itch.io

Played some more, this time finished the full demo 

Disclaimer: I was on the call when the game was being played on stream so I knew what to expect for the most of it, except the rat fight. Like I said last time, a lot of charm. Most of my notes will be about difficulty, I think that the current difficulty is alright for a player who is very experienced in  this kind of games, but not so much for a player who is just starting to learn the controls.

-Game starts difficult. The tutorial just ramps up incredibly quickly from reading textbox and simple jumps to tightly timed downward swings in the air and a boss fight. Some small enemies with simple patterns to give a player a taste of combat first and simpler platforming methods would make it more gentle. Also a boss you have more time to hit and doesn't require as much jumping.

- The rat with scientist boss fight is a lot of fun!

- The chase sequece has a long restart time when it is failed and having it before a boss fight makes things cumbersome for the boss fight. Maybe if the player is caught, damage the player and restart the sequence right away.

- I feel I kinda cheesed the rat fight. On the other hand, I wouldn't want to be on the middle of the stage having to spam the roll key non-stop. 

- As far as I can tell it is not possible to tell when the rat puke attack is coming.

- It is difficult to change the direction of a roll after a roll. If you are rolling, hold the opposite key of the direction you are currently rolling and spam the roll key, you will keep rolling in the same direction. This makes it complicated to chain rolls together to better position yourself during a fight.

- The wall jump needs an arrow key press on the wall, chaining wall jumps requires rapidly changing pressing the arrow keys A lot of games lets you jump without pressing any arrow key, just checking if you are sliding on a wall. It makes chaining wall jumps easier.

Very good job with the game! Im looking foward for the progress you will make on it.

I beat the game, very fun! Some levels required a lot of finesse. I believe I cheated the coin count. Picked up every coin in all levels, but the final count said I was missing 4. 

Then I noticed the very last coin you can get  wasn't being saved by the flag checkpoint, so I collected it, went to the flag and respawned for a while, effectively farming that coin until I reached the final score of 120/119. Is this intended? and if it isn't, can I get a tip on where to find the remaining coins or how to check the amount of coins on each level?

Played this on stream. Very faithful adaptation of early hearthstone decks, very impressive! I hope you manage to draw attention from the hearthstone folks with it.

It's funny seeing someone die to a rage potion (sorry)

Ah no worry lmao, I should have read the description and not just chugthe potion. Also how did I randomly die on the first long playthrough? I just exploded all of a sudden.

Defeated the final boss. Video: 

Played for a bit. Video: 

I played with a human rogue and recorded it, then a fairy rogue, fairy warrior and human assassin off-screen. Video:

I know it is a very early version of the game, but the cards are way too small on the screen. Even in fullscreen I had to go very close to my screen to read them. Also a lot of the times I was hovering over a card, clicked it and another card was selected. I noticed the undo function later on from the menu, but there should be a way to "confirm" that a card is going to be used in such a way that it doesn't disrupt the flow of the game too much.

Difficulty is a bit wonky. I managed to win with the warrior though it was a struggle. Meanwhile rogue was too difficult and I haven't found a good strategy yet. Off camera I played assassin and that was a breeze, you have everything at your disposal with +action, +card, trashing, card duplication, a lot of damage for cheap and even healing on top that cycles.

I hope you develope this game further, since it has the foundation for something really fun.

I have two since I'm on a laptop, Intel(R) UHD Graphics and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070. It should automatically pick the nvidia one though.

Reached the second level. Video:

I have been following in twitter and was looking forward to trying the game. It has a cool aesthetic and a nice way to handle the inventory,. Some things to note:

The camera can give motion sickness. I don't think you should allow to twist the camera in that way while in putt mode.

I'm not good enough to beat the levels, specially with such harsh limits. Having to wait after dying made things feels even more punishing. I did want to get to the part where there was the conveyor belt and the furby but I just cannot see myself going through the golfing part.

There were many situations where the physics felt wonky. Sometimes I couldn't hit the ball, either because it was too close to a wall or because there was a moving wall that changed where my shotgun was.

There is no options menu, which is understandable at this point in development, but ppressing escape shouldn't take you to the main menu without telling you in advance.

Aaah I imagined something was missing. I did have fun, I will give the more complete version a try later.

Watching you fail the captcha until you selected the mirror reflection made me laugh, I hope it was a good joke on your end.

