itch.io

Here are some thoughts as I play.

• Nice music.
• Movement feels a bit more sluggish than I expected, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Basic walking doesn't feel fast, which might be intentional. 
• Finished the first level, the movement options are neat. Not particularly striking but they seem to work consistently, and there's room for growth.
• I'm not sure what the point of having a dedicated weapon pick-up button is, seems weird for a game that's all about being fast. I'm assuming future levels will have more weapons than I can carry at once.
• Rocket jumping feels a bit unwieldy due to the fact you can't aim down while grounded. Likely intentional, but annoying all the same. The fact that you barely get any impulse from rocket jumps if you have any downward momentum doesn't help.
• Played the first level a few times, best time I got was 35s. I'm happy with that.
• Tried the second level, got a 1m15s on my first attempt. Tried it a few more times, eventually got it down to 43s.
• I'm not sure how to feel about gating levels behind time thresholds, you're potentially alienating a chunk of your audience. I respect the commitment to being a sweaty game, though. 
• The magnum is cool, I wish there were more places for me to use it.
• Only played the last level once, can't be bothered trying to perfect it. Shooting backwards to propel yourself is neat. 

I don't have much to say. The gameplay is enjoyable for what it is, a little frustrating at times solely due to user error. I'm not a fan of the visuals, the environment is incredibly flat. They're not bad per se, just uninteresting. Maybe that's your intention, some kind of minimalist retro MS Paint aesthetic, but there are more flavorful ways to achieve that in my opinion. I'm not sure if I would care about this game on my own, the prospect of buying a game where you shoot targets doesn't excite me, but I'm sure there is an audience full of movement autists that would eat this up. 

Thoughts as I play.

• I don't think that's how breathing works.
• The camera feels immediately off. It's very sensitive and very floaty, and moving the cursor from one side of the screen to the other causes this awful vertical "bump" that's a bit nauseating. I'm not sure what the best way to describe this behavior is, but you'll see it if you move the camera left and right with significant speed.
• I killed some guys, combat feels alright but pretty slow. The player and most of the enemies move at a slug's pace.
• A little too much screen shake in my opinion, but it's nothing debilitating. Definitely make it configurable.
• Blood effects are cool, but the fact the splats are fairly spread out and don't disappear with time makes them look more like autumn leaves than blood splatters. Maybe that's just me.
• The enemy sightline visualization is neat, I wonder how relevant that will be.
• The blue crystals sometimes spawn out of bounds. I'm not sure what they do when I pick them up.
• The noisy background muddies up the visual clarity a lot, it's not easy to tell what's the level and what's the background at a quick glance. Maybe just flatten the values of the background in a particular direction instead of having a mix, i.e. make the background really dark or really bright.
• The portal sprite looks horrendous with that wobble, we're beyond mixels at this point. 
• Not sure what extracting is, I'll continue and do that next level.
• The cursor reloading graphic puzzles me. There's a rising orange bar and a blue line: you'd think the blue bar represents the end of the reload, but no. The orange bar extends past the blue line. Is this an active reload minigame or did the widget break?
• The room barriers during combat are a little lacking, they're not immediately obvious. I backed up into one that appeared right behind me without me noticing and got swarmed.
• I started a new run, but my health is still 0. I am invincible now, in fact. I refreshed the page to fix it.
• Found a purple chest that I can't open. Okie.
• Extracted after a level. I have a few crystals and runes and whatnot. I can't seem to do anything with them through the menus, so I assume you haven't implemented this stuff yet.

I'll stop here. I'm not sure what this game is after playing it, I can only surmise it's some kind of roguelite where you pick up stuff to build spells? I'm not sure. It could be fun, but it isn't right now. I would work on it more until you can call it a proper proof of concept, then evaluate from there. 

Here are some thoughts as I played.

