itch.io

Thanks for playing! 

The barrel section is kind of an easter egg/hidden area for later, I just kept it in as a little secret because the rocks happened to leave that small opening. The floor collision has been fixed recently, too.

For camera easing, it's hard to find a balance because it needs to be responsive enough to keep up with some of the other enemies. Locked camera also has to offset itself a little to frame things from a slight angle so that you don't fully cover the enemy, but I also haven't considered the part of having it be dead centered too. 

The story kind of is just that, and there isn't much else you need to know beyond the few mandatory conversations if all you want to do is to fight. 

Unfortunately, regular non-bosses are part of the game's "will not do" list, because each boss is supposed to ask something a little different of the player to quickly build them up to the point where I can throw even crazier stuff out there and expect them to deal with it. At most, I might do more in-depth ability-focused tutorials/training mode in future, because even the fox can be done in under 2 minutes if you understand how to maximize your damage with the skills. 

Sorry for the late responses and DD reviews, I've been busy with managing the Steam demo launch. 

Some of the bugs that have been mentioned here are fixed in the latest builds (I hope), so give it a try and see if it still happens. 

Thanks for playing! Yeah, there's a lot of bugs in controller focus, and I'm slowly working my way through finding them all. 

Lynette sexo

Thanks for playing!

It is intended for players to figure out how best to use the skills on their own, but I'm still thinking of how I can add extra tutorials for those...

Lynette's a pure projectile parry check. You either learn to reflect them and win the fight in under a minute or you spend forever trying to get past it. The shields have a duration equal to their cooldown, so they'll swap to the next colour if you don't manage to break it in time, and it's also unlikely for you to be able to break the shield without performing reflection against a whole sequence of the projectiles. 

Someday I'll add small bits of voice acting....

I haven't seen other bugs related to that area, but you should be able to just move and leave the dialogue pose. There's a lot of dialogue related bugs that popped up, which I've fixed in recent updates. 

Got the warning too, but I played it anyway. 

The VN system is pretty weird, clicking doesn't advance it and only the keyboard does, but I need to click the options with the mouse. Having everything be stuck together in one text box is very strange. 

As for the writing, there's a lot of spelling and grammar mistakes, but I like the fact that there's words to hover over for definitions. The other guy is okay and the rough way of speaking fits his status as an Outer, but the other 2 women are much more vulgar than I would've ever imagined, especially for what their designs would suggest. I'd have expected the Inner woman to be more stuck up and military-like with a strict personality, and I expected the nomad to be more monk-like (perhaps with a cunning side due to the trading role of the Nomads). Instead, I just got to see them call each other all kinds of insults. 

It tells enough to paint a picture of what the place and mood is like, but I'm don't find the characters other than the 2 guys any interesting so far. 

I think you mentioned something about wanting more feedback leading into your EA launch (I don't think it's ready for one tbh...), so I'm going to be as thorough as I can in this post. 

Most pressing issue with the game right now is the new player experience? I haven't ever tried the multiplayer, so I can't speak for the appeal on that side. Kinda got filtered by trying to make a coffee too, so these are my thoughts and suggestions from a very short playtime. 

1. You're only told to open the cafe and serve customers with the place still in a mess with nothing prepared. 
2. It would probably be better to start you inside the cafe, and then tell you to clean it up and prepare to open (I think most other cafe sims follow this format of having you get things ready first to teach you the basics).
3. Having a dedicated tutorial segment where your senpai (TL Note: senior) maid teaches you how to make coffee would be good, since there's an awful lot of steps to get everything set up. When I'm left to try and figure things out for myself, I run into a lot of problems of try something -> turns out I need to do some other step first -> turns out I need to do something else first which leads to some frustration. You could even just have this as a separate single player mode before you come out and start your career(s) as maid cafe managers. 

Graphics are still really lackluster. You could try grabbing some free textures, rather than having flat colours that don't feel cozy or cute. Try playing with lighting a bit more, and it would also help immensely if the exterior of the cafe looked anything more than just a greybox (or, you could simply not let the maids leave to stop them from seeing it). Could also look into using other shaders like liltoon or poiyomi or whatever's popular in VRC/asset store stuff. 