Yes I found it funny! A very nice small puzzle.

It doesn't work for me sadly. Tried both version, loading the debug version gives me this error while the fans of my pc go mad and the computer becomes unresponsive. Hopefully it helps.

Completed the demo, I think. I didn't find the final place where I was supossed to go. Video:

It took me a little while to get used to the controls and I believe that having played hollow knight helped me to understand what I had to do. The down swing bounce is kinda an advanced technique to put on a demo. The enemies aren't knocked back when they are attacked, a bit of it could be nice.

Played this on stream and had a a lot of silly fun. Here are some screenshots I took while playing.

I'm happy that it solved your issue! I want to investigate the crash, how it corrupted your files so it doesn't happen to other people. Do you mind if you share that folder with me?

It is a fun video, that fairy looks like this now.

sleeping toad

The sleeping toad has received some tweaks since the demo to avoid those scenarios. But yeah the dev console can create some pretty strange scenarios.

loading screens

The gallery is built manually, I forgot to add the picture for the demo.

test levels

The current demo has no test levels, so trying to open them defaults to the first level.

Thanks for playing!

Rise and Shine

Bonus levels are more difficult to regular ones, it is ok to skip them if you get stuck.

mobile

Not for release, first it will be for pc online

repeated offense

The timed jump is intended as a fun curiosity. The game wont require that level of dexterity for regular solutions.

Thanks for trying out the game! Odd issue, is the first time I heard about it. Try updating your gpu drivers. If that doesn't work try manually erasing your save files. Go to "C:\Users\<your username>\AppData\Roaming\Godot\app_userdata\Poke ALL Toads" (replace C with the hard drive where windows is) , make a backup of the files inside and erase everything inside the folder.

If that still doesn't work, do you have anything running apart from the game? There might be something causing a conflict.

Trolling supreme. Very ingenious and super cursed.

Played the game until I ran out of things to do. Video: 

Very fun! Super polished. I liked the mechanic of gathering items and crafting swords. I found the tongue sword to be the most effective since the range+speed was too powerful to pass up. My favorite weapon to use was the very heavy stone sword, it felt satisfying to land hits with it. 

Some weapons felt redundant, but I can imagine this kind of game is more about getting a full collection rather than using that collection. Somewhere mentioned that there is a right sword for each situation, but I believe people will try to brute force every stage with their prefered weapon.

It would be nice to be able to heal while being petrified. You can heal in hitstun, so why stop the player from healing when they can't move?

Reading the comments, it seems I missed some content, so I will play a bit more later to try to find it.

Played for a bit. Video: 

Played a bit using two clients.

Not much to say for now since it is too early. Normally autobattlers let you have many rounds against your opponents even after losing, will it be like that in the future?

Regarding the contracts, the current implementation is actually "Sell X at the same time". I feel like your read is the more natural one and the current way could be added as a harder tier. Still, it never occurred to me that they would read differently.

Oh ok makes sense, that does make the contracts much more difficult to complete.

Can you clarify the sound bug? I thought I squashed most of those.

You can see it in action at the 17:00 timestamp of the video. The grab resource sound keeps repeating..

Played for a bit. Video: 

I liked the idea of the hat being a renewable second life.

It is hard to notice when you get hit. Sometimes an enemy exploded and all of a sudden I was dead in the other side of the room.

The 19:30 explosion had a much larger effect than I imagined.

The game crashed a lot on me. The abrupt end is from a crash.

Played for a bit. Video: 

I have seen this game in others DDs and wanted to give it a try. The idea is interesting since sucking planets dry of resources is a neat sci fi concept.

First off, I did get tired of text quickly. From the introduction, to the tooltips, to the tutorial, I didn't expect to get walls of text every time. When there is so much fluff mixed with tutorial info, it is hard to know when something is worth paying attention to. And yeah that resulted in me skipping part of the tutorial.

Maybe you can get used to it after a while, but completing contracts at the same time as maxing resources felt too difficult, specially with the resource draw RNG. I tried to meet a modules contract but couldn't get any modules before it expired. Later on I had one that said "sell 10 resources" but I felt it never completed itself. Time advanced every time I did anything so there is an unclear time limit making things more stressfull.

I don't understand the atom smasher, when am I supossed to use it? It grows in power cost every time so if I use it on low cost stuff I end up earning little money, while also running out of time for contracts. I think that using the second ability to get power also increases the cost of the main ability, why?

