itch.io

Great job on expanding the open world aspect! It is hard to overhaul a game and scrap previous areas but I think you guys are getting closer to your vision of a more story-driven game. Like others mentioned, it is a little confusing to grasp the intention or pregression, but it does sort of play into the dream-like atmosphere (of a God, no less).

The hub definitely feels cleaner with a greater sense of purpose, especially when you find a fragment with a teleportation slab waiting for you to take the player back to the hub area. It would be nice if we could teleport or even fast-travel to certain places in the two areas available to us since they are relatively large areas to explore. As someone mentioned, a minimap would help in getting our bearing of what we have explored and the general layout of the area (might be hard with the foggy bridge if you want the fog to appear in the minimap, but parts of it could gradually get "unfogged" as the player explores those areas). 

I did not get the chance to play much of the game, but from what I gathered so far, I got a better sense of progression from the foggy bridge than the destroyed cityscape. Given that the player is locked to the paths provided by the branching paths of the bridge (though, the player could always jump off and roam freely), it is a bit easer to fully explore since we have a set of linear paths to traverse than a fully open area. Someone did mention you were softlocked if you got out of the bridge for some reason, but one of the paths provided a ramp back onto the bridge so the level was designed with the possibility of falling of the bridge, so exploration does have its perks.

As with the previous playtest, the colliders are a little weird to navigate through (especially with the "bumps" on the bridge) and some objects don't have colliders or interfere with the camera and restrict visibility. It's not a huge issue but movement does get a little boring to deal with, especially with how slow the player moves relative to the scale of the world. This is apparent when exploring the destroyed cityscape with the player having nothing to do but hold the movement keys until a destination is reached. So, it be nice if the player moved faster (like with a walk or run state if a slower walking pace is kept).

The assets and how they are shown in-game looks pretty good, especially with the damaged cars and the backdrop of the leaning buildings. Honestly, I thought for a moment we could have the player driving one of the cars (cool idea and would speed up traveling) but it was interesting we could destroy the cars with just a few punches. Speaking of destroying objects, the attack animation looks better and the animation that plays after an object is destroyed is a nice touch. 

Overall, the exploration of the game is nice but the movement and colliders do work against it. It would also help if there was some guidance given to the player on what we should be looking for when traversing an area. I know you guys said to look for objects that don't necessarily fit with the theme of a given area, but that alone probably isn't enough to give a sense of direction, especially when the areas get bigger. Maybe some indicators along the way or side quests or goals to keep the player engaged while they explore or progress towards finding a fragment. For now, we aren't rewarded with anything when finding a fragment and it would be nice if it unlocked something in the hub or in the yard outside the house or even a simple memory/event via text.

Since I played the first playtest, I'll try to list the improvements I experienced with this second playtest.

First, the overall balance of the game is much better than the second. With more towers to try out, there was definitely more choices and experimentation we can play around with the tower combos and placement. However, I did feel like some description for each tower would be nice since some of the time was figuring out the range and what the tower actually did rather than finding the synergies and their effectiveness against certain enemies. 

The level design and flow was easier to grasp initially so good work. However, the collection of the stardust is still a bit of a chore, even with the added tower to aid with this. Like some others said, it is still mundane enough to affect how we played the level, like putting towers closer to the chest to speed up the collection process. This might affect how well the towers were able to clear the waves if there were no clear winding paths or choke points. 

The level layout was a nice touch. The different groups of levels were nice, especially the 0 levels that showed the player the basics of the game, like feeding the blackhole stardust to complete the level. The improved UI also helped, and the extra shake when the enemies moved past your towers and drained the health was a nice feature (not sure if was present before because of the busted Saturn tower in the first playtest).

The level art itself was interesting to see, especially the different enemies that appeared in the different terrains (like the snowy field). Even though the level structure is pretty similar and there doesn't seem to be interactable or added effects, the different field map provide a change of scenery to an otherwise similar experience across different levels. It would be cool if there were terrain effects that changed how the towers are able to deal to the enemies (like a certain elemental affinity is boosted while another is resisted, like boosted fire attacks and weakened water attacks in a fire terrain). I haven't played much with the elemental attacks but it would be nice if we got a list of enemies that may appear in a given level, giving us a better way to prepare instead of purely experimenting with the different towers available.

Finally, thanks for putting the frame rate cap. I could play the game without worrying about toasting my machine.

Unfortunately, I did not play much of the game because of a nitpick (more because of my personal setup) discussed at the end. Though, what I played of the game so far was certainly enjoyable and it had a good twist on the old tower defense formula.