• The second I loaded into the game and pressed W, I alt-tabbed to come here complain about the lack of friction with the floor. You slide too far once you stop moving, which is made worse by the lack of foot IK.
• It's interesting how not only does the player have a flashlight pointing forward, they also have a fainter light pointing backwards. Why?
• The girl's hair horns jiggle when you move and shoot, that's great.
• The normals on the blood decals make it look super hi-def, maybe too much. I don't know if you intend to keep the current fidelity of the environment, but if you do, maybe tone down the blood a bit. Otherwise the gore is nice.
• Shop girl is cute as expected. Having animations for each item she sells is very charming.
• I still passionately dislike the transition effects when you enter/leave the shop.
• The player's flashlight goes through walls if you stand right up to them, maybe add a raycast between the player's origin and the light position to determine whether the light should be emitting or not.
• I shot the red gas canister thing a lot with the minigun but it didn't blow up, I had to use my pistol. Is that intentional?
• The walk cycle has a hitch in it.
• Shotgun pellets travel so slow that it's a little funny.

It's pretty neat, it will probably make for a cool game once it is one. I only ask that you write "REMEMBER CITADEL" somewhere in blood.

What's new:

• First boss fight.
• Balancing.
• That's about it.

Thanks for playing and for the stream!

Thanks for playing!

Thanks for playing!

Thoughts as I play.

• This is the first DD demo I've played that's had shader precompilation. The power of Unreal. It took 1-2 minutes.
• I like the little video demonstrations in the tutorial dialogs.
• The chandelier above the blood fountain you spawn in looks weird, it's just floating there. I understand what you were going for but I'm not sure I'm a fan of that kind of prop.
• The checkboxes on the tutorial dialogs feel somewhat unresponsive, it takes a few clicks for them to work.
• The UI looks pretty cool, it's not super streamlined but it has charm. The one caveat is that the buttons don't seem very responsive, sometimes I have to click more than once for the action to happen.
• The game feels pretty nice, there's a lot of small juicy touches that add up. I especially love the fire spell, it's very punchy.
• The knockdown health meter is an interesting mechanic, it trivializes a lot of fights in the tutorial but I imagine it's different in the real game.
• Opening the pause menu while your inventory is open does not close your inventory.
• I wish the walls would become see-through at a greater distance, it's easy to be in combat without being able to see the enemy a t all.
• The inventory is a bit glitchy after dying. It said I had no healing crystals, but if I click onto equipment and back onto items, crystals appear.
• I don't understand how the lizard boss' attacks work, they attack inward or outward seemingly at random. What's the tell? 
• I just brute forced the lizard boss. The entrance barrier glitched out a lot when I did, it kept lowering and respawning infinitely.
• Died at the second boss, can't be bothered to keep going.

It's definitely got potential! I will definitely check it out again in the future.

Thoughts as I play.

• The tutorial is alright. I don't like being railroaded like this, I want to move around right away, but I understand why you did it this way.
• It feels weird to tilt by moving the mouse left and right. That might just be my inexperience with plane simulators showing, but my initial reaction was confusion. It feels like the A/D controls fight with the mouse left/right controls, like the controls are trying to both be a sim *and* arcadey.
• Wow, it really is quite difficult to handle this thing. Shooting the static targets in the tutorial felt super clunky. I assume this is still an issue on my part, but still, it's a data point. 
• Man, combat is hard. I died twice just flailing everywhere, but I got some kills doing flybys. 
• I think I figured out why the rolling controls feel so weird: the camera doesn't follow your rotation. 

I stopped playing without beating the combat, I wasn't having a good time. The game seems competently made, I just got frustrated.

Thoughts as I play.

