I really appreciate your feedback and support. It's been really helpful and motivating.
I'm glad you like practice mode! I have some ideas to make it even better in the future. I'll try to fix the bugs soon. I'll also keep working on the checkpoint times.
Where was the lighting too dark? I can adjust it in the next release. I'll fix the audio settings too.
Can you tell me more about #9? I don't quite understand. I also want to know about the double dash you mentioned a while back.
Low Latency mode changes how Unreal Engine displays the game. It's meant to decrease input latency but can have some drawbacks. It might lower the frame rate on your PC or make it look choppy. It's best to only use it if you have a very high frame rate.
Really well done! I'm working on some new tools that should help. I don't any concrete stats but I've run each course many many times. I spent hours creating those records haha.
The hop doesn't increase your speed at all but it has a different arc than the slide jump. It gives you a little more height and less distance which can be useful in some cases. Sometimes it's better/easier to get a hard fall and then convert that into forward speed with the slide.
If you try to jump while in the air it will buffer your input for .05 seconds and then jump as soon as you touch the ground. You need to hold the jump button down during this time. You can see it in the first video below.
While testing it today I discovered a bug when using it with slide. It's using a cached version of the slide speed instead of re-calculating it on the landing. This is how I was able to maintain my speed for my Tutorial record. You can see it causes me to jump backwards in the second video below.
I've thought about adding a practice mode that would let you select a checkpoint to restart at. I think that would help a lot since you wouldn't have to play the whole level to test specific skips. Maybe it could include other features like flight so that you could examine the course.
I was able to break my Tutorial record twice. The slide jump doesn't have a minimum timer so you can do some pretty creative stuff and there's also a "hop" mechanic that I didn't explain in the tutorial. It lets you maintain a lot of your momentum with a normal jump if you can time it right.
I made some mistakes but I was able to beat my best time in this recording. You found some original skips in both your Course and Tutorial runs. I'm impressed! Part of the fun is finding the best route and part of the fun is trying to execute it perfectly.
Thank you so much for all of your notes! I really appreciate your time and dedication.
I've had that jump bug before but I haven't been able to consistently reproduce it. If it's something that requires skill to perform then I might leave it as a mechanic.
If I decide to make any more updates then I'll include checkpoint splits. I think I can add them to the leaderboard too. I can also add the restart key and a speed indicator pretty easily, those are some great ideas. A replay function would also be great but I'm not sure if there's a way to share them with LootLocker.
I would love to watch you beat the main course. Thanks again for playing :)
I didn't rate this because I didn't have a second player. My main feedback is that it's difficult see your health bar when you're focused on the action. Maybe consider adding some damage to the player (cracks?). That way it conveys the important information in a way that also enhances the visual presentation.
Thanks for playing! I used a free service called Loot Locker for the Leaderboards (I still had to set up the UI and game logic separately). I really appreciate all of your feedback.
I wanted to do so much more with it but I ran out of time. The lobby is incomplete and I had a bug preventing player respawn. The plan was to earn money in combat that could be used for unlocking new characters and weapons.
I do have one bit of feedback. I felt that the aim smoothing was way too strong (I'd personally like to disable it). I liked the camera shake but I know some people get motion sickness. It would be nice to have options to adjust both of these features.
To echo some of the other comments, I found myself fighting with the controls at times. The mechanics were great but I had a bit of trouble with the actual gameplay.
What kind of monster puts run on CTRL instead of shift? Neat game. I make it anywhere near to the end but I was impressed with how much content you got out of relatively simple mechanics. I also liked the music.
It took me a while to get the hang of the mechanics but once I did it was really fun :)
I had a little bit of feedback. I think the the dash meter should refill when you load a checkpoint. The bullets block the player so if I was moving too fast and shot in a forward direction I would get blocked by my own bullets. The slow moving bullets also make it a bit difficult to hit the boxes unless you use slomo (I loved the slomo, I just think it was too hard to play without it). Great concept overall.
Not bad. The movement felt responsive and the collision was very forgiving (which I liked). The game was very short and I think extra stages or more enemy types would have gone a long way.
Really cool project. I think this shows that the AI stuff has a lot of promise (but it's not there yet). I'd be surprised if mainstream games aren't using it in a few years.
Really cool game, nice visuals and fun gameplay. The Assault Rifle is so good that I never used the other weapons. I couldn't tell if shooting through walls was intended or not but it made the game too easy.
Really great concept and great visuals to match. I also appreciate having a menu and configurable settings. I think the game would be massively improved with a few relatively small adjustments.
Character movement feels too slow. Giving the player faster side to side movement, especially in the air, would make it feel a lot more responsive and open up more gameplay opportunities. The jump is pretty floaty but that might pair well with the increased move speed.
The enemy attack patterns seem to be random which can lead to low engagement. I had a screen full of enemies harmlessly drift past me, which lowered the tension and forced me to wait around for valid attacks.
It was generally hard to hit enemies once they started attacking a platform and it was especially hard to hit them if they were attacking the bottom corners of the platforms.
Using the default QEF as attacks means that it's harder to use those same fingers for movement. If you decide to use the mouse then you could also consolidate forward/up attacks and use mouse position to choose the attack.
Collision on platforms can be a little weird. When two platforms are next to each other you can walk from one to the other but not the other way around. I'm sure there's a few pixels of height difference but it can feel inconsistent.
I hope this wall of text is helpful. I saw you asking for more feedback in another comment so I figured I'd offer my thoughts.
The different obstacles and enemies were great, they added a lot to the game. I liked the music too. It's not always obvious what parts of the buildings you can stand on. I think using consistent surface colors would make them more readable.
Really cool concept and having the city grow in front of your eyes was a great idea. My only real complaint is that there wasn't much player feedback to tell me why certain things were happening. Adding an information screen or overlay would be nice and a notification system could warn players about issues or report what happened.
I really liked the visuals and sound design of this one. I found the enemies to be waaay too spongy though. I know you get to upgrade your gun later but I'd prefer the enemies to have less health. I also found the jump to be too floaty considering all the small jumps you find throughout the game.
My final issue is that the gun seems to have hit registration issues. You can reproduce it by shooting a wall at close range. If the right side of the camera is closer to the wall then the bullets shoot way off to the left, away from the crosshair.
This game feels really complete/polished in a way that I wasn't expecting for this short jam. Nice visual design and appropriate sound (though too loud for my taste). My main complaint is that the play area seems too small. I think zooming out a bit and reducing the flame size would help. It would let the player see more platforms so they could make more informed decisions.
Edit: Oh, I forgot to mention. If you jump into the side of the platform it's possible to hover. I guess this could be a bug or a feature depending on how you want to play but it didn't seem like it was intended to work that way.
Neat concept with good visuals and sound design. I agree that the attack is way too slow. Adding more attack types would also be nice. The auto-rotating camera is a cool idea but I found it disorienting at times. Maybe consider making the buildings transparent when you go behind them instead.
I finally got a chance to watch the video you linked in the discord group. It looked like you wanted to join a match in progress. This is disabled-- you can only join while the host is in the lobby waiting for players. Sorry for the confusion, I could probably have made it more clear on the menu and in the instructions.
Maybe you'll have a chance to give it another try before the end of the rating period. Thanks for the feedback!
I can try to organize something if you're interested but I won't personally be available until the jam is over. I've played it with a few different groups of friends and got some good feedback. Everyone had fun so in my eyes this project was a success.