Default font is cheap-looking, and you should try to make sure nothing in the game screams default Unity UI. Maybe a font that's sans serif? I took a quick look at Google fonts and something like Josefin Sans feels like it'd be a good fit. (although this was while I was cross-referencing the artbook PDF for Kemono Teatime and seeing if I could find a font with a similar vibe. )

Since you've already got vroid models set up in your pipeline, just use them for your customers as well. Give them a bit more personality than blue capsules. Make some serious-looking businessman come in and be a total maid nerd. I think seeing people that you would or wouldn't expect to be in a maid cafe is part of the charm in this idea. You just need some animations for them sitting down and making emotes back at the players, and possibly even have traits for what kind of orders they make. 

Also, if you're going for the friendslop route, then you should also consider what kind of wacky events you can put in, since those go viral for the stupid stuff that make an entire friend group laugh, rather than having everyone be stressed out managing orders.

The general chore-ness of most things, the low-quality feeling graphics, and the default Unity UI takes me out of the experience of being a cafe staff. As it stands, it just doesn't have enough polish to feel like something I'd want to pay for, even if I were to be a job simulator fan, but on the other hand, there's a lot of actionable items you can do to immediately improve the appeal of the game as a whole. The idea itself has a lot of potential, but a lot of it just hasn't been realized yet, and I hope you find a good direction to take it in.  

The loading screen is probably the only part of the UI that looks half-decent. It doesn't help that the main menu image is really blurry lol. 

Controls are fine, but the direction changes are hard to react to if you don't already expect it. There needs to be better signposting for when and where it's going to curve. Collectibles have annoyingly small hitboxes, and I end up missing them by a hair's breadth. The levels feel like their lighting is really flat and asset-flippy for the somewhat realistic style of the assets. It might be a little better if you throw on some post-processing?

Really cool, very creative take on the turn-based combat. Just needs stances to be more readable, I don't know who's doing low or high guards, and it's hard to tell when my parry is coming out since there's times where it'll completely miss a whole sequence and I can't tell if I'm just mistiming it or if the game didn't register it. But a lot of the art is still placeholder,, so there's lots of room to improve on something that shows a lot of promise already. Getting guard broken and juggled by a mob goblin is pretty wild. 

Nothing seemed to happen at the bed, so I couldn't progress (just like in real life)... 

There's some weird animation states, like being able to stand mid-air when the walljump tutorial popped up during a jump, and  trying to attack while climbing up a ledge also just leaves you standing in mid-air. The 2H sword is so much stronger than the 1H sword with how fast it hits. 

Feels way better than the last time I played it, but I accidentally hit the PYW a few times when I didn't mean to. New power-ups are nice. 15 waves do drag on for quite a bit, though, I felt it had already run its course around wave 6-7  (died on wave 8). The enemy variety is appreciated, and most of them bring meaningful differences to the table, but the jumper just feels like a slower normal crab. 

Menu animations are cool. The maps can get really big, which also means that a lot of enemies can end up spawning and flooding the whole map while I'm stuck with just the basic ship that's completely outgunned in every single encounter. I also feel like I got stuck on the level geometry a lot, especially around the doors they spawn from. The breakable obstacles can hide enemies underneath them too. 

Been seeing this for a long time, but this is the first time I've actually played it. Very GMI, love all the cute loading screen art, and the puzzles are at a comfortable but satisfying difficulty. Unfortunately had to leave mid-way through my session and it didn't save, so I wasn't able to play Coast-10 and the bonus level. 

2nd jump didn't work. Character moved very slowly after that, and holding multiple keys together made it just take one pose while playing the same sound over and over again. 

this has got to be the most unhinged platformer i've ever seen holy shit 

Made it to the 10 scarab dance soda and managed to do it, then got filtered by the whole section next to it with the multiple balloon jumps. The demos are nice, but it would be nice to be able to fast forward it, especially to skip the negative examples. 

Pretty cool. I'm surprised at just how far the grapple extends to. Feels less about swinging and more of just pulling myself toward the target. It gets pretty jittery when you're swinging with a very short rope length on a wall, and that can be used to just propel you upwards by releasing it at the right time. 

Didn't manage to make it that far in the game. I'd just get pushed around by a sudden mob and die before I even get to figure out which direction they're in. 

