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Movement reminds me of my game more than I'd like to admit.

Air control is really good, but as opposed to that having only one option of starting from the ground doesn't exactly feels right, especially if you are about to jump into spikes.

Glass not changing the direction is just too funny, great idea.

It doesn't exactly bring out the full charm of bumble bees. It needs some buzzing, funny leg movement and tall flowers bending under its weight (catapult prop?).

Feels like a complete game overall, very polished. Last stage was a neat challenge.

Kino progress. Now you need to start pumping out gameplay.

Physics can sometimes glitch out. You can get stuck while standing next to the body of water next to a cave exit with some wind, until you blow so much of it, it rips you out of there and throws you across 20 meters. Some wind movement doesn't ever gets dampened and stays as perpetual vortex.

Thanks for clarifying, that's true. I biased the system to make player fight mid air too instead of clinging to the ground to prevent that playstyle pitfall. It kind of worked as intended then, and now I'm being dumb because I started expecting to have it both ways.

I'll experiment with dashing while working on the flamethrower, but I doubt I'd like it as a main mechanic. Momentum acts as a reward for skill and confidence, so it's never expected but rather encouraged (outside of the practice stage).

It works fine. The biggest problem for me is visibility. Shadows, buildings, fog, barely shaded enemies, crosshair, window cracks and fortress mode on top become noise to me as I mow down enemies by the health bars alone, and spam sprint to preemptively avoid missiles. It feels like audio could also be better.

At first I didn't even notice the damage taken indicator because of all the things going on. Sometimes I get teleported or turned around instantly, I'm not sure what's that about.

Thanks. The setting is completely separate, but they share some themes while branching out to do different things with them. I see them as the opposite of each other.

Does the horizontal on-ground recoil feel slow or did the tutorial fail? It's a bit gimmicky but it adds to shooting direction decision making and works around mech animation restrictions. There's also a variant of it with holding down direction, but that's not tutorialized yet.

Missing a parry can be really bad, though that's mostly the case when you are playing aggressively. I'll do some more testing with the bosses - optimally the snake boss gets constantly harassed, but the acrobatics involved are insane. Theoretically taunting could cover for that in two ways. Gameplay can actually be far from methodical, as high momentum and aggression is viable without any limits - this is why the style meter works this way.

How's your demo btw? I hoped to see it this DD.

It has some potential. Mechanics are simple and it's not a matter of gameplay tutorial, but the power mechanic scaling needs an in-world explanation to make it perfect, something like power grid load. Other flavor texts would be nice too, like selling power could be skimping out on lighting, and you could even make it affect the background art to let you directly see the result of your actions. With minimal effort additional flavor text could push it from doing semi-abstract actions to actual immersive storytelling.

I don't think the hover tooltips should have a delay. Time is critical when you first boot up the game and quickly try to learn all the resources and buildings. It doesn't bother after that initial stage though. Buildings could have their names always visible.

The game could scale really well with new mechanics since you can get away with anything as long as it's intuitive (anything business or industry related). It doesn't feel like there's much complexity right now so a greedy strategy works just fine.

I couldn't change the game mode in the options so I assumed only one was implemented, but it actually is random after booting it up again.

It really needs attack and hit sounds. It's like all the juice went into the pretty particles and bloom to compensate.

There's a skill with regen icon and ice aura description.

The game takes a bit to get going, but once it does the waves are fun, although it's still not that challenging. I like having a bossfight at the end, but the summoner is too simple as it is. I expected being gatekept and build-shamed by it.

The bomb character is kind of meh when it comes to the basics, but it eventually does get the job done with bomb spamming. Animation bugs out when you press both mouse buttons.

Thanks. Levels have hand placed casing absorbents to avoid blocking the path. I'll make a dedicated shield holding animation for the boss to make the vulnerability visible.

Thanks a lot for the video, it will be plenty useful. There are some subtle things to learn, like some ledge spots not being obvious.

On windows I can only see a white screen and the console. Can't call doscript due to an error. As it is, it would be cool to have vsync on and key repeat.

Works fine this time. Can't tell much about shaders, but the floor had a nice subtle specular if I'm seeing it right.

I had quite a bit of trouble building on ubuntu. It lacks -ldl flag to build properly.

TARGET_LINK_LIBRARIES( bengine dl )

I'll come back to it later to try building it.

Thanks, I'm glad you liked it more this time.

I fucked up big time with the controller, I hope you didn't play with it all the way through with it because the kick doesn't even work properly as I forgot to rebind stuff. After some testing I decided to change movement to the left stick (at least until I find a better way for up/down input effects).

