itch.io

keybinds aside(which make it more difficult to play and judge the game, especially the guns part)
I don't know if guns belong in a speedrunning game, certainly not this many guns? 

Placing a target here or there you need to reach is reasonable as a mechanic to have you plan your route and raise the difficulty by performing more inputs, but it's one input in dustforce(I think?) which is clean and fast, compared to stacks of targets which force you to stand in place, the antithesis to speedrun. 

I beat levels 0 and 1 sloppily and did not feel compelled to unlock level 2. If you do keep guns, perhaps reducing them down to rocket launcher(movement tech) and a pistol each on a dedicated button would help make it more fun and remove the gun management portion, which I think drags it down.

Well, the key idea is that I think a more casual and fast gameplay is better for this idea, the terrain generation means  brainpower spent on navigation and slower arrival at the next combat encounter, two points that prevent more immediate and flowing fun, for the version of the game that **I** imagine. 

It's awesome. maybe menus/buttons could be slightly more fancy, maybe the simplicity is better for the pixel art style. great job. 

Hmm.. I'd like to be faster to match the speed of the enemies. I feel really slow compared to the spiders. 

Vision cones don't make sense for me, I think the game mechanics would be complemented by an arcadey, arena horde style gameplay. I could not figure out the inventory after dying once and extracting once. it took me like 5 minutes to try space bar and figure out it was the dash, shift makes much more sense. To answer your question, this iteration was not fun for me, but the idea is not bad, if done differently( like in similar games, noita, magicraft, bullets per minute, odinfall)

I was able to get real high up by flying into a mountain and converting the horizontal velocity to upward velocity.
I couldn't see shit from the cockpit then until I mashed buttons and found the view swap key. the controls are hard to get used to. but the plane's.. are even harder!!  It's a professional tiny game. my favorite part is the tank handling feel. it almost made me yearn for a tank drifting game.  how's that different from other drift games? dunno. well turning felt real good. 

arrows instead of wasd for movement triggered me. bro..

I think the in game menu aesthetics is shaping up pretty good.(such as shop/guild) 

I feel like an accept/cancel button combo is direly needed on all menus, space and esc for menu navigation gets old fast. 

perhaps add menu choice with num row? frankly I can only like BG3 dialogue choices for when this really vibed with me, but if I'm going to be pressing attack/skill 2000 times per playthrough, maybe num row can save a lot of time and be more enjoyable. it is experimental, I guess.

so I managed to hire some people and get lost in the dungeon for a while. I levelled some skills up(got to level 2)

I didn't have potions so I resorted to escape cheese and trying to find the exit/treasure/boss which I couldn't. I somehow managed to activate the dungeon map, but then wasn't able to do it again. I'm not a huge jrpg guy and never played etrian.

I played with kbm since I was too lazy to plug the controller. it works, kinda.

I got filtered at the loop because I couldn't find the dive button. I also got filtered at the platform with 4 enemies since it's real hard to find openings. I accidentally drank one of the tutorial dudes and felt bad about that, but it also made me smile. really great feature.

I like it, it's pretty comfy and cool.  I don't mind the level design, it's more like a showcase for abilities I suppose. works well enough. I like the vfx and enemy designs but the ground and rocks textures need something to fit the style of the shark.. dunno. it feels mismatching. Looking at spyro it looks like the level textures have less detail and contrast more with the player color theme.

Maybe the shark should be cuter, like spyro? the growl sounds threatening. and he's a skeleton.. so maybe it's a different feel. overall I like it.

I played dome keeper a bunch so I'll do a lot of comparisons, I guess. (and abbreviate it DK)
At first I didn't like the attractor beam, but after upgrading width I started to like it. It's really prone to resources getting stuck on blocks that half obstruct the way. It's also worse than DK in the way that you have to commit to a single direction.  DK's elevator feels amazingly useful from the first moment, a must use in all runs, unless you find a teleporter first. even then.
The map generation feels kinda bad. I got hardblocked very close to spawn in two directions.
It's possible to bounce back and forth between blocks even if you don't intend to but it feels like a bug to speed-mine this way, not like skill expression like in DK.

The win screen opened behind the upgrade screen but I was able to interact with it.

You might want to have a toggle for the gun to rotate towards the mouse, if M1 will be used to shoot the gun.  

There are other DK input parity things that are missing, I think using Q to quit the upgrades is one. not sure.

