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Thanks for playing! It was fun to watch live.

Yeah that's fair. I'm not a fan of traditional survival mechanics with resource gathering, farming, grinding, etc. But I love survival mechanics from survival horror games, so in the moment resource management is my jam. Maybe I should add more randomized fruit spots, now that I think about it. Either way, I'll keep your experience with it as a data point.

Okay, just checking. Those are the only food items available in the current demo.

This save data was very useful, thank you. I figured out what the bug was pretty fast, and it had to do with world state flags. I appreciate it.

Thanks for being so constructive, and apologies for the crashes.

Hunger is one of those things where I feel like the game is better for the friction. I'm trying to capture the friction from survival games while not having it be a traditional survival game. I want it to be an action game with survival elements. Though I can definitely add a difficulty setting to make it not a thing for players. I am wondering, did you find the other food items that gave you different buffs?

Yeah I've also been thinking about the EXP loss thing. Right now it's set so you can protect yourself from losing EXP by eating kalo poi, but you're right that it still feels like a fairly large punishment early on.

For the balancing, yeah, you're right about the difficulty. It's simply something I haven't touched in a while due to working on other aspects.

Bizarre crashes. I'd be surprised if trying to load the game constantly gave you that error, because while I have seen it, it's pretty rare in my experience. I don't suppose you'd be able to get me that save data, would you? It should be some place like C:\Users\sleepl\AppData\Local\Moku, assuming you're playing on Windows and not on Linux with Wine or something.

As for that last one, do you suggest I have the player hold the pose at the end of an attack a little longer before going back to the basic pose?

Yeah that's a simple fix. It might look a little awkward but it will be easier to understand than what you have currently. Either just hold the follow through, or make the return to idle a lot slower.

Any ideas for a better dodge key? V?

I'd make the dodge key ALT probably, but that's just because it's easy for my thumb to reach without accidentally hitting SPACE. In the future you will probably want to add keybind customization.

When you say predictable do you mean the attack impulses send you too far? Because that's something I noticed in your video. That is REALLY damn weird, because that isn't how it behaves in my testing. If you've seen the MP4s I post on the threads, you'd probably noticed the attack impulses aren't rocketing you around. It's much more manageable there. I'm going to have to look into that somehow.

Yeah, the biggest thing is definitely the impulse. I had a friend test it, and the game behaved the same on his computer. If I had to guess, it's an issue tied to frame rate. As far as I can tell, I'm running LFD at 144 FPS on a 144 Hz monitor. If you have a more frame limited monitor, such as a 60 Hz monitor, and Unity is tying the game's frame rate to your monitor's frame rate, and the physics aren't properly set up for it, physics impulses could become massively over tuned at higher frame rates. This is a very common problem, even in professional video games. Mind you, like I said, that's just a guess. I don't know for sure.

EDIT: I tried setting my monitor to 25 Hz and ran the game again. It didn't seem to make a difference, so I could be wrong.

If you must know, the purpose of pause attacks are usually to be more multi-hit style combo extensions.

Yeah that's perfectly fine. My main issue with the combo system is still the fact that the player character goes into an idle stance before continuing the combo.

Hey thanks for playing.

A lot of the art still needs a lot of work. At some point I'll be overhauling player and enemy appearances.

I might end up changing the frying pan in the future so it's a bit less cumbersome to use. Otherwise the game is fairly based on timing and positioning for attacks, as opposed to focusing on twitch reactions.

I could probably add little pushable things here and there. Definitely not a bad idea.

Apologies for how much I was rambling. I'll try to recap and add things below.

• Smooth animations really are everything here. If the player character animation goes back to idle, players will assume the combo string has been broken. The recovery time after a swing should be a lot longer. Worse comes to worse you can let the player dodge cancel the recovery animation.
• Swapping between sword and fist should either be instant (probably best for a fast paced game like LFD,) or should only be (and mostly always be) possible when in idle. It felt extremely finnicky and I have no idea why.
• Dodge should not be E, that way the player can control all of WASD.
• Standard attacks should be predictable. I shouldn't be flying all over the place just by hammering the basic attack button.
• Non-standard attacks should have a point: IE, chase attacks, stun locks like juggles. It seems you have these but they're still very finnicky. Your running chase strike is way over tuned and should stop at the enemy it targets. Your upper cut juggle is probably fine, but at least right now there doesn't seem like much of a reason to chase them up to try to attack in the air. You might even want to add some sort of AoE attack, like a spin attack, to hit enemies all around you if you get surrounded.
• There needs to be better camera controls, such as turning the camera and having the camera face the enemy better while targeting. The camera does try to keep the enemy in view, but in my experience, targeting cameras tend to feel best when they try to roughly keep the player between them and the enemy.
• Something as simple as decreasing the jump gravity could go a long way into making the jump feel better. You can also reduce the jump strength to match if you don't want the player to go higher with lower gravity.