• I love how you picked a background picture with the lowest possible resolution for the main menu, it's kino.
• Took a second for me to figure out what I was doing, but I survived the first wave with relative ease.  
• It might be a good idea to have at least a little downtime between starting a stage and enemies spawning/activating. I lost all my barrier immediately when I started the desert level due to one of the ground enemies firing at me before I could react.
• Died at the ice level, but I can restart without starting the game over again. Weird, I took this for a roguelite given the mechanics in play here. I did lose all my upgrades. What kind of game is this supposed to be?
• Died again, but this time I respawned in the forest level. Was my first continue starting in the ice level a bug? Maybe there is no set level progression and stages are just picked at random.
• I found a strat for clearing most stages in 10 seconds tops. Just get damage upgrades and fly close to the ground, zigzagging so that you shoot the ground. You can kill a bunch of ships and reach the kill target really easily.
• Trying out the eagle plane, it seems worse when you just start the game. Maybe upgrades will make it shine.
• I don't understand why the game offers better/advanced versions of upgrades without there being any sort of penalty or higher cost. Why would I take green tech over red tech, ever? They cost the same.
• I wish enemies were more involved, they're not very interesting right now. 
• The upgrades are very limited, red tech is the best one by a huge margin. Why not some upgrades to your health, movement/turn speed, etc? 

It was decently fun. You need a lot more content so get to it, chop chop.

Thanks for playing as always! 

My brain will never get used to countering electricity with ice and water with electricity.

I think water being weak to electricity makes sense, but electricity being weak to ice is very arbitrary indeed. I don't really know how to structure the weaknesses in a fair way otherwise. It would make sense to have each element be both super-effective *and* weak to its counter, e.g. water is weak to electric and electric is weak to water, but wouldn't that simplify things too much? It would also mean that logical counters would no longer work without some sort of pattern breaking: fire wouldn't be weak to water anymore, for once. 

Unless I'm mistaken, the barrier spell's calculations does not consider current elemental afflictions. So if you're wet and use fire on yourself the barrier breaks leaving you wet because it thinks you are going to be set on fire. 

Yes, this is in fact how it works. I could make it so self-inflicted statuses don't trigger the barrier, but I'm not a fan of breaking generality like this.

[Recipes do] cause some "wait do I have that in this run?" moments. I know that there's an icon on the bottom left but it's not exactly immediate. 

Yeah, it's an added cognitive load on the player. I could highlight the player's current recipes in a dedicated UI gizmo, perhaps icons running on the top edge of the screen or next to the alchemy text on the bottom right.

I think volatile tar used to be harder to make, now it's much easier to use and combo with fire.

It is in fact easier to make now, all the special chemicals had their recipes flattened to only use base stuff. I can tweak the numbers a bit on the tar, perhaps make it so it can't self-trigger when an attack has fire + tar, but I don't mind it being powerful. I want the player to have fun.

Thanks for playing and for the kind words! I think I know what you mean by the game being slow, there's a lot of downtime. What do you think would help speed it up? Faster movement speed for both the player and enemies is what first comes to mind for me. 

Thanks for playing!

Thanks for playing! The spawn cap is a good idea with the miniboss, and I'll investigate the green VFX that never goes away.

I will be writing down stream of consciousness thoughts as I play.

• Main menu is simple but comfy, I like the music. 
• I think it would do you good to replace the flat green background with something more stimulating. I know you already have the falling letters effect on the main menu, but other menus look very flat. You could just have a diagonal grid tiling infinitely, even that would be an improvement.
• Started a run with default difficulty. I love how your tutorial dialog box moves around, the UI is very well done feel-wise.
• Interesting, I think I'm getting the concept now. The roguelite elements/systems seem deeper than I expected at a glance, it's interesting. I did get slightly overwhelmed with the exposition dump, but I don't see how else you'd introduce things to the player cleanly. I also have never played Scrabble before, I'm sure that influences this.
• I am not very good at this game, and I'm basically buying things at random. I assume some degree of strategizing from the start is required to do well and I just didn't do that lol.
• "Dih" is a valid word. 🥀
• I lost! It would be nice to see my score at the end instead of just being told "GAME OVER" and that I suck.