• Felt like I was taking damage from things I couldn't even see, only to find that I'm surfing on a wave of demons somehow. Probably needs that directional damage indicator you see in most FPS games. 
• This is the first time I'm playing with the gravity mechanics, but it feels too binary in how it anchors you to platforms. Just jumping is enough to "disconnect" me from some platforms, even if there aren't any other platforms around. The camera also seems to turn around to align with the platform's direction, which made me flip around instead of just rotating my camera around where I'm already facing. 
• The basic demons die in one hit, so I don't see any reason in using the shotgun. It's got a slower fire rate, and it's rare that things bunch up enough in the early stages for it to make a difference. 
• The scale of the demons feels too big, or they're coming way too close to the player that it's hard to see what's going on. It would be good if they could stop temporarily after each attack, or their speed could be lowered. 

also >stroming hell 

• Died once and was stuck at 0 HP. 
• Not sure what the walls that disappear when you walk under them are supposed to be. They don't block bullets either, so what's the point?
• Collision seems a bit wonky on some of the obstacles, or I just saw wrongly because it felt like one of the enemies was able to just ignore the rocks entirely while moving. 
• I think the inventory broke? I just got lots of number items. 
• Crafting doesn't seem to work, or I don't know how it's supposed to be used. 
• Screen shake on everything is absurdly high. 
• Chests take a really long time to open. 

lots of changes since the last build since i went and polished it up for a steam demo

even i have no idea just how much i've changed 

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3863820/Illusive_Domain_Demo/ 

I'm working on the new version, and the version that was on Itch had gotten too outdated while focusing on the Steam side, so I took it down temporarily. 

A new update will be released next week, so please wait warmly until then. 

It's fine, it works well and the menus are nice. I tried it twice and got stuck on round 5 on both times, the board remaining between turns is pretty limiting, which makes it ramp up in difficulty quite quickly. 

Managed to beat it this time! Ammo feels a lot more generous, and I was able to pick up most of the weapons in this version. Probably because I didn't miss out on the elephant level this time, so I went into the boss with a lot more resources. I think ammo might be a bit too generous right now, since I never really worried about it unlike my previous attempt, although I found a lot more secrets and had more weapons to use this time. 

Elephant: Only the projectile attacks seem unfair. It's hard to see it in the dark, and it tracks in a weird way that I don't really understand. Unless I managed to get it stuck between some trees or something to block it, it would always hit me a few times. 

Chieftain: Overall much better, but his jump slam attack seems to trigger even when he lands on objects that aren't the ground, so the hitbox ends up being higher than I would expect, and this killed me a few times. 

Only played for a short session up until I died to one of those bigger enemies, but it does feel like the world is quite empty, or that it's too big at the initial sections without much else to do but walk. I'm sure there's some upgrade later on for it, but I'd like to have a melee attack option to deal with the small enemies when they're up close. That's pretty much all I have to complain about, everything else is insanely good. 

Seems like some of the ambient audio tracks kept starting without stopping. It stops once I move on from the Spaceship, but starts again shortly after. 

That aside, menu is fantastic and the gameplay is everything I would ever want from a speedy precision platformer. Just that I am not someone who really plays precision platformers. 

I played up till a little past the first introduction of the blue lines (or whatever colour you usually play it as, the number of colour palette choices was pretty crazy), but everything up till then was surprisingly really intuitive to understand. Love the star fart key blocks teaching you that you can fart to go downwards faster too.

Made it to the 3rd floor, then had no idea what to do with the fish slope. I guess I should do something with shooting, but I cleared everything before with putt mode only, so I don't really know when I should be using shooting over putting.

First time playing it. Some of my deaths just happen too fast and suddenly that I don't even understand what happened. It took me a while to start noticing the vending machines and drones exploding out of nowhere. 

It can be hard sometimes to locate the hat. Slow-mo focus on enemies dying always feels weird, because it's also used when I get hit, so it just feels like I messed up if I'm seeing it. 

I found the UI to be really small on my screen, probably needs some scaling. The in-game HUD was fine, though. 

Tutorial was mostly fine, but I have no idea what to do in the 2nd level. 

The cannon tutorial could do with some more direction, because although it's already facing the right direction, also saying that I can turn it around makes me try that and fall a few times before I figure out that it already was facing the right direction. 

