itch.io

I played the demo. Idk if the infinite jump was intentional? I explored everywhere I could, including the out of bounds area in level 1 with the infinite jump. I didn't find any lore though. Just the morse code in the description. Interesting game.

Hello! So I played the demo today, and I wanted to give some feedback as someone who is also learning game development! I promise not to hate blindly, and I think indie devs who are learning should help each other! So I'm not going to critic like you've done this for years (I don't really have the qualifications myself anyway lol).

Firstly, I see that there's a decent amount of aggression in your game description above towards the potential people playing the game. I can totally get why you'd get frustrated with people saying it's a Deltarune ripoff instead of other aspects. However, I feel like it also can make people who do want to check out the demo turn away. I'm unsure how consistent the comparison has been mentioned, or how negative the feedback may have been elsewhere, but I think keeping it unmentioned on the game's home page would be best.

Now onto the game itself. Yes, it's a heavy mix of popular Deltarune stuff. But I think it's more important to talk about what that actually consists of. Story, exploration, fights, puzzles, characters, dialogue, etc. All of those things are HARD to get right. So much so that I haven't even tried to do stuff related to writing (I'm a mostly self-taught programmer who sucks at that stuff lol). But I do think that the story and overall progression of the demo was hard to follow. I didn't feel like there was something pushing me forward or guiding me very well. The 2 times I felt like I had something keeping me progressing was the elevator key puzzle to floor 2 and 4 (I actually didn't talk to mrluxe since I was exploring and found the key that way). Aside from that, I felt a little lost, or didn't have a motivation to move forward? I guess to compare it to Deltarune, Kris and Susie got stuck in the dark world and wanted to get back to school. Here, we fell asleep and are moving forward to a goal that isn't there (unless I missed the dialogue giving a reason?)

I think another reason I felt a little loss is because I had access to really big rooms with a lot to look at? I instinctively explore what's open to me and see what isn't accessible yet. I assume this was to give the player an area to look for the floor 2 elevator key, but I think it's a bit too big of an area? And there seemed to be a lot of rooms to access in general that were empty? I'm assuming that's because this is a demo, and they'd have a purpose in the actual release? I think having access to the empty rooms made it feel a lot less fleshed out.

With that being said, I understand that this is a learning experiment, which is good! It's good to try and recreate games you enjoy when learning and putting your own ideas into them. That's a great way to learn. However, I think you could learn by taking smaller parts of it and trying to polish them more. That way you aren't spreading the effort across a giant project that took Toby Fox himself ages to make. Though, with this project, I'm sure you saw how hard it can be to manage when things start to grow in size. Especially with organizing code (I myself am still pretty bad at documenting code lol). I saw that your Instagram bio says the game is already cancelled, but I hope you take what you learned from this project and apply it to a different one! You aren't defined by one project or by an attempt of a larger one. Start with a clean slate, maybe reuse some code and see where you can do better! Completing a lot of small projects can and usually do teach more than a singular large one!

Also I'm unsure if this was a bug or simply an ending point of them demo, but I couldn't complete the Oliver floor 3 quest. I looked everywhere for the knife, but I couldn't find it anywhere. So I got the UndertaleModder and set the completion flag to true. That let me get to the Mrluxe fight, which again, I'm unsure if there's a proper end screen to the demo beyond that. But I didn't see anything else to do after it. I already made this comment really long, so I'll end it here 😭. But I do hope you continue game dev beyond this! Good job publishing something you made! (Most people never post anything)