I need to be careful with bullet mode (and other recoil movements), as it can make the controls feel unresponsive in a jarring way when it activates by accident. There's a lot of leeway with preserving momentum and you can simply aim down for some time, but I think the practice level misrepresents it a bit - optimally you enter and exit out of it quickly to mix up with other moves giving you time to think and rest.

Something like that. Level is subdivided into pillars for simplicity and performance.

Yeah, what I meant by that is that I wish mouse controls were back, and keyboard is 100% viable but not exactly fun to control as it is.

Made it to wave 26. I might be full of shit seeing how far I got this time, but keyboard controls feel worse than mouse controls form last time. There is still some weird movement in certain angles, but as long as you don't do anything too crazy and only press keys for very short time it works pretty precisely (though I would prefer doing smooth flowing motions rather than constantly correcting my course).

Same problem with the font as below.

Does odin work with absolute paths to the point of embedding them into code, or something?

Works perfectly fine. The AI is decent, and seems like the background is subtle enough to not give me motion sickness.

Nice minecraft reference.

Damn, anisotropic filtering does a great job here. The shading looks nice, though I miss the old shadow casting. Terrain editing seems more limited now, but that's even better for landscaping purposes.

The standard left/right click feels underwhelming, instead of working like a brush it would be better to snap the shovel in place and allow user to adjust the terrain by dragging up/down. I have no idea what trimming does, to me it looks the same as leveling. I'm not sure how to use shift + control thing.  You can make the selection stay indefinitely by releasing mouse and shift at the right order. Standard left/right click doesn't recalculate normals.

While unzipping on windows there's a conflict of test.png and Test.png file. I get a crash after fucking around too much:

/odin-urban-tycoons/src/quadtree.odin(312:28) Index 27 is out of range 0..<27

Other than that it looks and works perfectly fine. Still can't wait for wall editing.

Thanks for the info. What does it look like at 1440x1080 on your end? There didn't seem to be anything wrong when I tried it, although it snaps left on fullscreen (well, my screen doesn't even support it).

Is there an error_log.txt for the crash? What system? I only know one other case where that happened.

Stinger is fun to use and has all sorts of utility. There is some risk to using it, but it's not that big when compared to actually trying to play properly. Second stage doesn't fuck around and there's no way I can beat the boss, especially after seeing that long reach high damage attack. I'm glad crouch got some substantial utility in there.

Thank you! Esoteric is a good way to put it, especially if the project was fully realized.

Thanks for the video and the comment!

Sorry, there was a number of minor improvements but nothing major to miss out on.

Crouch jumped across a spazzing out wall (thankfully textures were more stable than on the webms), fought some zombies, couldn't read too much into the dialogue due to respawning. I'm not sure if I've seen much of the content, couldn't find anything else.

Zombies are pure black which makes their attacks hard to read sometimes, but it adds a nice twist to group combat when zombies become an indiscernible clump, adding to the danger.

I managed to softlock the game by opening journal, which made all the other controls stop working.

Pretty good. I was surprised to see a realistic shotgun in this type of game.

Kick wasn't listed in the controls on the title screen and it's crucial (for ammo gathering). Portals should be way easier to find. As it is finding it feels like it takes like 40%+ of playtime. There isn't that much time to read item descriptions during combat, I wonder if it should have a prompt with a pause, or those should appear at the end of the level. Portals could also need a button prompt to activate, not only are they hard to find, they are also easy to walk onto accidentally. Items are also hard to see in the levels, especially when everything is littered with bodies.

Unless you are going for very long playtimes with elaborate builds, 5% penalties to stats don't feel significant enough. A small defense penalty means nothing when you can receive massive damage killing you quickly. As opposed to that there are some amazing items with good twists, like exploding enemies and falling rocks.

That's very weird since I can run it on a 12+ year old laptop just fine. I there an error_log.txt? I assume it didn't since it looks like a crash right at the start.

Haven't seen any, so it might be fixed.

Yeah, the artifact was appearing while walking around level 2 for sure. After rechecking I got quite a lot of the bug appearing right at the start of the first level as white rays of light.

It's ok. It has a slow start, but from the level 2 it started picking up due to stronger goblin archers actually giving me a taste of what it feels like to delve into a goblin nest. Very soulful title screen with different variants. Slapping goblins with a bow is a nice touch. I'm digging the lighting.