Yeah sorry about that.

Thanks for playing. Can you elaborate on the strafing sideways being awkward?

• How was it awkward?
• What input were you using, gamepad or keyboard and mouse?

• Some sort of visual indicator that you can combine an item in the stack with what's in front of you would go a long way to making the game more intuitive.
• E to interact would feel better for me personally.
• I have no idea if the attack button is actually functional.

• I love the gore and the way enemies can fly into fans and the like.
• Getting hit barely feels like anything. There needs to be a way better visual indicator that it happens, and likely more obvious wind up from enemies.
• The shotgun is great.

Gave it another go. 

Wasn't sure how to close the game at a glance without doing Alt+F4.

I swung and I gung. 

Apologies for being so negative in the end. I hope you know I'm rooting for this game.

Played your half demo.

Updating the level up screen is something I've been thinking about for a little bit, as well as how to explain how the crafting system works better.

Thanks for playing!

Thank you for your further thoughts. I think you're right about the map thing, and I'll add overworld maps to my to-do list.

You are also correct about me being fine with people missing many items. I'm not sure if I'm alright with players missing pamphlets, as those are supposed to be both story related and tutorial related, so that's for sure something I'll think about more as I continue tweaking this test area and dungeon, and going into eventually crafting the actual game world.

The taro one is an interesting thing. You do make a good point about players picking something and potentially sticking with it, so it gives me more to think about. The reasoning behind the taro being so useful is actually a cultural thing, funny enough. The game in its current state is leaning heavily into Hawaiian culture and mythology, and ancient Hawaiians ate taro mashed into a kinda wet goop known as poi. This was their staple food, and they ate it all the time. In trying to lean into that, I made it so poi is an incredibly valuable food to eat, and swapping off poi could be a risk vs reward thing once players get better at the game. I'll need to think on it more to see how I can continue to incorporate poi without making it a required item for a lot of players.

I'll also add a little text pop up to let players know when they can craft something new.

Hey, thank you very much for playing Moku! Your video was probably one of the more valuable ones I've seen, and I got a lot out of it.

• Due to your video, I'll be adding an option for gamepad players to lock movement to the 8 cardinal directions.
• I will absolutely be adding a sound for there being not enough bag space while in the chest.
• It took you a bit to recognize that you needed to access the chest to change your equipment. It made me realize I should show crafted items going to the chest when you craft them, much like how picking up the rusty pan at the start shows it going into the chest.
• You ran into a bug where the lock-on was refusing to work when the enemy was close to the bottom edge of the screen. I'll be fixing that soon and making lock on more generous, so it takes a few seconds to unlock you from an enemy if they go off screen.
• The bug you saw where you had 4 Kō Salves on the belt but only one of them had 10 is a bug I'd been unsure how to reproduce and then fix, yet miraculously you reproduced it multiple times and I now understand it. Thanks!
• At one point you were fighting a big axe guy on some platforms near lava, and you'd noticed he would take 10% damage from falling like the player does. After picking up the obsidian you tried to dodge back across and ran into something, causing you to fall. That was actually the axe guy's collision box you hit, meaning you didn't go as far. That's a bug I was 100% unaware of until I saw you do it, so I'll be fixing that.
• You also didn't really know what switching the lever did at first, so I'll likely be adding a bit of text saying something like, "You change the flow of the pipe."

That was just the notes I took while watching. Honestly you did pretty well to get as far as you did, especially considering there were some materials you didn't find and some items you didn't craft before entering the dungeon. You can find iron and Olonā (a plant used in rope crafting), allowing you to craft armor, a crossbow, a shield, and rations. You also missed finding Taro, which would have given you two different ingredients to cook with, one of which makes it so you don't lose your EXP on death. You also missed a pamphlet that would teach you about the stab attack, which is really useful to avoid hitting walls. You would have had a way easier time with the double spike arm guys if you had a shield and could just block their wild charge. Not explaining what you missed to rag on you, just giving examples to explain my thought process on the game cause I figure you might be interested.