Interesting style, just that some things tend to blend in with the background. Only being able to fire forwards means that it's hard to shoot at enemies when they're too close, which could be a part of the combat as some kind of positioning check, but there also isn't much space to move around in the small maps. 

The results screen has a black fading overlay that gets cut off a little bit at the right side of my screen. 

Art is really good and cute. (I'm just going to ignore the blurred elephants in the room.) 

But the level design is shockingly cruel for what's the very first level of the game. Gave up on the section after the penguin with ceiling spikes. 

Doors that you need to somehow shoot while managing the rest of the platforming is just a lot of inputs to consider for being this early in the game, and I still haven't even managed to really get used to X>Z because I'm too used to jumps being on X from other games I've played. Would definitely appreciate a way to rebind those keys. 

It's certainly a choice to be going for such high difficulty, but I think there should at least be more checkpoints to  help isolate each of the skills you expect a player to be using. It feels like a puzzle game mixed with really strict execution, and I'll admit that I'm probably not the target audience for this. 

I don't really get it. I guess it's some kind of clicker-adjacent number go up game? 6 to start/stop is really weird  controls though, I'm not sure why I'd ever need to stop it.

Animations broke in the middle of the 1v4. I've seen this happen before in my own games when I update the animation clip and reimport it while the game is running (with custom playable graphs), never happened in a build for me though. 

Also, "2 to return to main menu" didn't restore my cursor. 

Here's the logs:

```

NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object

  at CharacterControllerBehaviour.HandleCombat () [0x00288] in <267283b3a0eb498fa9913587e5ca69ed>:0 

  at CharacterControllerBehaviour.MovementStates () [0x000af] in <267283b3a0eb498fa9913587e5ca69ed>:0 

  at CharacterControllerBehaviour.Update () [0x00017] in <267283b3a0eb498fa9913587e5ca69ed>:0 

i am moving

i am moving

ArgumentException: Each item can only be used in one IndexedList at a time.

  at Animancer.IndexedList`2[TItem,TIndexer].Add (TItem item) [0x00032] in <d2ceed881e3a485e952eb02a4de046d7>:0 

  at Animancer.AnimancerGraph.RequirePreUpdate (Animancer.IUpdatable updatable) [0x00000] in <d2ceed881e3a485e952eb02a4de046d7>:0 

  at Animancer.FadeGroup.StartFade () [0x0000a] in <d2ceed881e3a485e952eb02a4de046d7>:0 

  at Animancer.FadeGroup.StartFade (System.Single targetWeight, System.Single normalizedFadeSpeed) [0x00019] in <d2ceed881e3a485e952eb02a4de046d7>:0 

  at Animancer.AnimancerLayer.Play (Animancer.AnimancerState state, System.Single fadeDuration, Animancer.FadeMode mode) [0x000e2] in <d2ceed881e3a485e952eb02a4de046d7>:0 

  at Animancer.AnimancerLayer.Play (Animancer.ITransition transition, System.Single fadeDuration, Animancer.FadeMode mode) [0x00008] in <d2ceed881e3a485e952eb02a4de046d7>:0 

  at CharacterControllerBehaviour.HandleCombat () [0x000dd] in <267283b3a0eb498fa9913587e5ca69ed>:0 

  at CharacterControllerBehaviour.MovementStates () [0x000af] in <267283b3a0eb498fa9913587e5ca69ed>:0 

  at CharacterControllerBehaviour.Update () [0x00017] in <267283b3a0eb498fa9913587e5ca69ed>:0 

```

Controls were alright on controller, but I think the camera needs a bit more smoothing. Some areas that seemed problematic was just circling the left stick when locked on, and walking up and down the long stairs. 

Combat feels less difficult than it is tedious. Not so much in an annoying way, but in the sense that if all I can do is swing/shove/block for the next couple of hours there's not a lot of options for dealing with groups who have basically the same options and can parry to stop me from hitting the others. At the very least, I think the turn rate on some actions should have some end lag to allow for a little bit of circle strafing, since at the moment it just feels like they can always just track perfectly. I think being able to hold your thrusts for a bit longer to wait for enemies to come in or overextend could be good? Could even do something like thrusts > blocks/parries and parry > normal attacks and normals > thrusts in a kind of rock paper scissors arrangement. 

patch notes changing genres entirely is crazy

Eye guys are funny. I think there might be a bug with the item pickups disappearing, since I went to both chests but still wasn't able to open the door to the next area. Inventory didn't show any keys either. 

