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Reached the end first try, didn't even use up any lives and barely engaged with the mechanics. I think it's pretty good but needs rebalance.

Encounters are pretty fair despite how chaotic they appear to be. The full wall of turrets having you maneuver across a line of platforms is a nasty bomb bait though. Aggression towards turrets is overwhelmingly rewarding and killing just a few the moment they spawn will let you have much more breathing room - this funnels you into a single strategy for opening encounters.

I'm not sure all spawns are telegraphed, l was surprised when a swarm of the small white drones spawned almost on top of me.

Player is way too tanky. A different way to balance this would be a bit more punishment, less healing opportunities but gradual ramp up in encounter threat.

Edit: I played the old version, I swear I didn't even notice the update notification and wasn't prompted by that to try it.

It's really buggy. Menu on game over and level end doesn't work. Bullet time doesn't end. I have no idea how to get out of the mech in the second level. Chainsaw doesn't do anything.

Mouse sensitivty is really weird. If it's supposed to be a limited turn speed thing, I think there should be two "crosshairs", one for actual mouse position (and it should be visible to communicate that it's actually responsive to the input and where player will end up aiming) and the other for actual mech orientation getting interpolated to the mouse position.

Oh, I've seen it on /v/ threads before. It's so cool that I wouldn't even care if there's no depth. Having any feedback on hits would improve it a lot.

To be honest I doubt I would break even on the 100$.

Got chroma turtle and shroom, but primavolt seemed like it would take some grinding because I wasn't certain about the timing.

It's a very interesting concept, but I think it wears off quickly. Frontloading all the information even if theoretically optional doesn't let players be clever and explore the game on their own. Immersion is also sacrificed as a result. 

Locking progression behind exploits is a banger idea, though focusing on timed execution rather than pure knowledge checks adds a lot of friction (but I can respect the brave design decision).

Amazing. At first I didn't even notice the level selection because UI doesn't communicate that well.

This game is way too forgiving for all the bullshit I was pulling off. Dropkick is kind of too good, you can skip blocking mechanics, though rarely it can be countered.

Some NPCs in the onsen can get stuck on walls and other NPCs creating tricky situations. First target got stuck on a woman in a perfect defensive position on a bridge with lookout at the door, with a body shield while sniping with shurikens. Thank god for smoke bombs.

I had lots of funny moments, like finding a guy who poisoned himself with a banana, sneaking up on him to figure out what's happening and getting jump scared by a ninja right next to me, and then finally slipping on the banana peel. I also suicide banana bombed another target by dying and dropping all the items, so he started eating them with his bodyguard. When I found them with another character they kept slipping on the peels. Would be even funnier if slipping could make people fall out of the windows.

One of the things I would change about the controls is letting pick the Yes/No decisions with mouse (if you click on No it will select Yes because it simply accepts whatever was selected). The other is letting player interact using mouse instead of using looking direction of the character (so I'm next to a table and I can't interact with it until I turn to it using WSAD, instead it could just direct player on mouse click and interact as long as it's within range).

The combat is fine as it is. There were other options like letting player play more defensively (as a health vs time tradeoff), so aggressive playstyle actually ends up simple in practice. The timer gives you lots of design options, like getting items from fleeing enemies, destroying crates mid-combat to save time and having different room difficulties with more risky combat but better loot. Running from encounters could be fun too using the acrobatics mode to its fullest and you can always band aid fix it with balanced item drops.

Amazing progress. It looks great with actual assets. No problems with controls or mechanics (outside of some mouse and keyboard minor gripes, but that's not the main control scheme).

Turns out when I'm time, money and health limited at the same time, I'm more aggressive than doom guy. The pressure mixes well with the combat. It could be way, way simpler and it would still work. It doesn't mix well with resource gathering though, since there's no decision making, just picking up what little crates you can get with no dynamics outside of multiple descents. I'm not sure about acrobatic mode controls, but it works well enough.

The shop on the other hand gave me a bad experience. I was stuck in a low food price loop with barely any market changes across many days. I could swear at some point the newspaper said the food prices stabilized, yet it still traded for lower that day and forward. I got to 180$ and stalled out there for multiple days.

Works fine, plays well. Got all the bones. Only the roof one was tricky and I have no idea what the intended route was.

I managed to find a bug that blocks your ability to jump, reproducible by jumping and immediately crouching. Can softlock you unless you find a ledge to fall from to execute the buffered butt slam.

The button was tough to press, I had to cheese it by wall climbing from the bottom and then dashing.

Clumsiness is fine, but it needs positive or interesting effects that add to the gameplay variety rather than just nerfing basic controls. For example warioland series has a lot of different effects from falling, rolling or being hit by enemies.