The character we control (Ophi) is quite interesting mechanically but a lot of the issues I have with the gameplay flow do stem from the side stuff we have to manage with Ophi. The decision to decide whether to use the stardust to fill the blackhole and complete the level faster or use them for towers and upgrades definitely adds a layer of depth to the game. However, unless the game was balanced in such a way that punishes players that just try to put as many towers/upgrades on the map (e.g., enemies eventually outpace the towers in terms of health and speed), I think that the choice of stardust isn't as impactful anymore. The player could just focus on towers until enemies aren't a threat anymore and then feed the stardust to the blackhole. Also, the process of having to collect the stardust, much less trying to decide how the stardust should be used, as the enemies drop them is quite monotonous. Especially when more towers/upgrades are added and we want to experiment with different tower combos and placements, I can see the collection of the stardust to be a mundane part when we just want to see how the towers perform in different scenarios.

It is crazy to already be asking for quality of life features, but it would be nice if we had some way to auto-collect the stardust (maybe as an expensive option in the shop or just a permanent feature after we collect X amount of stardust in general, regardless of its usage). Then, a slider or some way to immediately specify how much we want to store in the chest (for towers and upgrades) and how much to feed to the blackhole would streamline the break period in between waves. 

As others have said, the Saturn tower is pretty busted and would probably need more balancing (maybe start with that first before trying to add new towers so it would be easier to figure out the damage scaling and damage distribution for the other towers). I know the interesting part are the towers (at least for us, the players) but it might actually be easier to create different enemies first. The reason for this is because if we have all these different towers and upgrade paths with different elemental affinities but no specific enemies to exploit them with, then the strategy aspect of the tower defense game would effectively be nonexistent even if the towers were balanced. 

The towers can be created on a need to counter basis -- if there is some enemy (or in some wave with increased health and speed) that cannot be handled by the current set of towers available, that is when another type of tower should be considered. Another person already mentioned the area of effect (AOE) attacks of the Saturn tower but maybe gate that tower till later in the game (or as a more expensive option) and have a simple tower that only does single target (ST) attacks early on. Gradually introduce the different mechanics of the towers with higher tier upgrades and stronger towers, but only when necessary. I would rather have a tight knit group of towers and upgrades to work with (maybe with only a couple of elemental attacks) that are well-balanced and enemies that requires certain placement and combos of towers that aren't directly countered by a single tower (like AOE towers should have lower damage than ST towers but may have special effects, like slowing enemies).

As for the reason why I didn't test out the game fully...The innocuous end bit to the description above "(Settings button does nothing at the moment)" was actually a bit disheartening. When first loading up the game at the main menu screen, everything seemed fine (besides the louder fan noise than normal). But when entering a level, the fans started revving up pretty quickly...For a simple game, I didn't think it was that intensive until I looked at the FPS counter in-game. It is certainly a weird experience to have a game be bottlenecked by the CPU, and to reach over 1000 FPS...frame caps would certainly help here. Case in point, maybe cap the frame rate at 60 FPS (or some other reasonable number) or have some way to limit it in the settings because I was pretty surprised when everything started to run really hot and immediately closed the game when running it for the first time.

First off, I want to say that I am a pretty big fan of the game you develped so far. The idea of a God being stuck in one's own mind is certainly a unique and interesting idea, and out of all the games, I personally think this game does a really good job of interweaving the narrative into the gameplay and drive the player to collect the fragments. It would be nice to see what kind of "memories" will be shown to be player and as for now, it seems to just be an objective to gate progress. This actually reminds me of more action-based RPGs -- Kingdom Hearts comes to mind with exploring "dream" worlds, especially with the fragments and the area after the tutorial.

It would be great to see how the hub idea gets expanded. A list of the various location, maybe fast travel to areas already visited, and an indicator of how many fragments were collected at each area (assuming you don't have to collect all of them to move on) would be a nice way for the player to keep track of what they found so far. Also, since you guys already have some sort of inventory system, it might not be that hard to extend it to other collectables (maybe with powerups or temporary buffs/boosts when the combat system gets fully implemented). They could also help with the "memories" aspect as certain items can unlock a certain memory or act as keys to unlock hidden areas or even one big (final) area when multiple items are collected from various levels.

However, there are certainly some slight annoyances when it comes to implementation. As someone mentioned, the terrain collisions with the player can range from a pain to get unstuck to completely interrupting the experience (especially in the after-tutorial area) since the main character would not be able to free themselves (jump does not work and visually, it doesn't even look like they are stuck in anything since there was just open space). Though, I did not encounter jittery camera issues and the camera control was fine for the most part (the close zoom-ups sometimes do feel odd).  

The barrel puzzle...was quite a hassle. There was a tin bottle and a barrel, and only the barrel seemed to matter. There were times when the barrel would roll down the slope, and it was weird to roll the barrel back up. First, the player had too little mass (or everything had too much) so rolling would actually cause the player to roll up the barrel sometimes. Second, the collision wall to prevent progression got in the way of getting the player on the other side of the barrel to push it up the slope since the barrel would be against the collision wall. This was another confusing part of the tutorial since I initially did not know why the collision wall was there in the first place. The tutorial prompts were nice and helped to hint on what we needed to do to proceed, but being limited to just small squares on the ground as triggers could have been frustrating if I didn't notice it early on.

