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jakefriend

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A member registered Apr 29, 2020 · View creator page →

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Okay, honest feedback from playing. This is fairly critical but not meant badly.

  • This is trying way too consciously and overtly to emulate Hollow Knight. The title screen in particular is just... Hollow Knight's. If you have any interest in this gaining commercial viability or popular success, you need to abandon this direction and find your own ASAP. At bare minimum, if you're emulating others' directly, you need to wrap the aesthetic differently. Also a bit of a tone whiplash after the "Happy Doodz" silly cartoony logo.
  • The tutorialization is all over the place. You're told how to walk, but before you ever need to you have to crawl, which you aren't told how to do. And so on. You're told how to attack before there are any enemies, then like 5 tutorial points later you fight an enemy and you just have to remember what the attack key was. Before you ever need to regular jump, you need to double-dash-jump.
  • The tutorial ghost people also are pretty inconsistent on how vague their direction is vs. outright telling you the controls to press; I think you should be more consistent and if you have to standardize one style or the other, do the latter so the player at least always knows what they're being told to do/learn.
  • Someone warns you to look before you leap, with the indicated icons just being the movement keys again. I hold down, assuming it'll let me see down; it doesn't. I jump down, assuming there's a trap but not being sure how to avoid it, die. Not sure what you're meant to do here or if the 'look down' command just wasn't working?
  • Way way way too many things taught in too short a span, which is not how player retention works. You need to establish the player understands and has retained one thing before packing on another. In like, two minutes, you've introduced base gameplay, two types of attack, a shield, and two different resources besides health. The first enemy takes like 8-9 hits before you've even established the player knows how to attack, and you fight the next enemy with a different attack, and then suddenly you're fighting a boss with like, one and a half actual enemy fights under your belt, maybe.
  • Genuinely rolled my eyes at "Jailer of the Untriumphant". Deeply overdramaticized. Approaches like that really need to earn the player's respect to be taken seriously, and when you force it that fast, well. Yeah.
  • On retention/tutorialization again, by the time I got to the boss I hadn't really been tested on this pretty wide skill set (many of the keys I only had to press like, once ever, or in a single combat situation) and didn't really remember what my moves were besides "spam attack" and "one of these was a shield, shoot, which key was it". Looking at your gif it probably feels good to be dashing through the enemy hitbox but I don't think you've actually trained the player enough yet by a long shot.
  • UI takes up far too much space. Lines are way way way too thick. I also don't think it looks that great with very sharp pure white edges when that's not really in line with the in-game artstyle.
  • And, uh, as others noted, this is outright just Hornet's outfit down to the colour. This is an outright error. Imagine if you dressed the character in red clothes with blue overalls and a big red hat with a "M" on it, then gave them a mustache.
  • Maybe I'm being overly nitpicky but I don't think the font suits the art style.

That was pretty critical - some positives.

  • I liked the gremlin-y rat character noises a lot. I think leaning into that more than the self-serious HK/SS direction would be a good move.
  • Assuming you learn and internalize it, it seems like a pretty varied and responsive moveset.
  • The overall art style and aesthetic was working, other than the blatantly HK-elements (font, black ghosts). I do agree that having pure white background elements with pure white gameplay elements isn't great but that's pretty addressable, and I think the simple gradient-shapes looks is overall working and cohesive.

Hope I'm not coming across as disheartening; if you slow down your tutorialization and back off from the HK imitation I do think you're starting on something solid here.

It looks like you used scaffold instead of bricks on the right wall! Can't see the left but possibly the same there too? (I recognize the readability on the left side isn't great - an issue I didn't have time to solve unfortunately!)

Thanks! It's actually less painting and more of a line art cartooning style - books on principles of animation would be more useful than on painting, I think! That said, this is just my personal style that's grown over time; I haven't used tutorial resources for art before so I don't have any to recommend 😅

Even-more direct follow-up hint (with one number worked out):












If the first three numbers are all 1 (as low as they can be) and the fifth question is false, then their sum is 3 and the fourth number is either 1 or 2. Because that doesn't isolate a single number, that can't be right - so the fourth number must be 9, with the fifth question being true and the sum of the first three numbers being 8.

From here, the rest of the solving should be a lot easier - there's only so many combinations of the numbers on this phone that can total 8!

More direct follow-up hint:















In order for you to get the fourth digit, the fifth question must indicate exactly one number, and only one number. Because it is comparing a sum to itself, the only way it can isolate a single number is at either end of the 1-9 set, if the total of the other three numbers is either less than 2 or greater than 8.

Even more direct hint in next comment.

Hint to help you get started: (hopefully you have to hit 'read more' to see this!)









Consider the premise that you should not need to bruteforce the code, at all: The questions, when answered correctly, will only ever lead you to a single possibility of numbers that can be the code.

