itch.io

All feedback is so very appreciated!!!

The game is fundamentally in place: it has the underlying mechanics of a platformer already in place, inspired by various other platformers I’ve played, like my favorites of Hollow Knight or Cuphead (yes, i’m basic). Despite implementing our idea of gameplay, there’s an emptiness, a void that just seems to not give you the satisfying feel of a polished game. The act of actually refining a product feels more daunting than actually the creative part of design.

Obviously online there are many fixes to these common “clunky” issues, like coyote jumps and hang time, but even with the power of online guides it just doesn’t “feel” right. Perhaps clunkiness also comes down to a lack of art. Using default assets is fine, but when we produce our skeletal hitboxes for enemies and players alike, it just doesn’t look good. This probably could be fixed by getting an artist, but then again, I don’t want to have to make them draw something and then have them redo it when something changes down the line. We lack a certain charm.

Fundamentally many platformer games are simple, yet when we try to replicate that, we fall short: there’s no challenge or attractiveness in our levels that we can’t quantify. It’s really hard to quantify this “charm,” so all we can do for now is just to ram our heads against the wall and hope something sticks that builds the identity of this game. Ultimately, although we take inspiration from many other past games, and that copying them might be the easiest way to fix this issue of “charm,” our main goal is to develop our game’s own identity, something standalone that gives the same profound “wow” that memorable games uniquely produce.

Now onto combat. More straightforward to improve, but still just as hard. Combat doesn’t feel responsive. There’s no feedback, visual or audio, and no knockback, and even worse, very little indicators that something actually happened. We imagined a very complex combat system with multiple weapons and spell combo systems, and as such there has to be unique indicators for each of them. We’d like to implement some sort of visual feedback such as recoil and knockback, but as you would expect, especially with the quantity of unique enemy and player combat components, it’s difficult. Long story short—we’ve fallen into a common pitfall of producing creative ideas that surpass our abilities to refine, ultimately producing a very rough, rough end product.

Suggestion: a competitive gamemode: Every day you can play 3 times. If you are the imposter you get 3 points per kill, if you are a crewmate, you get 1 point per task. The rules are set and the map is randomized. The last 3 days of every month you can go in a shop and buy cosmetics and nametag effects. After the month is over, your points reset but your cosmetics remain. You can also play in the normal gamemode, but earning points if much harder and you earn only 1 point for winning.