Moku at its core is a game about exploration, discovery, and mastery over environment. Aside from a few games, I kind of hate modern survival games due to their focus on grinding for materials, and I'm much more interested in the kind of survival you see in survival horror. In survival horror games, you learn how to best deal with enemies whether you fight them or run from them, you learn how to navigate potentially complex environments, and you manage resources as you explore. That's the feeling I'm trying to go for with Moku, where you need to plan what items you'll bring with your limited bag space, manage getting hungry as you traverse the landscape, and push yourself to go further than last time you set out. This game is 100% inspired by The Legend of Zelda on one hand (mostly by Link's Awakening on the Gameboy), but mechanically it also takes a lot from Dark Souls, including attacking with the shoulder buttons and the general difficulty.

One small mechanic you complained about was the injury system, which I completely understand because it's not tutorialized at all. When you get hurt, enemy attacks include an injury modifier, usually 10%, which makes it so 10% of the damage they do is applied to your health cap, meaning you can't heal it back unless you rest at a tent. That was the chunk of your health bar that was striked off with the black diagonal stripes. Being on fire has a massive injury modifier at 50%, making it incredibly dangerous. This mechanic is to add another layer to the health system, making it less feasible to just bring a bucket load of healing items to damage sponge your way through the game.

Another mechanic you complained about was wall hits, which I am of two minds about. On one hand, I want your weapon and attack choice to matter beyond just going for the most damaging option. Hell, normally that option is grab attacks because they do massive damage, but doing grabs when facing multiple enemies is a huge gamble because you can get hit and get stunned out of the grab before it completes. You also might choose a stab, because it won't smack against walls. But you also might want a swing, because it can hit and stun multiple enemies at once. So I like the mechanic for those aspects. On the other hand, it's 100% true that enemies straight up ignore hitting walls right now, and that's something that will be fixed later on. Everything is test enemies right now, so there's a lot of details they lack, such as their own attacks hitting walls, causing them to need to pick attacks suited to the space they're in as well.

There was another funny little thing that I'm not actually sure how to fix. When you crafted the Leiomano (which are real Polynesian swords, pictured below,) you of course immediately went to cut the bush to pick up the Koali ʻawa (which is a type of Hawaiian Morning Glory). You then proceeded to move on instead of going to the crafting table to craft the Kō Salve with the Koali ʻawa. The crafting table sparkles any time you can craft something, because any time you can craft something, you just should, because of course you don't lose the resources for crafting and there's zero downside to crafting everything immediately. That fact is far from intuitive with most games having crafting resources be finite though, and the sparkle is the most obvious thing I feel I can do right now without downright dragging players to the crafting table by the ear. That all is fine, players should realize before long that the sparkle means go craft. But that does occasionally lead to a scenario where a player is able to craft the Kō Salve, but doesn't, and then gets the tutorial for the Kō Salve and gets confused. It is 100% an understandable mistake, and I have no idea how to solve it yet.

Moku still needs a lot of refinement, and I will be getting there eventually, including even the font stuff you mentioned. Once again, thank you. I'm glad you were able to see part of my vision in the time you played.

Thanks for playing! Yeah the sword stab thing is a bit of a hold over from when it was, well, a traditional sword. The current weapon is a leiomano, which is basically a Polynesian style sword, a wooden paddle with shark teeth around the edges. I could definitely imagine decreasing the EXP cost for earlier levels. Also, very weird bug you got. Are you able to reproduce that or was it a one off thing?

Thanks for playing!

Yeah, I will add menu stick controls to my to-do list. Thank you for the reminder.

Basically all the enemies are just placeholder graphics right now. They're supposed to be monsters but I haven't made any actual monsters yet. As my art overhaul continues that will be done.

That's not a bad idea. I'll figure something out.

I made a recording for it.

Made a friend of mine play. She got to the point where the big golf ball came around to try to kill her, and ended up giving up there. "The tension is no longer there when he just comes running over every time I try to take a shot. It's not interesting any more."