In the end the core platforming should be predictable to the player. I just read about and tested the stamina system and it doesn't feel like it should be like that. The stamina information is visible diegetically on the wings, but those aren't shown before you execute the jump. In platforming sections it just adds wait time which I need to guess each time. It also funnels me down a loop of: basic jump is really low -> use flight all the time -> use up stamina -> basic jump is even lower. The worst part is the jump not executing on sprint startup which is required to even do the jump, but alone does nothing other than reduce friction. It's possible to account for all of that with distinct animations, but I wouldn't recommend that regardless.

The better way would be not using stamina for the basic jump in any way, and making it tight and controllable, but making the extended flight be stamina heavy with little control (like it is now) and landing penalty because it's a high commitment move.

It's neat, completed the demo 2 times. There's a lot interesting going on, but it's hard to experiment because of lack of healing (outside of that one crit perk) and lots of pressure from layer 2.

The spells were meh for the most part and it felt like a damage supplement rather than significant option for combat. That might be due to little feedback and how much is going on while I'm trying to not lose precious hp (while fireball feels good to use with its knockback, eventually it devolves into fire and forget just because it's an effiicient use of the timer and mental focus). The passive perks are great though, especially the random elemental effect scaling with combo since it gives an incentive to tighten your playstyle (even if it might not practical).

The finisher is definitely a great idea. It's easy to abuse by greedy spamming, but since it can be used strategically it's not even a big deal. Love the visuals on combos.

I can't read that one font, so it was hard to decipher how to do the special.

The room transitions give me DMC3 vibes for some reason.

That's really experimental, I like the vibes. Controls like ass though, it's way too slow and too little control considering how long the air time is. Melee attacks have something interesting going on especially with blocking bullet hells.

It feels like a downgrade from previous demos. The world so far is overstretched without much interesting going on. Instead of uniformly placed enemies, making encounters with more pressure in less comfortable spaces would be more memorable.

I hope the music at the end of the demo isn't the new marble oasis track. I loved the previous rendition.

It plays really well but falls into simon-says and circle strafe for me where I just use super effective chemicals. Last run on medium difficulty surprisingly had only one recipe and no challenges so in total there was no space to push me out of comfort zone. Friendly fire is a great touch and there should be more shit like that. The boss battle is neat but it's way easier than any elite combat encounter.

It really makes me wish for a roguelike ripoff of Magicka with min maxing combinations of magic and interesting chemistry to figure out, weapon pickups and unique spells.

I'm ashamed to say I didn't touch it in a long time. In the meantime I had a hard drive failure and lost my entire pile of design notes for the project. Thankfully by some miracle I managed to get back source code for the full graphical revamp so it's not that hopeless. It's not too much of a step back, since most of the notes were brainstorming and at least the filenames are intact, but it will be an even bigger pain to get back into the project.

The only problem I found is sometimes jump not executing at all which screwed me over in some bossfights. Turns out if you stop running and jump at a precise moment it will do nothing.

Unfortunately the log is the same minus the "Segmentation fault".

I tried renaming the directory in case data from older version was breaking it but it didn't help.

I'm getting a segmentation fault on windows 10

Godot Engine v4.4.1.stable.official.49a5bc7b6 - https://godotengine.org
Vulkan 1.2.142 - Forward+ - Using Device #0: NVIDIA - GeForce GTX 1660 Ti
Segmentation fault

Plays really well. The combo system really ties this game together. It has a terrifying flow state potential as I learn the cube movements intuitively.

Tutorial helped a bit with getting some moves down, but it all goes down the toilet anyway when under pressure. 

UI mouse zones were fucked when I first launched it #justunitythings

I somehow missed the door from the start to the arcade and went to the stairs, which suffers from bad visibility and being able to walk off screen.

I managed to get stuck by walking towards the rubble near the arcade, I can walk from there towards different camera angles but never see the player on screen. Same thing with the rubble next to the first vending machine closest to the starting area - the spot is even lighted by the lamp so it looked like a path to progression.

From the starting area if you walk down right up to the camera, player will start spinning very fast.

Kind of weird how tamagochi menu can't be closed with X key.

When camera angle changes controls direction becomes relative to previous camera angle which is good, but it doesn't feel right to have it sustained when the inputs change right until release of all direction keys.

Shooting works well. Promising concept, but janky at the moment.

There are several indicators, but everyone misses them. Don’t know if you got an idea?

Oh right, I caught a glimpse of that at my first coven in mission 1 but I didn't make a special note of it because of all the other things getting absorbed at the time. It's still something that player should have control over while trying to keep the witch king safe and i.e. have the UI option to stop producing dropships even if it's at the cost of half the overall unit production, because once they are accidentally produced it's kind of awkward to clean up.

