done. Also, who do you usually play as? Some characters have an easier time than others.
Small update on this after doing some more tinkering. Earlier I was using the nightly Ikemen version which isn't a full release, so if you just use the old 0.99 release all you need to do is copy over the executable script to the crushing force game folder and you'd be good to go.
Although those 3 stages still won't load, after doing some digging, it seems like it has to do with the Linux port only using OpenGL (As evidenced by the select-GLOnly.def file in cfhud being the same as the select.def file but with every instance of those 3 stages replaced), haven't found a workaround for this yet, and it probably won't be fixed until a new version rolls around that has better support for OpenGL or other, more modern renderers.
Also proton does work fine, this is just if you don't feel like setting it up or just want to use the native version for some reason.
Ikemen actually has a linux port so in theory you shouldn't need Proton at all. I actually jury rigged together a linux version myself, all you really need to do is copy over the relevant Linux system files to the windows version of the game (or copy the game files onto a blank Linux Ikemen) and it should work, although the most recent Ikemen engine changed some things that cause a few characters to no longer work due to a function being depreciated, and rather than try to find an older version of the engine, I ended up editing 3-4 of the older characters to use the newer function, but that was some simple line changes in a text editor. The only real issue is that some stages just refuse to load (Specfically Second Circle Suite, Pleasure Falls, and Black Hole), the game doesn't crash or anything as they don't even show up on the stage select and seem to just default to another stage when in arcade mode, but I can't seem to figure out what causes it.
Honestly I can't see how it's unfair, the game is clearly based on more on games like MvC, Melty Blood, or some SNK fighters, and is mostly focused on aerial combos and normal cancelling, as someone who isn't even that good at fighting games I actually found it fairly simple to pick up, and I can pull off some fairly good combos as some of the more combo heavy characters like Aroma and Texas. You say you have a lot of time in street fighter but from what I can tell SF is a lot slower, more ground based, and has very short combos, so trying to play something like this like SF wouldn't work well.
As for balancing, the game does have some issues there, but if your takeaway is that Kaze is the most OP character I can only come to the conclusion that you haven't fought the majority of the cast, Kaze is low-mid top tier at best, he's a little annoying with his charging grabs but if you go for aerial aproaches or throw out some projectiles you can stop him easily. Characters like GL, Bertha, Trinity, Ra and Jumbo are a lot harder to deal with and have far worse moves and less weaknesses than Kaze has. As for feeling out of place, I really don't know where you're coming from, if you mean there shouldn't be muscular characters, Svetlana and Zafta exist, and if you mean there shouldn't be male characters, Rapid and Cytus exist. I think there should be a few male characters if nothing else than to serve as some decent victims for the girls, and besides it's Kaze's game, I feel like he's earned the right to put his own character in it.
As for difficulty, yeah the game has issues there although as someone else pointed out MUGEN handles bots in not the best way, I think a lot of the characters tend to execute moves a little too quickly, the worst of this is Jumbo's command grab which he'll almost always punish you with if you get close to him, even worse is he basically always starts the match with it frame 1, so you're getting hit with it every round start unless you jump frame 1 (which he'll probably counter by punching you out of the sky anyways.) And the worst part is that it deals around 1/3rd of your HP, so getting hit with it just once is more than enough to cost you the game. Not sure how AI is handled but I think adding some starting delay onto moves like that might be a decent idea, or at the very least toning down the HP loss due to how often you get caught by them.
Overall I think the game is a little easier to play than you're making it out to be, but I can understand becoming frustrated especially since a lot of matchups tend to be hard if you don't know the characters strengths and weaknesses. I'd just lower the bot difficulty and try practicing some combos for your character, and if you just want to watch some girls crush and gas each other there's always the CPU match option.
It's based off of what button you press when you pick the character, the low punch is the base palette, the other ones are for different palettes. Also if you hold the taunt button (Enter by default) and press a button, that will give you even more palettes. most characters have more than 6 so be sure to try it out.
Glad to finally see this game be uploaded in a more "offical" place. Been following it for years, amazing art and surprisingly fun gameplay too. If possible it would be nice to get changelogs, I know you still have a video coming out going over camilla, but it would be nice to have some notes to go over smaller changes regarding balancing/bug fixes to keep track of what gets changed. Anyways, really happy that you're doing well now, hope that you can keep doing what you enjoy!