The main menu is really awful. The fact that the selection indicator is the menu option looking grayed out? I kinda hate it. It should really just be a pointer that moves between the different options. As for the gameplay, that I enjoy, though I wish I had proper camera controls with the right stick. You can still include the shoulder buttons setting the camera in specific positions, just give finer control with the stick.

Played for a while. Movement feels weird, like for some reason it's stilted to start sometimes. The fact that so many attacks enemies do can miss just cause you're close enough is odd. The third fight was pissing me off with the deflect timing. She'd do those sets of double swings with the fans, and even though I swore I had the timing exactly the same on my deflects, it just would not work if it started off wrong.

Really neat idea. Got to see the game on stream and I agree, you should finish this game as soon as you can so the idea isn't stolen. My one complaint is being unable to have micro controls over the knobs and dials, making it difficult to get an exact value at times.

Hi there, I second this. I tried to find the roadmap mentioned but wasn't sure where to look. 

Hey, thanks for playing Moku. I appreciate you writing so much.
Most of the enemies are fun to fight. maybe im blind but the cannon guys dont seem to have a tell for when they're about to fire
Yeah, they don't really have much of a tell right now. That's definitely something I'll need to fix when I work on them more.
getting the first tier of weapons / armor feels like a huge upgrade which is nice
It probably won't be as much of a jump when I start making setting appropriate armor, but I am going to make sure gear matters a lot beyond just stats.
could really use some juice and beefier sound effects, maybe some hitstop, screenshake, or particles on landing a hit
Combat in general feels very simple. Nothing wrong with that but also not tight enough yet to really be a selling point
Yeah, you're right about that.
It'd be really cool if by the end of the game your attack speed can be like 3x what it is at the start, didnt play long enough to find out
I dunno if any weapons will end up speeding up that much with your leveling, but I could imagine say, a big heavy slow weapon speeding up a good deal to become more usable.
Environment didnt really "hook" me to see the rest of the island. this might just be my preference talking here but I wanna see some weird shit
Totally fair. It's only a few different plants right now so a lot of stuff looks samey. I'm actually taking a research trip to Hawaii at the end of the month to learn more about plant life, which should improve that somewhat.
Feels like stamina should start regenerating maybe a little sooner imo, adds a lot of down time to combat
I'll need to think on that, or actually tutorialize the fact that any stamina you spend beyond zero adds to the amount of time it takes to regen it. Basically if you have 10,  and spend 30, you need to regenerate from -20, and can't do any stamina based actions until you're above 0 again.
loop of going out > finding materials and getting EXP > coming back and crafting / leveling is nice
I'm glad. That was my goal.
I ended up stopping in the smith dungeon. I get what the idea is with the pipes but was spending so much time running back and forth through the tight rope rooms after changing the levers that I got fed up with the dungeon layout and wanted to take a break
Oh yeah, for sure. It's been a couple years since I made that place as my first attempt at a dungeon. It's got a lot of back tracking which can be frustrating.

Pretty inscrutable. This game could be fun if the basics were taught better. Also buggy.

Hey, thanks for playing Moku again. The aesthetic stuff is definitely coming along down the line. Been doing a lot of plant research to figure out what I need to make assets for. And yeah, I've been thinking about reducing base stamina drain in general, cause needing to eat after every fight is kind of a pain.

Hey, thanks for playing Moku again.

I would for sure place the first food a lot earlier to introduce the concept earlier and I guess place the second food where the first one was.

Moving the first food item might not be a bad idea. I'll take it into consideration.

however I really like the Hawaii theme you've coopted and I would love to see the enemies fit the theme a bit more

Yeah, there's a lot of art work that still needs doing, which has been low on the priority list for me as I work on improving the tutorial and figuring out other mechanical things.

Once last note is that, in many cases but especially blatant in the iron room, you can just grab items and ignore all enemies, which could be a strategy right, but I would consider locking certain items behind a cage that you need to kill all the enemies to unlock or something.

I had considered that, but for whatever reason chose not to do so though I can't remember why. In general I'm not a huge fan of forcing  combat challenges outside of dungeons, because something about it feels off to me, but that's just a personal issue. I might change it.

Also why was there an item over the lava river if you can't jump it? Is it possible to jump it with higher stats? If so then put a sign that references that maybe.