The game is fun! Even for someone like me who doesn't ever engage in stuff like this, it was calming. I can see this doing well as a time-passer kind of game: I don't think many people would go out of their way to sit down and play it, but they would definitely play it during downtime and whatnot. I don't have any actionable criticism, and while I likely won't play this again, I enjoyed my time with it. 

Thanks for playing! I'll try out your mapping suggestion.

Bro doesn't even have a gameplay loop yet but he already added skin switching sexo functionality, I fvcking kneel. It seems cool, it's hard to muster up many worthwhile things to say given how early the game is. The characters look cute and decently marketable, I expect you to get some good fart (fan art) this DD. The weapons aren't particularly satisfying but do the job, the shotgun feels the most impactful. The enemy design is dumb in my opinion, it doesn't look right to me. I like the environment. If memory serves me right, you mentioned this might be co-op? I can see that being fun. Anywho, that's all I had.

What's new:

• Shrine rooms and their respective special buffs.
• New chemickal.
• Rework on how high order products are mixed/gated.
• New spawn event system, enemy waves should be more cohesive now.
• More buffs in all rarities.
  
• Dungeon variants that affect visuals and spawns.
• New, hopefully better tutorial.
• Balance changes.
• Optimizations.

Eventually, yes!

Thanks for playing! 

Had no trouble with the tutorial, but the first room of the first level sure made me feel retarded. I think you should leave the enemies inflicting status effects until just a little bit later

Fair. I want to make a new tutorial that you actually fight enemies in, in theory it'll help bridge the gap between learning the mechanics and being in an actual fight.

Something that really sucks is that I can't break barrels with the pistol. Why? That caught me off guard a few times. 

The barrel model actually isn't tall enough to reach pistol-aiming height, that's why. I had the collider extend past the model before this build, but that made the sentries unable to aim at you through a group of barrels, so I changed it. I think I'll make a new barrel model that's the right size.

Make the map generation result in less empty hallways since those kill the pacing a little bit, but that might be personal preference.

Sure. I want to add portals at the end of room chains that teleport you back to the start room as well, should help with backtracking.

Why not make it so each element is a different attack? That would make mixing them way more fun.

Tempting, but I'm not sure how that would work. I designed the game with the core idea that elements don't dictate the behavior of your weapon, that's why you actually have dedicated weapons instead of Magicka's amorphous "cast" button. Not to mention, how would that logistically work? How does a fire scythe swing differ from an ice scythe swing? Or a water swing? Or a water + ice + poison swing? It is definitely a cool idea, don't get me wrong, but it seems infeasible. 

Thank you for playing and for the video! I'll watch it soon. I can tweak the fire rate of the sentries, and I'll experiment with a stronger time slowdown when in alchemy mode. The bomb guys are definitely controversial, I'll take your complaint in mind.

Thanks for playing. Yeah, it's a permadeath roguelite, you start every run with a new generation and from the start. Frankly, this isn't an issue in my eyes. Anyone who reads the storefront (here or on Steam) will see it's a roguelite, Demo Day is just an unique situation where people download the game without looking at any promo material. 

I agree on the randomized introduction, I want to make a new tutorial that acts as the first level of the game. It'll give you some weak enemies to learn your alchemy on.

What if I add a stronger time slowdown when you enter alchemy mode? Would that make it more bearable, or is there something fundamentally wrong for you?

Writing down thoughts as I play.

• Nice feely menu. If you're not giving me a drop-down for all resolution options, I would recommend having a confirmation prompt after selecting a new res.
• Went with earth element for no particular reason. Movement feels nice, I like how snappy it is. Shooting is good too.
• I was a bit confused after I placed the mask on the shrine, it took me a while to see the big starfish behind all the kelp. There were other trash mobs around me too, and I thought one of them would be the enemy I have to kill.
• I know others have expressed this sentiment already, but it's weird that you have to seemingly remake your shrimp after beating the tutorial.
• Chose ice for the first level, it feels fine if not a little weaker than earth. The beam seems more situational than the rock slam since it requires you to be vulnerable for longer. Maybe it'll shine later in the game, it's certainly useful against static enemies right now.
• I'm not sure I understand the core gameplay loop. I have to kill a certain number of eggs... is this a quest-based game?
• I like the music, it's very Ratz Instagib-y.
• My merged power was the glacier, the ultimate felt nice and powerful. The ice wall was sort of floating in mid air since I spawned it on elevated ground, you could easily fix that by making the model longer and having the pivot not at the base.
• Looks like I got somehow pushed out of bounds during the boss fight, I can't move past this invisible wall. Had to get myself killed.
  