I can't say I enjoyed the glass around "relics" having  collision. it's bothersome. 

It was difficult for me to distinguish "water" blocks as resource blocks before I interacted with them, I think in DK the earth blocks have a more neutral less noisy texture to them which makes you recognize the special blocks right away.

It has a while to go before it's not "DK but worse", but I think you'll get there.

I have played one "luft-like" game before, which is jet lancer. I feel like one crucial thing that jet lancer has and this doesn't is that outrunning your enemies is pretty simple to achieve, always. so you set up opportunities to safely kill chasers. whereas here it just felt unfair, a sort of gamble. and a hit and run game loop. basically, it is missing the fun. I think flying enemy design(movement, attacks, or both) should(maybe) change, but your movement kit has to change for sure, to improve the fun. 

I've had a similar pathfind issue where an enemy got stuck on the other side of the fence last time, this time I took a screenie. 

I played with controller.

The controls feel better but I couldn't really tell how without playing the previous build. less recovery frames/transition time between states?

Enemies feel somewhat op with their perfect parries(give them a whiff %) and dodges, it feels closer to elden rings input reading than I'd like. not as bad, but it does feel like I'm not allowed to take the initiative but instead should wait until they do something I can react to. 

The parry frames are probably quite tight, maybe too much so. I think the GS should have slower swing times and better poise break+damage stats overall, it feels too close to the scimitar. 

When trying to use GS against the strong dude I tried staying out of the range of his sword and graze him with the GS, it didn't work great, but it somehow felt like it should've hit. Maybe DS has chunky hurtboxes for enemies or weapon hitboxes that extend past the weapon? 

I like the souls ui and the item ui but I'm still a HP/Stamina spiral hater and still think it hurts readability.

kekaroo. joke noticed.

fo sho

I like the artstyle. the opening cinematic too, the two screens before I lost patience(apologies)

Perhaps add some interactivity breaking furniture if it's within scope and won't take too long. Adding a decal to the walls if you hit them can work and should be really quick to do. the melee hitbox feels insanely unfair with how fast enemies are, how fast their attack is. you basically need to gamble who hits first, unless you're really good with the timing already.  but then maybe it's not meant for speedy enemies like the zombies. I just went out of ammo/accidentally swapped to bat and just went on with it.

died pretty fast but I'll give it another attempt tomorrow maybe.

I didn't get how to bounce consistently. it's probably not a good platformer mechanic to just stand in place and play a mini rhythm game.

I'm a sonic hater so I hate the horizontal movement

for the jumps it has to be your decision how to make the game feel. At least come up with 2 control scehemes tops to choose from, if I tried every toggle combination there's be uhh 18+ of them?  

So, I like the mood of this game but it needs a lot of polish.

-The music feels like two melodies competing with each other at times which becomes distracting.

-Tiles are tiny and a bit annoying to click, this repeats with the items in the shop. for the shop the clickable space should probably be the whole square where the item is. for the tiles I can imagine pressing space to raise the tiles to select them from a new horizontal bar that pops where your mouse is, or pressing num row numbres to pick letters.

- Let players learn the game at their own pace, pop up instructions when they choose to press on tabs in the shop. or maybe it's just my preference.

- A lof of things feel rigid, tweens can do wonders for making the game feel more interactive.

-discard tiles by throwing them somewhere, it would probably feel way better than pressing one by one

- use the mouse movement(velocity) to rotate the tiles as you drag them 

-allow clicking a tile again before it stopped "select" tweening to revert the selection, players losing inputs feels bad

I got stunlocked due to the way I built my board after a few rounds and also the browser is less than ideal to play. but I generally like the game. good luck.

Really well done graphics, both high grade and in a cohesive style. I think the combat, gameplay and enemy AI is heavily WIP so there's no point commenting on that. there's a 1 frame animation glitch on transition between some animation states to idle. based box destruction, a souls classic. 

missing a parry opens you up to 2/3hp bar damage if you miss it, those recovery frames are massive. enemy AI can sometimes hang and forget to do anything(including move) until you try to attack or shield bash, it seemed to be when the enemy wanted to chase me but got stuck(?) on the fence(without clipping into it or anything, just against it), so perhaps pathfind issue. I meant to screencap but messed it up.

