itch.io

All of Jens Vide’s music from the game is available right here on itch!

System ST91’s contributions were commissions and I don’t think he’s made them available for sale but he’s got a lot of stuff on his bandcamp page. I especially recommend MindHacker, his Ghost in the Shell tribute as it was why I commissioned him in the first place.

I got Riot Revolution off of Wimus’ soundcloud many years ago but I don’t think it’s available anymore.

I haven’t talked to all the artists about putting together a soundtrack release. It is something I can look into though, one of the songs was made by me personally so that would be a no-brainer.

From the main menu if you go Settings and Controls just scroll down and you should have a list of rebindable keys. If it’s not there it’s definitely a bug I’ll have to fix. The scrollbar can be easy to miss too, it’s on the left.

I don’t normally respond quite this fast but I just refreshed as I was about to turn in for bed, haha

Glad you enjoyed it!

I’m not planning on adding steam achievements but if I ever change my mind that’s a pretty good one.

Thanks for the control binding suggestions, controls have come up during Steam review so I can fix some of these now.

Collision problems have been a huge thorn in my side the whole time. For future games I intend to ditch Bullet physics and just write my own because there’s endless dumb problems like this that Bullet makes really difficult to work around while also needlessly consuming tons of CPU cycles. At some point I may backport these changes to Ctesiphon but for now this is just going to have to be a quirk that comes up sometimes.

I had somebody else also find their way up into that OoB area. I do want to encourage exploration so I’m redesigning that corner of the map to make this look a little more intentional and to remove the opportunity for soft-locking.

Thanks for trying it out, release won’t be long now.

I’m really keen to participate but I don’t have the time this year.

Yes, absolutely. I’ve set a purchase price but will also have a launch discount sale to match the one on Steam.

Wanted to try this again because I really like the idea you’re playing with here. Just jotting down what comes to mind.

Text in dialogue is too wide and revealed too slowly, put some margins either side and reveal it maybe 50-100% faster.

I like the skybox but they’re very high res compared to everything else and clash as a result. The water also suffers from this, if you tried reducing the resolution it might look a lot more cohesive with what you’re trying to do with the models. That and/or everything could use a heavy coat of grime and noise to give the textures more texture.

Godot’s infamous shader loading stutter strikes again. I don’t know what you can do about it unfortunately, good luck with that.

I can’t remember if this was a problem last time, but it’s really annoying that turning the boat doesn’t cause you to turn while standing on it. Makes judging your movement way harder than it could be. Otherwise, the simplified controls and revised UI I think are a big improvement over the last time I played.

It’s awkward getting back onto the boat if you stop it on a shoal. You can walk right up to the boat but can’t jump high enough to actually get into it.

I had to stop in the level with the construction site. For some reason when I got close to the shore the game’s framerate nosedived and the main thread started rocketing at max speed. If I had to guess it might have been something to do with collision? I’ve seen in Quake how they only attempt four traces per entity per frame to avoid hitting an infinite spiral of little corrections pushing objects into other objects again.

I assume it’s something you’ve removed?

Yeah, that was from years back when I wanted the game to be more friendly for showing at a con. More recently when I added new blood effects I ended up getting rid of it.

Even with the framerate limit of 144 my game was running at 2500+ FPS

Yeah I recently broke this, just found the problem and it will be fixed for the official release.

This pier is wrong:

Good catch, I hadn’t even noticed!

Best of luck!

Much appreciated! Not long before release and I can finally move on to other ideas.

it would be nice to have a text log in the ‘escape’ options menu for the dialogues

I just had this idea yesterday too after Jamak brought up the same problem. I don’t know if it will make it in time for releasing the Steam demo on Thursday but it will definitely be in the final release.

Wow, no kidding, I don’t even remember doing that.

Edit: Ah, I see now. This prompt is hard coded in a different way to the actual dialog text. I am already detecting whether to show controller or keyboard prompts, I just haven’t applied it to the UI in any way.

game is showing me controller bindings

It certainly shouldn’t be! I’ve only done hardcoded prompts so far and all of them should relate only to KB+M. I still need to actually detect keybindings in the dialog box that’s near the top of the TODO list.

Making a new save lets you save it with no filename which seems wrong.