• After killing the boss, I'm still unsure what constitutes a loop in a domain. I assume that it always ends by killing a boss, but I don't know what triggered the boss in the first place. Maybe it's a case-by-case thing.

That's all the time I had right now, I might play again later. It's definitely fun, though it feels a bit free-form right now. I didn't read the dialogue with much care nor did I read all the on-screen text, maybe it's my fault. Hope to see you release soon.

The following are stream of consciousness notes that I'm writing as I play.

• The game boots in a tiny window, I can't see why you'd want this.
• Intro cutscene is nice, more sounds would be nice but I can't dock you for something that's clearly WIP. The plot setup is pretty neat. Are those Houndeyes, by the way?
• The tutorial is ok, nothing to write home about but it does its job. It doesn't overstay its welcome, which is nice.
• I'm not sure I like the VN-style dialogue boxes, it's never good to take control away for the player (even if just for a few moments). I think you should follow in Half-Life's footsteps here and just let the character move around while a VA speaks. 
• I think the text centering breaks if you try to fast forward through dialogue.
  
  
• From what I gather, the game is mission-based with persistent progression.  I'm wondering if missions are replayable, guess I'll find out soon.
• Having a bunch of enemies in the very first combat encounter feels like a bit much. It might not phase players generally more experienced in shooters, but could be overwhelming for a novice. If your game is meant to be hardcore, I guess it's fine.
• You can chop the grass up! Cool detail.
• The jump you make to get out of water is comically high. Maybe a shorter jump and a tight mounting mechanic would be better.
• The VFX on the slug's slam attack is very underwhelming: not only is the shockwave tiny, it's almost the same brown as the ground. Make it whiter, bigger, and maybe even add a tiny bit of screen shake to give it some oomph.
• I have 4 nades, but pressing 5 does nothing..? I tried pressing random buttons, nothing worked. The inventory description makes it sound like they're for a noob tube or something, guess I'll keep playing and see if I get that.
• The water ripple effect can proc through solid ground, maybe add a raycast.
• Questionable choice to mark a checkpoint exactly when you enter the fortress and like 20 dudes start trying to kill you. I was on low health, so I kept reloading and instantly dying. I had to eventually reload an earlier autosave 
• Shield enemies got stuck trying to pathfind around this edge.
  
  
• Interesting, you can't replay missions. So the game is purely linear, no level select? I'm not sure that's the best idea for replayability, especially if you're going for a boomer shooter where people want to play every level again and again to optimize their strategies.
• I got the two health regen upgrades and wow, they really seem to trivialize a lot of combat.  I haven't had to use a health kit all level (The Lair), and I haven't been particularly good at dodging. 10hp per melee hit feels kind of absurd right now.
• I'm not sure how one is supposed to avoid the elephant's ground slam attack. I tried being in the air while it performed it, didn't help. Maybe I timed it wrong, but it felt like BS.
• Why is there a distinction between available and consumed mutagens? Why would I want to not consume them?
• There is a lot of free sniping you can do in the Chieftain's Camp, most of my kills were from just circling the structure and using the mounted gun and the harpoon.
• The chieftain fight was underwhelming. The boss is tiny and doesn't feel particularly unique, it's just a dude who jumps sometimes. I melted through him with the trench gun.