There are 3 (4 if you count something basically impossible to figure out,) ways to get across the lava. One way is in fact to level up strength and agility, which will increase your dodge distance. Another way is to sprint dodge across, which has very tight timing but is possible without leveling. The third way is to find the water gun in the dungeon and use it to create lava rock to walk across. The 4th and impossible to find way is to cast the ice spell which will also create lava rock, which if you're wondering how to cast magic, it's not taught at all in the game yet. Something I greatly want to focus on in the game is having environmental challenges that can be surpassed in a variety of ways based on the player's tools or level, though there's only a few instances of that so far. 

Once again, thank you very much for playing. I appreciate the feedback.

Wow this is great! Thank you for giving the game another go with your partner.

Was confusing that we couldn’t craft what the other had already crafted

Understandable. Just like with all the resources, the way it works is once you have something you just have it.

Generally the outline on items is barely visible (e.g. also in the loadout menu), making it often unclear if a click works/worked

I could make that more visible probably. I'll look into it.

Didn’t understand what the Sprint button was supposed to be on gamepad. Checked it out now in the bindings (it’s "Left Stick Button") and it works, fair enough. But on my pad at least it’s very hard to "press" the Stick at the same time as steering with it.

Yeah I've been trying to figure out a better visual for that. Still thinking on it. That being said, with the gamepad, the default control is it's just a click.

Bit confusing that I see some kinda "shadow" of the mouse cursor on my screen in some menus

Oh yeah, gotta fix that.

It was easy to get confused about the 2 screens, especially as there is no boundary line either. Specifically my partner had the problem, when accidentally looking at the right-side screen to control their character, that the mouse cursor was (obv) always treated as being to the right of their char, no matter at which side of their char they seemed to actually put it. So for a split-screen situation maybe it’s a good idea to confine the mouse player’s cursor to their screen, or else make it so that it works as expected no matter which screen the cursor is on, as long as the mouse player’s char is there. If you get what I’m saying.

Yeah, good idea with the mouse constricting thing, I'll look into that. I'll also make it so a certain setting is on by default that puts a sort of color arrow on your character on your screen, making it easier to tell them apart when they're wearing identical armor and the like.

About the reworked overworld I can’t say much, as I don’t remember the previous one clearly… Seemed to be similar… Maybe the old one was a bit more open? Larger and with more open spaces? But possibly it only felt tighter this time because of 2 players running around, and smaller because I already kinda knew the style. Anw. I really enjoy this exploring and finding things part. Didn’t play all the way to the end this time, as it seemed unchanged. But at least I found both maps this time.

Overworld is larger but more linear. It used to be a lot more open and easy to get lost in.

Thank you very much for the long video, I appreciate it greatly.

No, fresh water was never a food ingredient. You hadn't found enough things to craft anything at the bench. There was just one material you needed past that little cave that you barely missed to allow you to craft a sword. I think this all really is just me needing to find a better way to communicate some of this stuff, or maybe drop the materials that seem more like they'd be ingredients. Not sure.

Yes, it was a Dualshock 4. Glad you enjoyed the video.

Thanks for the reply.

Yeah, something I've had trouble getting across is that once you find an ingredient or material you have it forever, but I also want you to be able to find more to "increase the quality" so to speak, giving you say, better buffs for food.

Ah, yeah you need to rest in the tents in order to make them your respawn point.

Hmm, were you using the leiomano while hungry? If you run out of stamina, especially while swinging a weapon, it can take a bit to regen that lost stamina. That's something I need to communicate better too, maybe.

Thank you for playing.

Were you finding the leiomano slow to use, or the frying pan, because that's intended for the frying pan.

Yep, you're absolutely right about that. They just give experience.

Yeah, lava is dangerous. Can you tell me what you mean by being booted all the way back to the beginning?

Every ingredient and material can only be found once, including the meat. Were you having some sort of trouble that you felt the need to find more meat?

Hey, just watched the video. Not sure what bug you think you ran into, cause everything was working just fine. You picked up one ingredient while playing, which was the Hāpu'u 'i'i, which means Hawaiian Tree Fern. The salt is considered a material, and is used for crafting a number of consumables at the crafting table. I can understand your logic in considering it an ingredient though. Thank you for playing, you gave me something to think about more.