That is definitely wrong, good catch. I need to make a text input screen for controllers this week anyway so I can patch it up then.

the sound effect for landing is bad, idk, it should sound softer

It does stand out a bit, I’ll keep that in mind for the upcoming sound balancing pass.

Seems like falling speed doesn’t count for the melee damage bonus, which would be cool.

The damage bonus is based on velocity so it should count, but I’m pretty sure I set a maximum multiplier. I’ll just apply the bonus twice, once for horizontal movement and again for downward.

So polished, I kneel. It’s like a first party Nintendo game.

I’m going to have to do that “saving…” popup for my own options menu too.

The game made my brain hurt, I’m not used to doing only puzzles like this and have to build up all of the muscle memory for common moves and the die’s orientation. Extra points for using the singular “die” in the tutorial!

Android is a hard market to pierce but this could do wonders there. What you’d really want is to release on the Switch or S2!

This has some great potential but there’s a few QoL things I’ve noticed immediately.

Running has this awkward momentum to it where it takes a noticeable amount of time to change direction compared to walking where you turn on a dime. It makes the animation look more goofy than it otherwise would, like you’re fumbling around on ice.

Dialog is revealed with some sort of easing so that you spend a long time on the first couple of words and then it speeds up. Definitely need to make that constant it’s really irritating. Otherwise, I like the dialog box, especially the golden borders. You just need something like a gradient or a pattern or some noise to fill in the main panel. Combine the borders with that everywhere in the UI and it should look super polished with little effort.

One minor thing is that I’m used to the cancel button being the sprint button rather than having a separate one for it entirely.

There’s a lot of transitional time in the combat, it’s not too bad right now with few enemies but if you’re fighting like ten dudes it’ll really drag to wait for their portrait to come up, walk over, wait a second, and then attack. You’ll either want sprint to speed the game up during this or make some option to do it more fluidly, like having the portrait ease in while the enemy is already moving. Probably keep the current way as the default though, you wouldn’t want somebody new to miss something important.

I only ever got hit once by an enemy, most of the time they would come in close but not line up their attacks properly and just end up whiffing. The camera also doesn’t pan over to show what they’re doing. I can get if you want to allow for some mystery in their moves but it would at least be good to move the camera to the nearest party member.

Would be good if you could pick movement while visualizing your attack at the same time. The collision is a bit buggy and you can easily commit to a move that won’t allow any hits.

At some point you’ll want to add controller support, shouldn’t be too hard with there already being keyboard controls only. Would also be really good to hide the mouse cursor if you can’t use it for anything. Preferably just set it to invisible.

I had to stop in the tunnels fighting three of the bugs because I had funneled them into a narrow passage that only two of them could hit Alexander through, so when the third one tried to line up an attack without hitting one of the other two he just kept yawing all the way to the right until he stopped and then the game soft-locked. Probably should just give them a timeout if they can’t figure out what move to make in time. This was also the only time any of the enemies could actually hit me.

This is very intriguing, I’m looking forward to seeing where you go with it. The Linux version worked fine, I don’t think any of my problems were to do with that.

200 MB for Pong? What else are you packing in there?

I have a way I could do them but there aren’t set “safe” zones in maps where I can put triggers for them. The open layouts mean I’d have to wait for lulls in the fighting instead and if you have enemies spotting you in a chain there might not even be a break until you’ve cleared the level anyway.

For casual runs I just recommend the easiest difficulty, your health regenerates and enemies take longer to spot you.

“now what was it that they said?”

This is a problem, I do have an idea to put a message log in the pause menu, that should resolve it pretty well. Gonna be a low priority though, I’ve got a whole lot of other things to do first.

3 headshots doesn’t kill even a basic enemy

Of course not, they’re doing the right thing and wearing helmets!

I feel like enemies tankieness slows down the gameplay

It’s only the SMG because it’s the weapon of last resort, if you could just click on every grunt’s head to kill them there’d be no reason to use any other weapon. At least this way you can stunlock them like that scene from Dead Heat.

like your a cyber commando or something but you make regular footsteps?

She’s au naturale except for the arm, it even comes up at one point in the story but that line isn’t in the demo.