The game felt like it would be pretty tough at first, but again, those health upgrades made things so much easier. I didn't die once after getting them. The boat still feels divorced from the core gameplay, it's often just a tool to get in and out of the level. The only time it made a real difference was in the level where I could just circle the map and kill stuff for free. You could make a level where you have to stay on the boat and keep moving on the boat--maybe there's a tsunami behind you or something. The floaty controls don't allow for any sort of crazy obstacle dodging, but still, you could have more boat than land for sure. 

I liked the animal enemies much more than the humans. The animals are more varied and serve clear roles, whereas the humans all look really similar.  There is a general lack of movement in the enemies, they all either stand there and shoot at you or just walk towards you. Even the floating squid dudes, which you would assume stay at a range and pelt at you, hone right on top of you and just insta-die.

Overall, the game was decently fun, but it didn't really feel exciting. There were moments where I thought "oh, cool", and that's about it. I'll play it again next time you submit.

Thanks for playing the game. Sorry you couldn't get the most out of the game, it has a steep learning curve for sure. Do you feel like you would've eventually gotten better if you kept practicing, or is there something more fundamentally wrong in your eyes?

Thanks for giving it another shot. I'm not sure I follow with the run feature, just a temporary speed boost? I haven't played Hades 2. There actually is a journal entry on the AoE circle, it's the electricity chemickal status effect, but getting hit by your own attack is a common pain point with a lot of people. I removed it from the latest hotfix.

Thanks for playing! I'll try out your suggestion and see how it feels.

Thanks for playing. The idea is to exploit the natural weaknesses of enemies: fire dudes are weak to water, water dudes are weak to electricity, and so on. You can tell what an enemy's element is by their color scheme. 

I like the use of right mouse for an input trigger, it's nice to separate the alchemy input between the two hands. That being said, I'm not really a fan of this idea overall. It would get tiring to have to draw out your mixture every time, it's a more strenuous action than just pressing a few keys. This goes without mentioning how much slower it is overall. 

The fact this is a twin-stick makes me question the input logistics. What happens to the cursor during and after entering the radial menu? Is the menu always kept centered somewhere, or is does it appear relative to the cursor? If so, what if the cursor is somewhere that makes part of the menu go out of bounds? If not, what happens to the player's aim after the alchemy input inevitably changes their final cursor position? It sounds tricky to me. 

I wouldn't be against a cosmetic wheel that shows you button prompts and whatnot, but that's just the current mapping with extra steps... 

Thanks for playing. You can switch weapon by pressing R, you can also rebind it in the settings menu.

Also, there aren't that many combinations. There are 6! / (6 - 3)! = 120 permutations of the six base chemicals. Combinations would be just 6! / (3! * (6 - 3)!) = 20. So it's not actually that bad! :)

Thanks for playing. I can't thank you enough for being a consistent playtester lmao. 

Locking tier 2 reagents behind an upgrade seems a bit punishing and it messes with my muscle memory but it works if you want to give the player a sense of progression.

Agreed. I actually changed it to have tier 2 unlocked by default between you downloading the game and posting your comment, so there's that.

Every time I play alchemickal it takes me a while to readjust my muscle memory and remember that Ice counters electricity but not fire and electricity counters ice but not water. Took me a while to get back in the rythm.

Do you think I need to state these relationships more explicitly? The player has to either read the individual enemy entries or just figure things out on their own. I don't want to hand hold, but maybe there should be some sort of general weakness chart.

Color coding is still off: Fire explore should be fire colored instead of red, neutral ice and water enemies are hard to distinguish when they're being summoned which can end your run if you're trying to scythe one of those neutral enemies and you realize too late that it's a cryo mine instead,

Fair, the neutral and ice enemies really do look alike when spawning. Fixing it now.

Turrets are fine in small rooms but in larger rooms like the boss room they can feel unfair when they're shooting from off screen. The turret rotation noise is a little grating.

I can limit their maximum range, I suppose. Maybe add a tiny aiming laser too.