*chthonic is a mouthful, I hope that's not the real eventual name

*played on an 8bitdo controller and worked fine

I liked the pixel art graffiti just outside of the hall with the seats. very cool artstyle, the big dudes are perhaps a bit too simple in their design. the guy went down the stairs as I killed it, then conserved velocity and moved forward while dying for like 4 meters, then he was interactable as a physics object, I climbed on his leg and was able to spin his around by moving. I think you have a plan for light vs dark play like the way the "neon" on the character shines while in patches of darkness, it's an interesting thing to lean towards in a horror game. good luck.

Interesting concept for a whacky arcade game, the artstyle is great. 

The art direction is awesome(UI, character, enemies, blood splatter)
The procedural animation on the bugs looks very good
I imagine the map art and layout is temp so I won't comment on that
I think the circle of light around the character should be softer, it feels weird having the same intensity as your vision cone.  I think the distinction would give a different feel.
The combat feels way different from teleglitch, slower, anxiety inducing. much less room for error. you're slower than anything the game has as far as I could tell which leans into horror but also is a bit of a problem with the current tuning of enemy AI, positioning, they easily swarmed me on level 3. 
I don't like how much the basic bug sways from side to side, makes it too easy to miss it.  It seemed impossible or too risky to try to melee it, its hitbox almost always damaged me before I was able to land the killing blow, even if I softened it up with 2 shots before. 

The stamina management seems borderline pointless with how weak of a boost it gives(still can't outrun enemies) and how long it takes to recover, but at least I think it would be more fun if it recovered at a faster rate than it depletes.

I think its a neat concept that has promise but the combat balance was off in favor of the bugs. their archetypes are unique though which is good for variety.

Alright, I played it.

KBM controls are very frustrating, mouse doesn't work for anything in the menus, you have to equip with enter when your fingers are on mouse+wasd(E for approve and Q for exit in menus makes more sense in that context, check how Lunacid does it)

the sensitivity is still too low even at 2.0. 

remove the delayed animation from the ladder, just climb at a steady pace. holding E to climb it is pretty weird, either allow a one tap and auto-climb or just approach it and climb/descend with W/S. 

It's a bit annoying to drown in the river and have to start from the menu again, how about a respawn in-level?

there's not much else to comment on but good luck with the project.

For some reason pressing both mouse buttons(vertical bars, yellow line minigame) inputs back on the browser(VIvaldi) which makes that game much harder to beat. I can't find documentation for that on google, maybe it's logitech bullshit.

Uh, I'd love to playtest but the mouse sensitivity is way too low. like 1/3 or 1/4 of what I'd like it to be.

Insanely pretty game and GMI

I think there are also hitzones with different damage multipliers? very cool. I got cornered by the two guys just after getting the rapier then spawned in your test room(?) with variants of clothes just hovering. I didn't open the door or anything, maybe dying prompted it, I'm not sure.

KBM controls are solid, maybe allow binding attack directions to extra mouse keys or control the attack with the way you move(left input for swipe left, user presses attack then is free to move and aim in any direction since the attack is locked in)
I'm pretty sure the Chivalry 2 allows using the latter method.

The UI and text felt too small on 1080p 

I beat the game on my second time but on the first time I got a map which was unbeatable. I'm 95% sure. If there are conditions that let you get more line or less quota growth please let the player know.
Well made, thank you.

Some gamedev advice:
The mesh edges are visible on the wall with the window for some reason.

Look up texel density for more cohesive graphics.

You're fucking with something in a wrong way whenever a player interacts with the fireplace(perhaps particles), that causes stutters for several seconds. It is a weak/old rig but for those simple graphics it feels weird. I can play half life 2 or bioshock.

Instead of having a no-ambience zone inside the house and then max volume ambience, perhaps use a radius around the center of the house and ease the ambience volume gradually.

Played on max diff

instead of gain elevation in the tutorial you can just tell players to jump, the wording is awkward imo

There are secret whiff mechanics when you miss attacks or kicks that also affect your ability to block, at least that's how it felt when I couldn't block several times when I didn't have any input or animation going on, maybe it's 0 stamina, I couldn't check during combat.

Enemy attacks feel unreactable so I was motivated to pre-block and always make sure there's only one enemy in range, fighting a retreating battle. Maybe it was partly due to whiffing, maybe interweaving kick spamming helps.

Gun enemies feel cheap, at first I didn't even try to block them because blocking a bullet with a pipe seemed impossible. they became more doable afterwards but with the horde in the boss arena that was rough.  I was able to kill the two handed thug in the arena but always died afterwards.