I would prefer hit markers

CoD-coded horseshit, never in a million years. You’ve got blood, you’ve got sparks, nobody’s painstakingly putting stupid little sensors in every 9mm bullet just so you know that it hit. I’m not making GOTY:420Blazeit 3

This is completely unnecessary, you can just go back and look at them again. They already stand out as interactive.

you could make the deadzone bigger. my character was walking backwards slowly when idle.

Thanks for trying, this is exactly what I wanted to know. Were you playing on Windows or Linux? And what kind of controller: Xbox, PS4, etc? On Windows deadzone is presented as fixed for all devices while on Linux each device reports its own recommended deadzone so I was matching up what felt good for my old PS3 controller as it has a really tiny deadzone.

maybe enemies can have more dramatic deaths

Hah, maybe! I could have some variants with flailing arms and stuff, but probably not until after release. I’m desperate to move on to a new project and want this one done so I’m cutting scope wherever I can.

This will most likely be the last Demon Day for Ctesiphon. It’s quite a bit smaller than the other demos, featuring only the first two levels. That’s because this is a trial run of the actual demo I’ll be putting up on Steam next week.

As I’m writing this, I’m about 90% or so through implementing gamepad support. Any Xbox or Playstation-type controller should just work both on Windows and on Linux, though none of the button prompts reflect this yet. That said, if you’ve played past demos you’ll have to reset keybinds to default or the new gamepad bindings won’t show up unless you set them all manually.

The whole game and all the menus should work fine with controllers, the only sore point might be deadzones. I’m calculating them per-axis right now which isn’t really how you’re supposed to do it, but I like how it lets you steadily yaw without pitching. Windows’ default deadzone is also crazy conservative (like 1/4 of the available area) and even through I’m only using 1/3rd of recommended it still feels like too much so I’m probably going to just make it configurable.

Edit: Also, I’ve switched to building the Linux version with the newer Sniper Steam SDK. I could theoretically build it with Scout still but GCC-9 didn’t have the dedicated evdev codes for proper gamepad buttons whereas whatever the default is in Sniper does. They are just integers and I could probably #define them myself but I’d like to see if Scout is even necessary for compatibility or if Sniper is good enough even without running it in Steam.

But enough talk. Enjoy this last demo, wish me luck for release around November/December, and here’s to making an imsim next!

Thanks for your feedback! It’s getting very close, I’ll be taking down this dev build soon and replacing it with the cut-down Steam Demo so you picked a good time to try it.

Would be nice if stealth melee one-shot the grunts

It’s all down to timing, the strike has to connect before you physically run into them.

Hit detection was also a little wonky

Sometimes obvious hits will occasionally miss so I don’t think it’s the hitbox, but I’ve had a very hard time catching this.

I got really stuck on the second level. There’s a light on a ledge nearby the bridge you need to drop down.

I don’t want to remove this light because then it’d be too hard to see the grunt up there, but I can put another light on the ledge you need to climb to get to the switch so it’s more obvious.

might improve how the gun feels

The SMG is intended as a backup weapon and I am intentionally avoiding anything that could make it a workhorse.

Having a button to press that shows all the key and door locations through walls

Oh hell no

They honestly seem a little too inaccurate

As long as you’re strafing, I’m trying to replicate the role of the hitscanners in Doom which can’t hit the side of a barn if you only move laterally in relation to them.

If this is a joke for the hardest difficulty it was very funny.

It wasn’t necessarily meant as a joke, but I’ll take it.

Linux version works fine even on my craptop.

Reminds me a lot of Traveller’s trading loop just as a pointcrawl instead of a hexcrawl. The core mechanics are already pretty good and you can just grind out some more content and call it done.

I think the random events as they are now are a bit limited in their usefulness but these one-off events should stay as one type along with some more persistent ones, particularly if hints of events in neighboring cities could be sprinkled into the rumor rotation.

Seconding what others have said that it would be good to have indicators on the map of the information presented by the travel options, showing you where the current city is and what the connections are to others and so on.

And yeah, like others, I had to stop from a battle glitching out and not spawning in all the combatants.