This type of room is satan incarnate and it was responsible for most of my failed runs. 

Same, honestly. Maybe I'll make the pits smaller, or just remove the room altogether.

I think you've got a room balance problem on your hands: The ones with pillars you can move around are super easy, the ones with small pockets you can hide in are also more forgiving, the other ones feel completely different and so much harder especially in the upper floor where you have no room to maneuver and doge the initial attack by the whole wave of watchers. 

What's your suggestion? More homogenized room shapes? I don't disagree, the room shape impacts the combat a lot, but I think it's good to have inherently harder rooms and easier rooms. I'll take another pass at the layouts.

Once I unlocked tier 2 I started using steam + electricity + ice and that's a combo that clears rooms of all enemies fairly easily. I never felt the need of experimenting or mixing my tactics unless there were a couple of enemies left to speed things up.

This is a recurring complaint with the game, which is born out of the lack of content. There is only one enemy faction with a set of baseline weaknesses, so if you find a combo that's good against them, you win. I could nerf the electric damage bonus when wet, I guess.

idk if it's even viable to use anything but revolver + AoE mix on hard.

Melee is viable, it's what I mostly use. It is definitely riskier and takes a special kind of confidence to use, so I really can't blame anyone for sticking to ranged. 

Thanks for playing. I'll tweak the difficulty numbers again, I always overestimate how people will fare. As for the controls, this is the best compromise I've managed to make in my opinion. I've tried:

• A radial menu, which worked but was very slow and broke the pace of combat.
  
• Number keys, which work well for the first 3-4 chemicals. The rest can be hard to reach without stretching your hand or taking your fingers off WASD entirely.
• Number keys split into two categories, i.e. use a modifier key to access the latter three chemicals. This wasn't too bad, but it still required taking your fingers off WASD. With the current scheme, you don't have to move your hand at all

I'm open to suggestions, though. Anyway, glad you had fun!

Thanks for playing. The tutorial is meant to be isolated from the main gameplay loop, your upgrades don't carry over. I see how that can cause some frustration. The three waves thing is also valid, I can tweak spawn credits to be more lenient. What I can't address is your complaints of the core gameplay loop. Fighting elemental guys with counter-elements and upgrading your stuff is just what the game is. The enemies will (and already do) get more involved as you progress through the levels, but if the first batch of content already isn't fun for you, I don't see why that would change with more content.  

Stream of consciousness notes:

Tried going down the menu items by pressing S and it changed the game's color palette. Maybe you should have some on-screen controls, even if just for the first time booting the game.

The health bar at the top left has some pretty low contrast, and the fact that the bar doesn't cover the entire "frame" is odd. It made me think that I would have a second health bar after the "top" one depleted. Why not do something like this?

Contrast seems to be a recurring issue. This guy looks so similar to the floor, it's crazy. The projectiles from the enemy with wings are also extremely similar to the floor.

I'm getting into the swing of it, it's pretty fun. I'm not the biggest fan of the "select an upgrade from three random choices" design, but it's pretty common with the genre so I can't dock you for it. 

I wish the game was more forgiving with enemy spawns. It's been twice now that I walk into a room with an enemy practically in the same position as me, and I instantly take contact damage. 

I don't know how to feel about the inventory, I'm not a fan of pausing the action entirely to browse through consumables. It's cool that you have extra tools you can use and it follows that a game with a retro vibe would implement it like this, but I just don't like it.

I didn't get very far, just played for maybe 20-25 minutes. The art is cute and the gameplay knows what it is, so I don't have any real complaints.

Thanks for playing. You have to purchase the available upgrade at the workbench as directed.

Seems like a very cool game, the ship building mechanics seem tight and the microscopic presentation is neat. Did you take inspiration from Spore? 