I think my biggest issue with the combat is the fear of getting surrounded even slightly and so being forced to play a very specific way with enemies taking turns getting a beatdown so I wish the player had more variety in playstyle. I really hope you add being able to throw weapons. 

Going down ladders is awkward, the forward input wants to climb the ladder even when you're facing the other way.

I don't know what's a good default bind for kick but taking my fingers off movement even for a split second felt like suicide, I rebinded it to M4 almost immediately.
Top tier art style/direction in game environments, characters and menus, music for this game.

For what's it worth regarding my difficulty comments I beat god hand normal KMS last year

OMFG the "rate jam" button hovers over the area where you select trucks and made me lose 7 trucks worth of progress.

Nice idea and execution, my favorite bit about it is the graphics.

GG
The only thing that I would've improved is make the collision for the handle bigger.

Look, the worst thing about this game is that it has a timer that limits clicks per second. I know I clicked a lot more than what I get, the game is running at 100% speed since I have a decent computer. This is an unbearable game design flaw.

in fact it has to be intentional, normally you would just accept all clicks. so you want to inflate game length?? 

The (AIslop?) cover image guy has 4 fingers

-Snappier animation start please, having to wait 500ms-1s until a unit starts running or punching is too long. 
-Enemy death scream lasts 2 seconds beyond death
-Being able to walk through friendly units freely takes some of the strategy of turn order away but it could be a valid design choice, I haven't seen enough
-Allow skipping dialogue on space or some other button, being stuck on a dialogue line 2 seconds after you read it feels awful
-bkspc for undo is bad. 1 2 3 to choose actions and z for undo probably feels better, consult into the breach control scheme. this game is trying to appeal to players of that game, after all.
-there's more UI and unit stats than into the breach, I'm not sure it helps your game. 
-If we have to escape via the breach, why do the demons escape the level when it's done?

-I did not go on a mission past the tutorial because the unit animations and dialogue depress me.

I second including drifting

It somehow feels like the steer directions when going in reverse should be flipped. I can't point to a specific game because it's been years since the last time I played a game with vehicles like those, but it's stuck in my head, gamer sense.

It's weird not being able to kill infantry when shooting a shell at their feet, but only from direct impacts. I think the precise hitbox is for accuracy in detecting the zone you hit in a vehicle, but perhaps it would be nice to add an infantry-specific hitbox that's much larger, for sharpnel and shockwave.

self destruct VFX should be a different color from repair

Vehicle parts destruction is a neat.

One other bug, I accidentally clicked enter a dungeon in the overworld and wanted to cancel so I pressed escape. it loaded the next area but the screen was dark except for the cursor. moving the cursor made sound like the menu was up but nothing was visible. The screenshot I took is just a black screen.

I admire your progress the most(game to game). I admit, I wasn't sold on the concept back then but it seems more interesting now.

-Should replace resusciate with revive imo. it'd help ESLs understand it better right away but maybe you like the british tint.

-Why is the spellbook icon a spear?
-Most of the heals seem very similar. If it was the start I'd tell you to only have 2-3 heal types and focus on other support spells.
-I couldn't move my party out of the way fast enough when I had an attack warning in the tutorial dungeon but I dunno if there's a binding.
-There's some lack of contrast, most things besides the characters are faded.
-I don't like all those stats on armor, I'd rather have just straight up DEF ATK and that's it. 
-Why can I move the camera if it doesn't rotate my characters? seems logical imo. otherwise just diable mouse control. It's far more annoying to have the camera point some way but when you press W you walk 45 degrees to the left.

I was quite at a loss as for what to do.
The controls obstruct the view and randomly(?) disappear/reappear
The conversation screen with the single mounted npc I found seems bugged when you try hovering on nodes, the links to other nodes freaking out, maybe it's the selected node that switches rapidly and randomly.

then I found a bandit outpost or something and quit playing.

The first thing I did was dig myself down until water, then read the controls. hover seems to work, fly is more like a weightless jump forward? it seems to be iffy. hover activates the swimming animation,  if that's intentional.

-the randomize button in the character creator swaps class, gender etc, I thought it was just the looks because it is under the looks side of the menu. that was a tad unexpected.

-Include a demo world to let people play faster?

I'm a fan of the simple graphics and hope to try it again once there's more guidance. I think part of it was me having to use the hover cheat to bear the distance between points of interest.