I used to get a lot of complaints that the game was too easy/pointless, so I guess it’s good I managed to swing the pendulum the other direction at least. Now to perhaps find a middle ground.

Maybe the game is inherently hard to balance. Normally the resource economy dictates the tempo, but here dynamics are different with big payoffs from calling dibs on free covens as early as you can. But maybe I'm wrong and simply mission 3 obliterates me too hard. Mission 2 seems impossible to fail because there was no offensive pressure and I could take my time.

Here you go https://files.catbox.moe/8v8prp.zip

Not my genre for sure.

Visually it looks like a mishmash of different asset packs but it's not that bad on its own. The bigger problem is that it undermines any sense of world building and atmosphere due to lack of consistency. Interesting ideas are being thrown in with the naming but then all interest goes away because of that. I can imagine that the concept of controlling different enough factions while keeping general cohesion is hard as fuck to do without resorting to generic fantasy.

It seems like a very simplified rts at first, but in turn the pacing can really ramp up when taking over covens one after another while having to manage each previously taken, and my APM is too pathetic. Mission 3 is completely kicking my ass even at slower tempo. The gates are bulky as fuck and can appear literally next to me without me noticing. I guess I'll need to find a Juggernaut coven first to prevent them from sweeping everything.

The tutorial wasn't really needed because mission 1 does a good job. What's missing is some info on buildings - I don't know what they do before I actually place them. Same goes for items, I can't see any information on what they do. This might be extended to units too, not sure.

The fog of war is really ugly as it is - not a deal breaker but because of how it works with obstacles you are forced to look at it in close proximity to the witch king. It's easy to mistake summoning circle unit preview for actual units when you are in a hurry. Normally moving cursor to the edges of the screen moves the camera, but that's not the case when selecting units - this is a bit annoying for large covens. Some prompt texts are too small like invasion gates appearing. I didn't realize through the entire mission 2 that mechs have stances, I just thought the ones with guns out were special unmovable scripted units. Should mechs and dropships be summoned both at once? I don't want to keep producing dropships which then I have to send to death to get back my unit slots. When you have a lot of units selected the unit UI collapses into unit type counts, but the unit icons are all over the place. The launcher window cuts some elements at its default resolution.

The skeleton gimmick is clever, though it's annoying to do because of how aggressive witch king is. Same goes to overtaking covens, I need to constantly execute hold position. The music is great, though I'm not sure it matches at the moment.

tldr skill issues

Unfortunately I'm not too good at linux so let's just leave it at that. I'll try to upgrade the build tools and port over crash logging for the future.

Yeah, no idea. It could be some AMD cpu quirk or a cpuset setting, and the problem is so far below abstraction level I would have to try different compiler settings or turn off thread pool completely. Thanks again for testing.

Hey, what was the exact distro again?

Thanks for testing. Seems like it fails to wake up threads from the pool, but no idea why would that happen. I guess it's time to install arch.

Thanks! Yeah, those are things I have to add next if I decide to take the leap. The trailer has a preview of the weapons (with a few more to come). The second minigun is accessed through a breakable wall below. Seems like I broke the casings for it in the last update, whoops.

Sorry for the delay.

I thought it was unity slop, but it's actually some completely different engine, neat.

The whole 3d free movement format is way too bloated, especially if you are just prototyping the game mechanics. This would work much better as a VN-like with less friction. Unless you are going for specific sort of interactivity that would give you an edge, it seems detrimental on all fronts except for some potential immersion (that would require massive amount of polish anyway).

I didn't get in depth with the game and I'm not familiar with the genre, so I could only judge some technicalities, and all problems stem from being to navigate in 3d and being in early development stage so it might be useless. Having several text boxes and a loading screen before entering each rooms sucks especially since there are a lot of rooms to visit. Camera controls are too sensitive. Exiting the swimming pool brings you to gambling room's entrance.

Sounds like the character roster is critical for the game, so it would be good build up the familiarity and parade the characters on screen as often as possible, maybe even use them for the tutorial. Due to that it feels weird that hanging out would cost energy, but let's see how it plays out when it's implemented.

Thanks, but I'm not sure about the metroidvania part, at least as a big metroid fan. The closest I could get is Demon Crest-like due to being more arcade-y and fiddling with already complex movement would backfire.

The boss mostly checks dodge and mid-air attacks (which most players still can't do at that point). I'll be adding minor tweaks to help with that. He ramps up to match your aggression though and going for nearly uninterrupted full health bar minigun combos can be pretty fun.