I made a little bot that can move around in any direction, which took some trial and error since it's not obvious which way the thrusters fire from the sprite. I wandered around the map for a long time, as it took me forever to find out I was supposed to go into the tunnel thing at the center of the map. I found a pink chest but had no clue what to do with it, then I died to enemies since I had no way to defend myself.

Trying again with the same setup, are the maps procgen? This looks different. The same thing happened, I don't understand what I'm supposed to be doing.

I've now discovered you can scroll in the shop, oops. I made a ship with a cannon, which was working until I stopped to pick up some parts. I don't know what I did, but I got permanently stuck without enough energy to use the welder, so I had to restart. It would be nice if you could see how much energy you have numerically instead of just a bar, that way you know if you'll be soft-locking yourself or not if you saw stuff off.

It's really cool that you can deflect projectiles with the cannon. I finally made it to the second stage, got my shit wrecked. Game crashed shortly afterwards with an error message saying "bongbing". Wait, it didn't crash, but I'm stuck in a black void.

This happened again after playing some more.

It's a very brutal game, which I like. It got fun after the initial hurdles induced by a lack of tutorialization. Honestly, one of my favorite demos I've played from the DDs I've participated in. Well done, looking forward to more.

It's unfortunate to see a dev stray into the pits of project hopping, but at least this is (supposedly) related to Ferarum. Writing down my thoughts as I play.

UI feels comfy, clunky in all the right ways. The photos are nice, I like the comet picture the most. 

The documents are neat, I like how you mess with the UI layout and stuff.

I see the 'rarum tie-ins in the games section. I don't like hurting girls so the Vivi minigame did nothing for me.  The 8-bit Gymnopédie No. 1 rendition in the Frankie game is nice, stayed on that for a while to just listen to it.  Not surprised to see Jojo talk being unavailable, there's another game for that.

I have two hearts on my desktop after going through all directories once. I'm sure there's more to see but my attempts at finding more stuff were to no avail. I've always been terrible with this genre of "game" where you have to discover stuff through trial and error, so I'll just leave it to someone else. 

It was enjoyable and well-made, keep it up bro.

Writing down my thoughts as I play.

Dropped some frames upon loading into the game and looking/moving around. Not a fan of the easing you have on the player camera, it's not the end of the world but I would much prefer snappier controls. It feels weird jumping while moving forward and looking down: you can't look straight down, so your character starts strafing if you look to the sides. It's hard to describe but feels wrong. Weirdly enough you can't seem to do this on the boat, your character just keeps moving in its original velocity. The boat controls are not the best but they do the job (I expect you to streamline them down the road). 

More frame drops when I picked up and first shot the revolver. The revolver feels  weak with its spread and low damage, no point in using it over the machete for now. 

I almost got the boat stuck at the second checkpoint, with the wooden gate. It is very easy to get stuck on the rim of your ship, which is annoying when jumping onto an island. 

The revolver has more relevance with the crabs and ranged guys, especially the former. The rifle is better against the ranged enemies but not the crabs. I dislike how the bullets in this game are so slow, makes the guns feel floaty and low-impact. The monkey enemies are completely irrelevant, I just ignored them and it worked.

Experienced a glitch on the island after the capsized ship where enemies disappear after walking past a certain spot, then reappear if I walk back. 

Died twice on the spiked parkour part, once due to me catching on the edge of a rock and being unable to move. Movement feels very, very clunky. 

The Blunderbuss is terrible, it was faster to use the akimbo revolves on the horde of shamans and ranged guys on the final island. The final boss was very easy.

It's a start, I suppose. Nothing felt particularly fun or captivating, as both combat and sea traversal were clunky and lacked juice. It's lame to have a game centered around a boat then have all the combat be on land, what's the point of the boat then? The level is completely linear which kills any feeling of exploration, something pretty critical to games about sailing the sea. I think you should take a step back and figure out your game's core identity before you go any further. Like Brim mentioned, the artstyle is all over the place, but this is a prototype so I won't dock any points for it.

Thank you for playing. I will make the tits bigger to increase depth.