The first time I opened the game I couldn't do anything in the title screen, no mouse hover nor click effects. Lots of stutters, especially when first casting fireball freezing the game for a few seconds. There are also some short blue light artifact probably connected to loading too. One goblin spawned completely frozen and it was impossible to attack it. A hood I picked up appeared in the equipment as a simple sprite, being placed on top of other items and not having any mouse interactions to do anything with it. Not all walls become transparent, so many goblins are hard to see.

Yeah. The perfect way would be to add the intermediate benefits from utilizing movement and then just giving player enough room to learn the advanced stuff simply by optimizing. I guess I should sacrifice new levels' visuals for the time being to figure it out faster.

I had bullet time plans from the very beginning because it would fit so well both with gun puns and mc's inspiration, but I need to figure out how to add it in a way that makes sense - I'd need some additional twist to it because using it as a crutch alone theoretically has some problems.

Control-wise, is their a specific reason that you like using key combinations to perform specific moves

Thanks! For kicks it's mostly a direction picking problem. Doing a kick in facing direction by default is kind of the opposite of what optimal parry looks like, and baiting parries while staying still is also the boring way to play. Context sensitivity is not an option because it would turn into button spamming. It's quite a pickle for me.

There is a lot of momentum based combat actually by chaining recoil and kicks (that's how you unlock the real fun), and even then it can go deeper.

I had an idea for a destruction shader, but I mainly thought about using for large objects like boss and environments.

Damn, sorry. Time to get my shit together and finally add error logging for linux.

Pretty good so far, though there wasn't much interesting exploration wise. I gave up on the large green boss because I haven't saved my progress. Having that sort of temporary weapons is a great twist and I have this in my metroidvania too.

Visuals, UI art and minimap are amazing.

Thanks for playing. There's both melee strike and parry on top of more advanced close combat options.

Thanks for playing! This fight isn't obligatory, I'm not even sure if it's realistic to beat it at current version anymore.

Damn, I'm tempted to bring this game back from the dead after all the unexpected attention it got recently.

I thought that the map addition would completely change the game for me but it didn't help me much. I suck at the game more than ever before and my playthrough must have looked totally embarrassing. After barely a few days I hit a wall that would require a lot of effort to get past. Even if I manage to find the mirror, it's located in THAT room.

Doors are an amazing idea to help with navigation, though it was negligible once dungeons became more complex. Sometimes they refuse to open until I walk away from them.

It seems like the game requires a lot of muscle memory to get going, like crouch jump-height ledges, precision bounces, etc.

The controls feel too twitchy while walking around, the acceleration is too quick. It feels a bit weird and it's hard to adjust position accurately and smoothly, especially while trying to interact or fall down into a narrow tunnel.

Crouch toggle is a weird decision, since it's used for platforming and I see it's turned on only once I land and see how slow I'm walking.

Action planner feels like busywork, especially once I started failing repeatedly and wanted to restart as soon as I can, though that's seems to match a dungeon management paperwork feel if that's what you were going for.

You know what would be cool? Warioland level flow but adapted for your game. You activate the mirror and that's when timer starts and some level elements change (crates become destroyable?). This could marry the exploration, room and movement practicing and timed execution aspects on top of adding planning and being able to scale up the dungeons.

This game would be amazing once it hits the flow zone but I will likely never reach it.

I like the melee and enemy design, they work well together. The mage attacks were pain in the ass so I bumrushed him.

Controls could be better but I totally got used to it quickly. It could have a different acceleration curve to start quicker and jump could have more height control. Running down stairs makes player fall off, classic.

I had to guess torch controls. Torch physics suck, it might need a simpler collision shape to be more predictable, and it doesn't look right with the rest of the aesthetics as it is.

Visuals could pop out more or need more zoom in. It doesn't look like it lacks gamma correction, so that's already better than many 2d projects with that sort of lighting.

Reminds me of rocket sword.

I discovered I can heal in the comments after playing a few times and after that it was too easy. You can just mindlessly go in one direction, sometimes clearing red enemies as a precaution. Discovering healing immediately removed all tension and excitement from the game, which made for a decent experience.

The combination of viewing range, screen panning delay, amount of enemies and lack of direction indicator makes me not want to use any more clever maneuvers.

Laser is too good as it's efficient at erasing red enemies and you can use it to offscreen enemies or detected them like radar. It also always shows current facing direction, which is something that is lacking otherwise to help with precise control.

Visuals are great, I love the background and water speed ripples are something I always wanted to add to my games.

I wish I could dogfight and play chicken with enemies, but the current concept wouldn't be able to handle that.