UI feels a bit sluggish, every action locks all buttons for some time, slowing down gameplay.

I think I got a sound bug on the asteroid level, a sound repeating non-stop.

"Depart from planet" appears as the second row button, making it look like something that should be activated constantly instead of a "end the run" button. I should get special treatment. 

I think the game has an interesting premiese, it is just the gameplay that needs iteration and more polish.

The test levels had a  good run. They were more for feedback rather than giving people a fun time so they end up getting taken out of the demo eventually.

Thanks for playing! I'm happy you liked the game.

Thats a great adaptation to pixel art! Nice job.

There are a lot of loading screens I haven't shown yet.

I presume that each toad matches the 6 colors of Fairies

Yup, but very loosely

Sorry for the late response

Thanks for playing. Could you describe the crash in more detail? I can't pinpoint when it happens in the video and I can beat the level during testing just fine.

It happens when you lose a battle. You can see it at 1:20:48 and at the end of the video. I did say it happened three times, but maybe  it was that I restarted the game 3 times (once for going before the respect bug). Maybe it has something to do with the swamp battlefield.

Thanks for the info about the pariah. It's like I imagined about bursting them down, I don't know much about MP drain since I must not have reached that part of the game yet. I don't think I have ever beaten a team with 2 of them, they just kill someone in the first 2 turns if I don't use an item.

About respecs, your game is more similar to a puzzle game than an rpg. In an rpg  there is always the option to grind for items and levels to beat any encounter while in AG you have no way of gaining such an advante. The only thing you truly can do is adjust your skill points to find a better strategy. Giving it a hard limit to that is taking away options from the player. What if the player tried different builds, none  of them work and they run out of respecs? Im currently stuck on level 7 and if none of the strategies work and if I run out of respecs, I would have to restart the game (I can just edit the savefile, but still). 

Talking about that, the difficulty in stage 7 is brutal.

A way to forfeit a battle would we welcome since many times I know I have no chance and just want to restart.

Also one thing that I forgot to mention, if you look at 1:28:14 I do damage to an enemy but it is redirected to Finnegan!

Thanks for trying it out! The screenshot is very caluable since the level has two different solutions and I wanted to see which one you ended up using.

Thanks for playing! I enjoyed watching the stream

Thanks for playing again and giving very nice feedback! I'm happy you liked the new fairy!

Sorry for the late response

-Smooth sailing until level 4, which only took awhile because I forgot that buttons of the same color don't act like not operators, but are either pressed or not. 

From the feedback I received, I believe this is a mechanic worth exploring in more levels since it isn't as obvious as I thought

-I don't get level 5, it's a non challenge? Also, the sleeve fairy doesn't have a purpose? I could be any fairy. So all I do is go left, wake up fairy, get it off red, then move blue fairy across and just ping pong the sleeve fairy on the buttons. Maybe it's supposed to teach about the alternating state of the launchers? If I was playing casually, I wouldn't care all that much. 

By testing, It is not a good level. It is supposed to teach about the launchpad, but does it in boring way.  I'm trying a new version in the current build, it is as easy but hopefully it is more fun.

-Level 9 is a little more challenging, satisfying to reason out. Not sure how much I like the question marks on the boost pad though. It's well intentioned, but it feels a bit unwelcoming to have the dev tell me, "pay attention to this puzzle object especially!", using a method that isn't informed from the level/visual design(like you adding those square visual flairs that hint where to stand to use a Toad tongue). I would personally prefer a change in the floor tile underneath, or maybe adding a natural animation to draw attention, like fire flies.

The indication of launchpads is a way to inform they behave differently since I don't want to give away how far away they take you. But so far I have rarely used the effect and you are right tiles on the floor do the same thing in a more fun way.

-Level 12 felt kind of odd, but it got the idea across.

Yeah, it needs more polish

-Advanced air control is the hardest level, a couple hours(while listening to a podcast) and still not finished. Felt particularly brutal since I kept getting off-by-one solutions and couldn't piece it together. Probably just a case of having horse blinders on, I'll likely get in a day or two.

I believe that part of the difficulty is on me for not warming up the players to the mechanic the level uses, it has nothing the player have seen yet.

Thanks for playing and the detailed feedback!