Then, look at the fifth question first. What would have to be true for this question to indicate a singular numeric answer, between 1-9?

More direct hint in next comment.

Still gonna be a while, sorry!

Nope! It's unlikely the demo will be updated past where it is right now, other than some quality-of-life thing, and the full game is still a ways out. (The demo is like, a teeny tiny fraction of the content that's gonna be in this thing!)

Yep! Still a while out, but it's my full-time focus every day :) It's a BIG game, is the thing!

cat in car simulator

I adoored this game

Thanks for making a video, glad you enjoyed it! Just noticed that you were actually playing an old buggy build from Sept 2020, when the most recent build is April 2021 with much more content and polish in general - so some of the awkwardness you ran into is long-since dealt with! That said if you're interested in checking it out again, I'd just wait a few months more until the updated demo comes out :) Cheers!

I'm glad you enjoyed! 😄 I barely had a chance to playtest for enjoyability, so I was really hoping it'd all come together at the end!

Can't wait to see more! :D

This is a problem with your local device, unfortunately, not the game.

The files are all the same version for different operating systems. There are icons showing which, and you can hover over for the full filename.

same tbh

Katana!! Your energy is so good in this, I was so into how into it you were :D Thanks for sharing!

Hi arsenkka, that happens when your computer can't handle the GLES3.0 open source drivers the project uses. If you message me at jakefriend.dev@gmail.com or on the Discord server (link above), I can get you a copy of a GLES2.0 export that will work.

(The full game will have a proper configuration file that manages this, but for the time being, it's just a separately exported executable.)

Hey, thanks for the feedback and glad you enjoyed! :D

I actually just posted a new patch, which you'd have to redownload (but won't break backwards save compatibility). It addresses some rebalancing of the Waking Fossil fight, and adds one more secret event :)

The white Xs aren't quite visible enough yet, yeah - I'll need to iterate on that a bit more still. But thanks for passing that on!

Yes! The full release will be on Steam, Itch, and possibly GOG.

gaming

Thanks Chillera! I'm aware of #1 as the game's currently meant to be manually downloaded (I'm not sure why the itch app is pushing it when I haven't yet set up the app integration - I'd prefer it didn't until I was ready for it).

#2 is a bug that's been cropping up only in the Kickstarter build the past few days, and which I'm trying to resolve for the March 30th secret content update. Right now if you can open the settings, turn off fullscreen mode, and turn it back on, that should reset it to 'proper' full screen! Sorry for the inconvenience there :)

No, I can't sustain a living without charging for the game, nor would I feel comfortable about dedicated a total of a year and a half of my life to giving away a high-effort product for free. The demo will remain free forever, and may still get 1-2 updates in the future.

Please see this answer below!

(1 edit)

Hey sikry, while I'm thrilled at how the Kickstarter is doing, $24,000 CAD is not even going to cover my own costs, just rent while my partner covers everything else. Even if I didn't need the money myself, it wouldn't be half-enough to fairly pay a single additional developer for a year. Just to make it clear that it isn't some colossal amount of free money to throw around!

Unfortunately that's part of exporting an EXE for a small project - until Microsoft can see it has been publically downloaded X number of times, it will warn you that it's an unknown file. Every time I put out a new version that download count per-file drops to 0 so this will happen a lot until I stop updating it :/

It is safe, though, and only needs to be approved to run.

Sorry to hear you didn't enjoy the art, Yoppy. Did you end up trying the demo?

That depends on how much funding the Kickstarter gets! Hitting 100% will take us to the very end of the year, while adding in the stretch goal content would extend development time by 3-4 weeks per.

I loved your video!! Thanks so much for sharing! Your enthusiasm is so contagious hahahaha 😄 I'm so glad you enjoyed!

Extra-hard bonus levels you say...? 00

So glad to hear about the hyper successful launch!!

I've been waiting for you to drop this!! :)

Thanks Liam!! : ) Definitely will on both counts! Linux users have been a big part of the 7k download milestone!

Sorry to hear that, Enderslime! Do you know which star you weren't able to get? I haven't had any other reports about a problem like this, and the code around the stars is quite simple, so offhand I don't have enough starting information to have a sense of what happened.

Gotcha! The game doesn't auto update, so you have to re-download when there's a new version :) Glad to hear it's an old version as I was sure I had fixed that for 07!

Thanks for letting me know! Could you tell me the version, either on the filename or the main menu in-game?

Oh wow, that's so awesome Enderslime! 😄 Really glad to see you back trying the demo updates! We're only about a week out from the big lore update with a ton more to do and read about the world, you should check that out too!

PS - we'd love to have you in our discord! It's a great place to share stuff like this and has a really good community in general!