Alright, the mp system makes sense now so there's more decision making for sure. But holy shit, I just had the worst streak of unlucky hands ever, and no amount of mp could help me. No idea how could I have beaten this first try with no skills.

Current setup works mechanically, but there are probably more interesting ways to make this twist. Right now it feels like fighting against the community cards rather than the npcs, especially since it's asymmetric. If you are going the game-y route and slowly become balatro/solitaire battle then it should be fine.

Oh wait, the mp isn't per whole game but per hand, holy shit, nevermind. I won tricks by using no skills because of being too conservative with it. I'll replay it tomorrow.

It's interesting for sure. Tricks have too much bullshit going on, to the point it makes me instantly care less about what's going on and about using my skills because the community cards can all completely change. It could turn out good after some tuning though. What I hoped to see was trying to bridge psychological aspects into single player and giving some deduction tools to the player.

I like the commitment to being a doom-like and removing head shots.

The basic shooting enemy is completely broken and does no damage, so sadly I can't judge much about the gameplay in the end.

The city level is sprawling way too much. At least add a map if you are doing that. I gave up after searching for the green door for god know how long. It also lacks visual clarity with all the darkness and countless small point lights. The hospital is a step in a good direction though, as it's recognizable from a distance. Some collisions are broken i.e. with stairs (one can be clipped through into the side, another makes you stuck). Level design has a lot of good shit going on though, so I believe you have the most important stuff figured out.

I think being able to shoot the pistol by holding left click is a mistake, although I'd have to retest it with fixed enemies.

How the hell does it run so slow? My gpu might not be an rtx, but below 50 in the tutorial is a bit... Thankfully the visual style still works with lower resolution.

Damn, those might be some of the best controls I've seen in an agdg game (played with a keyboard). Pretty much no fighting with the controls. Did all the bones and the gauntlet no problem.

Butt slam might be a bit too fast, as it looks almost like a teleport. Swimming animation can glitch out by butt slamming in shallow water. It's easy to panic when doing aerial maneuvers, so air dash could use more frames where the character is stopped mid-air and you can aim the dash direction, and the duration could depend on the dash key press duration. It's not really necessary though, at least on keyboard because of how responsive it is.

You totally have to add claw marks on walls when sticking to a wall and fumbling down, shit's going to be hilarious even when failing.

Unless you are adding more mechanics it looks ready for pumping out assets and content.

Funny how the barrier skip you immediately discovered almost makes the entire level doable gunless. Thanks a lot again for streaming, I had a blast.

I'm not quite feeling it. Technically it's all well made but feels overcooked with all the complexity being thrown into the mix, especially level up upgrades, before letting me grasp and enjoy any nuances of the healing combat. I can't quite come to terms with the camera where I can fully see the back line and the front line isn't tiny, maybe the fov could be lower.

Works well and looks nice.

It lacks a bit of visual clarity but it's fine except for some confusing tiles that i.e. look like one sided platform but actually doesn't have collisions at all.

The platforming is good but needs more time for me to get used to. Jumping straight into timed platforming is an instant progression wall. It would be better to simply be able to fuck around with all the new mechanics in a more relaxed setting rather than putting a confusing sequence of platforming right after introducing sliding and platforms. My WSAD hand isn't good enough for platforming this precise and arrow controls aren't comfortable with mouse either so I would need way more time to get good at this game. I would prefer showing cursor XY cursor position during the target jumps as it's less confusing and allows for faster and intuitive angle adjustment. Arrow up doesn't open chests, only W does.

The game is way too quiet, at first I thought it lacks most sound effects until I boosted the system volume x3.

The secrets are really neatly hidden, especially the water one.

I crashed while playing:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date : 03/08/2025 14:46:21
System.IndexOutOfRangeException
Message : Index was outside the bounds of the array.
StackTrace :    at TangEngine.AudioClip.AudioUpdate(AudioStore buffer)
   at TangEngine.AudioCallback.ProcessAudio(AudioStore buffer)
   at TangEngine.AudioE.BufferCallback(AudioStore buffer)
   at TangEngine.AudioE.Callback(Void* stream, UInt32 framesCount)

But don't tell gedg you don't have a linux build.

Feels really good. Screen shake didn't look as nauseating while playing like it did on stream. I managed to freeze the game when doing over 10k combo. The additional hit stop (also known as lag) is working well in letting me know I'm doing good.

The large bouncing combos are the biggest appeal but also the biggest problem if you would go for gameplay depth instead of dopamine pumping.

I'm not quite sure what the health is for.

Thanks a lot for the video! It will be helpful for me.

I'll try as soon as I can wrap my head around it. As of now I have an almost full revamp ready with better graphics and I'm gradually planning out an improved concept.