I believe level 4 might be bit confusing because normally pressing a colored button toggles the corresponding springs, but in this particular example you are given the opportunity to hold 2 buttons of the same color and when that happens they act more as a ON/OFF switch rather than a toggle because holding 2 red buttons at the same time is the same as holding one. The stage is not particularly difficult but I don't remember encountering this interaction before.

For the level 4 mechanic, it was introduced on world two where there are 3 busy fairies pushing buttons down. But it is a nice idea to introduce it in another level and flesh out the mechanic properly.

Level 7 introduces a mechanic I consider noteworthy because for the first time a fairy other than the blue one is capable of enraging the toads. Of course, this was technically introduced earlier along with the brave fairy, but this is the first time it's required to solve the level.

Yeah, making toads mad is something that makes the brave fairy stand out. I do have to flesh out the levels with her a bit more.

I know I'm reading too much into it but this has slightly changed my perception of the blue fairy's character from mischievous to maybe a little compulsive because annoying the toads without poking them doesn't progress the levels. That means poking is more important.

It is mischief, just focused on poking more than making toads mad.

Finally, there's a new unfinished mechanic in the form of the mysterious red area that attracts the friendly toads. This generally works fine with the exception of stage 12 where the yellow toad would sometimes get stuck walking right instead of up where it's supposed to go and I couldn't really tell why. 

I will adjust level 12 a bit.

Besides that I think the levels were quite straightforward and I didn't find any bugs or issues. The reason I had difficulties with Advanced air control in particular was because I didn't occur to me that I had to enrage the toad at the start rather than later on so I kept misusing the smart fairy to go in rather than out which left me short of a fairy to press the red button at the end.

Advanced air control might be a very challenging level, but I'm ok with having levels like that in the game. I will keep it like it is now, but making sure it is not easily accesible.

Thanks for playing! Happy you like the brave fairy I'm very  happy with how she turned out. Also very nice, you found a secret!

If you have the time, try out level 11 and see how difficult it is. Level 9 is a bit of a mess and the bonus and the last level are very difficult so don't worry about them.

Played for a bit. Video:

My save was gone, so I had to play from the start. I speedrun the game to try to get back to where I was as fast as I could. Some notes:

The game crashed 3 times on the last map I played. The crash is very consistent, so I will wait for an update to try completing this area again.

The cactus enemy that has a second life is very annoying to deal with. I haven't found a way to handle it, if I try to rush damage from turn 1, it does it's special move turn 2 and just outright kills someone. And if I wait until I can kill it in a single turn it still dishes out absurd amounts of damage. And it is very tricky to decide when to kill it since it's egg state is so short so I might kill it but I don't have anyone nearby to destroy the egg.

The mana rain battle field feels like a coin toss. I have lost battles just because the enemy team manages to use an ability  all their turns thanks to luck.

I found a bug when using a respec. I put some perk points and want to change something, so I pressed discard changes and the game put the perks back on how it was before using the respec. As a result the perks ended up how they were before and the respec point was gone.

About the respec, I'm not entirely convinced about it. Thanks to the nature of the skill tree a lot of time you end up with perk point that you cannot really use that stay in the inventory until you level up again.  With the old system, you could adapt a different build so the point had a temporary home. Now that is much harder

Beat the entire game. Video: 

I will start saying that the end of the game is amazing and I fully didn't expect it. I was going to stop much sooner, but since I found a strategy that worked pretty well I wanted to see how far I could take it.

One thing that really should be taken care of is the wait times. Waiting for the puck to fully stop, waiting for the scores to tally (for each player), waiting for the new round, the amount of waiting hurts the game. The character reaction and the tally could be put on the same scene to save time for example.

Also good intro and very nice spritework overall.

I beat the game. Video: 

I find this game a bit overwhelming. Everything has abilities and different stats that makes things difficult to keep track of and the gameplay is very chaotic to the point I feel most of my moves have random results. I don't feel I'm in control. Pointing the shot in the direction I want is challenging, I want to do fine adjustments and for that I have to do quick taps of the direction keys that not always result in the path I want, so I have to keep going back and forth in an uncomfortable way. The windows to use the abilities feel too tight, making it much easier to miss.

It is a good starting point, needs polishing and in my opinion simplifying some ideas and giving the player more control.

Played around in all the levels. Video: 

I recommend you watch the video, since a lot of things happened. The game is shaping up, keep up the good work!