Overall, I think there's a lot of potential and building up the idea of collecting fragments and doing something with them (like unlock memories, perhaps as journal entries or something) instead of just an objective would certainly convey the story a bit better. The controls are certainly wonky at times, but I do believe this game can turn into something truly great -- just continue what you have currently, and it should work out in the end. The textures and environment (at least with the cave and lighting) look awesome and the playable character has a cool design with the side blades (why punch when you can just slash stuff with them), but jokes aside, it would be nice to see if the enemies have a similar design with accented colors that almost glow, contrasted with the darker tones that gives an almost deep underwater feel. Oh, and maybe extend the punch animation length (and apply it to a greater effect area) and add some animation to the jump.

I think I can speak for all of us but it was great to see all the effort you guys put into making this game. The different aesthetics of the game, including some voice acting (the background song was certainly unique), dialogue boxes, and overall narrative of the game did help capture a unique feeling when I was playing. Besides the issues the others mentioned, maybe add a pause screen because the sequence of gameplay leading up to the final boss takes a little while and the boss itself takes a bit of time. So, it would be nice to regroup and take a break during gameplay. As for your questions, I thought the speed of the boat was a little slow, but I guess it's balanced with the added stamina (and how often the boats come by to refill your stamina bar). However, the boats do get in the way sometimes during the final boss and the screen does get cluttered somewhat because you have to manage all the enemies on the screen, avoid the boats, collect the floating barrels and treasures, and deal with the boss that's able to follow you really well. As a result, the final boss is actually pretty hard to beat. One way to deal with this is to keep track of how many enemies or objects are currently on screen and maybe cap how many things are present at a time (at least, during the boss). Maybe more treasure items to refill your health bar would help too. The stamina bar is a cool addition but I feel like it is used up too fast (especially during the boss) so maybe reducing the frequency of the ships and increasing the max stamina/decreasing the rate of stamina consumption would make us use stamina more strategically instead of spamming stamina. As of right now, the scoring system feels like a padded feature especially when we are busy with the enemies on screen and keeping our ship alive. Also, given that the game gives us the choice to decide how we progress (safe or destroy other ships to face the spawned shark miniboss), the score system sort of leans more towards destroying as many enemies as possible to get more points. The points could be balanced so that destroying a ship would deduct points or maybe provide some bonus if a certain amount of points is achieved. A final point would be to maybe have a bool to keep track if the player restarts the game so the dialog boxes doesn't appear again because it is a hassle to have to click through the dialog (or have a skip button). Overall, I thought the presentation of the game was great and it reminds me of RPGs I used to play.

For the issues I encountered, there was some weird stuff with the positioning of the UI elements, like the health bar, barrel above the ammo indicator, and text boxes since I use a larger monitor (not a big deal, though). For the text boxes, I can actually see all the other text prompts used in the game on the lower left-hand area so maybe put them out of view more. Also, for some reason, I can't see the text or the continue button in the dialog boxes on one monitor but when I go switch my main monitor, it displays it just fine. The game was certainly playable, but I'm just confused as to why there would be differences between the kind of monitor used (besides scaling to screen size).

Edit: just thought of this but it would be cool if we could just replay the boss scene with some set amount of ammo instead of having to go through the initial phase as an extra feature

This was the first game I tried out and overall, I thought the game delivered a lot on the promises it set to do. I think someone else did this too but I also initially played without looking at fish abilities. It was a little weird figuring out the controls and getting used to the in-game physics (gravity was higher than I thought), but I was able to get 6 pearls with just using the Q ability. Without the bugginess of the walls, I honestly probably wouldn't have collected many pearls to begin with (or maybe that was intended) since escaping the jittering allowed a brief period to jump again if we timed it right. Taking advantage of that did net me one of the pearls that required me to climb up a ledge. Originally, I thought we only had access to the Q abilities for the play test and got stuck so I came to see what other details were provided. It turns out that we had access to the E abilities as well -- just need to slot them in with E when we first fish them. It would be pretty cool to test out the various combinations of fishes and Q/E abilities now that I think about it. Didn't have time to go try out all the combos but I can see the mechanics of the game going pretty deep with more fishes being added later. Besides that, the art for this game was pretty distinct and I think it meshes well with the setting and style of the game. I also liked how when you hit the spikes, it would load the player to a preset location close to where we died. Though, the kinetics of the player did feel a little slippery and the player would sometimes hit the spikes multiple times (a save location close to the spikes), carrying over the previous velocity and I would have to wait for things to settle before continuing. Overall, there was a lot of substance in this play test and I can't wait to see what else you guys add!

Edit: glad the time didn't force a game over because it would be pretty disheartening to lose your progress on your pearls (especially when I first experimented with the controls)