Yeah, me too

Tried out the Linux version on my old laptop, seems to work fine except that I need to use dedicated graphics (doesn’t seem like it should be necessary) or else SDL fails to open a window (I’m just guessing, but it could be it’s requesting a framebuffer with AA or something by default which the ancient integrated chip can’t provide). Here’s the entire contents of panic.log:

Even when it does launch it assumes the initial window dimensions are the most it’s going to get and resizing the window afterwards doesn’t make it expand to fill the space beyond what it had in the beginning. Really annoying in i3, I have to launch it from a floating terminal in an empty workspace or go through the trouble of setting up a rule to launch it floating by default.

I think your font rendering is also not working correctly, characters have incorrect y offsets and it doesn’t look consistent enough to be intentional.

The tutorial really needs to point out which areas of the interface are what, or better yet have it marked on the board itself. The XP system was particularly confusing, so we expend XP as currency to buy new cards except the prices are listed with a dollar sign? The phases also seem a little strange, so you don’t complete a full encounter at once but you get to spend XP every round? I was expecting something a bit more like munchkin whereas this seems to be more like you’re supposed to manage the encounter card draws to not get overwhelmed?

I didn’t play much because I don’t like card games, here’s the screen where I stopped because I thought it had bugged out having me pick a new encounter while an enemy was still present.

That’s about what I expect from Epic really, there isn’t anything about it that should cause it to not work but alas. Well you tried at least, I’ll try again next time even if you don’t do one, maybe it will just randomly work at some point, however unlikely that is.

Going into Ctesiphon I was expecting a lot more of an emphasis on sneaking.

The temptation to make an immersive sim continues to haunt me…

In all seriousness though, I do actually intend on adding light stealth mechanics in that I’m going to make spotting more gradual as it’s currently completely binary. I’ve wanted to do that for a long time now and just didn’t get around to it.

The title screen was going for that Metal Gear look

I haven’t thought about this in a while, I do want to redo the title screen background as it’s still a placeholder from many years ago. Going to try and ape Vanquish instead to imply a little more SPEED.

The game has a simple artstyle, but it’s kept cohesive

Very deliberate. I’ve stuck to a specific workflow have intentionally not experimented much. I’m getting sick of it though and really looking forward to branching out with whatever I do next.

In the first level I jumped into the water somewhere and had a difficult/long time finding my way back to somewhere where I could get on land again. Unless I missed something it doesn’t seem like you can jump out of the water? Would be nice to have that.

No there is no jump out. You can crouch while approaching to sort of “mantle” onto a slightly higher ledge, but I made a point of making ledges low enough that you shouldn’t need to, it should be enough to move towards a ledge and you’ll step onto it.

That level is due for a big overhaul soon as I’m going to be putting together the demo for Next Fest, and particularly the first little island has a bunch of places where there aren’t nearly as many ways out as there should be.

Going in for a kill with the spike at one point (had no ammo in any other guns) and after picking up a gun it automatically switched to it; nearly killed me :(

There is an option under Settings/Game Options to disable Auto-Switch. I originally didn’t have it but then people complained about having to switch to new weapons. I do get a lot of complaints about how it switches to weapons that you already have though, I might just remove that part.

Jumping and crouching in the air kills my momentum a bit and it doesn’t feel intuitive. For being faster paced game I kept naturally jumping and holding crouch to try to extend my jump, but I had to remind myself to jump without crouching to get further instead.

This isn’t intentional, crouch is supposed to make you move at walk speed but only on solid ground and I’ve only been checking for if you’re underwater. That said crouch doesn’t really extend your jump, just that crouching in mid-air causes your collider to shrink upwards instead of downwards which raises your step height.

Oh also the music was pretty good, too

All credit to SystemST91 and fellow agdger JensVide!

I don’t know what else you need to do before it’s complete

Well the plan is another level, a boss fight, a couple more portraits, a bunch of level design polish and dialog lines, and some missing essentials like controller support and exclusive fullscreen. I don’t know if that will be enough but that’s what I’m doing.

This is pretty good, everyone’s already praised the general art design but I’ll also point out that I really like the menu SFX in battle. I don’t know if you somehow got it from the same place, but the confirm option sounds exactly like ordering an attack in Medieval II Total War and now I want it for my own purposes.

I’ve never played Darkest Dungeon so I just played it like it was a Final Fantasy game and everything seemed to turn out alright, I beat all three battles without losing anybody though I did have to dance people around to make full use of the Cleric’s passive.