Esc menu is totally covered by inventory/skill menus. Couldn't figure out what to do with the skills menu when it showed up, or maybe the pickup for that was also bugged since I didn't have anything show up. 

Without combos to perform, the basic puppet enemies just become a matter of spamming left click, and maybe the only thing is to try and group them together to hit them all at once. 

The block pushing only worked when I was at the corner of the box rather than on its face, which I initially thought to do. 

Thanks for playing! Each call to block reduces the perfect block window, so eventually it'll just become a regular block. It's exploitable to a small extent when your stance meter is still low, but you can still get stance broken through normal blocks, so it's still limited by the stance meter. 

You can play this through Proton. I believe 9.0 and above work for this, last I remember.

Thanks for playing!

• Yeah, this is a text bug. I do remember one of these having to be inverted to have the defaults both be off for what I see as normal, haven't really seen what the standards are here.
• Haven't been playing with my gamepad plugged in, so I haven't thought of this issue before. Will try it out some other time.
• camera the bane of my existence
• It's similar to DMC's style switching. There's a lot more complex inputs that can be done when they're dedicated buttons rather than something like R2+X. Generally they're all somewhat usable in all scenarios, but they're pretty important for dealing damage. 
• The window for each attack more or less matches their active damage frames, so you have to experiment both with your own attacks and the enemy's. 
• There's 8-direction snapping because movement gets really wonky at certain angles. 

You can access the new boss by talking to her in the hub area and clicking "About the challenges...".  It's meant to be a 2nd tutorial before Louise, so try beating her off first before beating off to Louise. 

Some known issues:

• Settings -> Invert Horizontal Look is duplicated, this is only a text bug. The top invert is for vertical and the 2nd is for horizontal. 
• Keyboard and controller remap menus haven't been designed yet, so it's still using a placeholder. 

Thanks for playing. Sorry for the late reply, this was stuck in approval hell and I didn't see it until now. (and SOMEHOW bots posting phishing links don't get quarantined)

Actually, her grab attack is meant to be easy to dodge, since it's quite deadly if you get hit by it (although it doesn't directly kill you). In the setting, this technique is supposed to be really hard to use effectively, which is why you need to practically be standing still to get hit by it. The somersault kick is a little fast, and I'm planning on adjusting the timing next update. 

For the shuriken blocking, just like how you can parry some projectiles, enemies can also parry yours by just attacking. I think the speed and effects on this are set too high that it immediately travels across the map to hit you before you can see it, so I'll look into fixing that next. 

Louise's AI is frankly quite a mess at this point and I plan to overhaul it at some point. 

There's also been some other updates to the game since this post was made, so please do try the new changes. 

Thanks for playing. 

• Parrying takes some getting used to and it's not easy to explain succinctly, but since it's a core mechanic I left it as a compulsory part of the tutorial. I'm still trying to think of how to improve on this. 
• The game auto-saves, but there isn't a lot of things to save. Specifically, only dialogue progression and clearing bosses will get saved, but I guess that's why games have that "Game is currently saving" icon at the corner of the screen. 
• Middle-mouse button allows you to unlock the camera. 
• There's still a lot of bugs I have yet to iron out with the foot placement system, unfortunately.
• The sit animation is a dogeza, but it's something I left in partly as a joke apology for the problems with the previous playtest. 
• 

Thanks for playing, just watched the video. 

It looks like you were playing the version before the update I pushed yesterday at first, and there's a lot of things that should be better in the latter part of the video after the update. (The sections where you can see her silhouette through the walls are after the update). 

I've also just nerfed the poison a little bit earlier today, but in actuality her grabs rarely end up connecting as long as you keep moving, and it's really a fight that's meant to push the player into making full use of their abilities and mobility. If you're up to try again, you can try to use the other abilities more, since they're all quite powerful in their own way once you figure out how to use them. 

This has happened a few times in the past couple days so I need to point out that any comments talking about this is 100% some kind of scam or hacking attempt. I delete all of the posts that I get notified for, but I'm leaving this post here just in case I don't get to it in time.