I couldn’t tell if the Fighter or Knight passives were actually doing anything, I wasn’t paying attention to the Fighter’s stats and was just sort of expecting to see a little buff icon or something.

Now that you’ve got battles working what’s your plan for the non-battle parts of the game? I feel like you could take it in a bunch of different directions.

I tried it out on Linux with umu but it didn’t really work, the shaders freak the fuck out and I just can’t see anything.

Oh thank god, everything still makes sense

This is a really tough one to track down, are you definitely using the hotfix build?

death scream of the main character continues even while restarting

Yeah lol, the audio system is very fire and forget so I didn’t add any way to halt sounds in progress.

This game is awesome.

Aw shucks

I’m stuck at the second stage

This one used to be more linear but there’s an important switch you can miss so I added a loopback and now that means it’s possible to go in circles without progressing.

Needs some music in the main menu, even a placeholder so that you don’t think the sound’s broken.

I was worried this was going to be either a Devil-Daggers-like or a Post-Void-like but I’m very relieved that it’s actually distinct from both. The time is quite generous and the level isn’t procedurally generated so there’s actually some strategy involved. I like it, nice and simple.

The MAC10s are pretty fun but their positioning on the screen makes it impossible to see side-to-side like you’ve set your FOV to 40. I’d either move them down, or go all-out, hold them sideways, and push them all the way up into the upper corners.

The minigun appears to be in a class of its own, is it meant to be the easiest difficulty?

it might be related to the point light issues.

I think you might be right actually, does it still happen with the hotfix?

Because I had a bad bounds check in the map loading code which was writing into the memory immediately after the pointlight array. A pointlight is a pretty big struct so it definitely could have written all the way into the fog settings (it was also overwriting the number of point lights which was why the game was crashing when saving because it was trying to serialize a brazillion lights and hit an invalid memory location)

I’ve now fixed the bounds check but because I bumped the light limit already I won’t both uploading another hotfix unless I need another fix for this fog issue. If it’s not this bad bounds check then it’s probably going to be something to do with the fog maths in the shader, but if you’re not getting this problem on map 5 then I’m pretty sure it is actually from the point lights.

I took some screenshots before I forgot to include, here’s the laser pointer problem I was talking about. You can just barely see it, it is there, and the tracer looks normal when you shoot, but I’m sure this isn’t intentional. EDIT: Now that I’m looking at it, you totally can’t see it, but in motion it is just barely visible.

And this was just the start without the flashlight, I could barely see the instructions up on the wall until I turned it on.

Could you let me know what kind of controller you were using?

It’s a PS3 controller, but on my setup I think all controller input passes through Steam so if you could get it running on a Steam Deck it should just work with every controller.

I’m not 100% sure what I can do for the shader stutter, but I assume there’s a way to preload shaders beforehand.

On Unity I think there is an option for it somewhere, but it could also be caused the DirectX->Vulkan translation, in which case you either have to have Unity use Vulkan or OpenGL instead of DirectX (assuming that’s possible, I haven’t used Unity in like a decade) or just give up and make a dedicated Linux build.

Thank you for your kind words.

np.

Thanks for playing, glad to hear you liked it!

Every level should be beatable even from naked but often on Hard or Harder you’ll have to know where some of the secrets are and run past some enemies until you can grab a more powerful weapon.

bit cringe

Once upon a time I didn’t have auto-switch at all because I think it’s lame, but there is an option to turn it off in Settings/Gameplay which I always use.

pls add checkpoints

The open plan levels make checkpoints really difficult to add without sometimes getting those annoying instant death loops, quicksaves were meant to be the compromise.

The physical approach wouldn’t work, but I could do a Coyote timer a fraction of a second. Yeah alright, why not

Tried the new map with the level selector but it crashes whenever I try to save

I just tried saving and it crashed for me too. I’m a little busy tonight but I should be able to fix that soon. EDIT: It looks like I exceeded my limit on point lights, just had to bump it up and now saving should work fine. I also put in a safeguard to prevent it overflowing in the future.

Also this harsh shadow seems unintentional

It is definitely unintentional, and its weird how it’s clipping certain parts off. That has to be a shader problem but I don’t know if I’ll be able to recreate it on my own setup. Does it do that on every map or just the new one?

Looks like you’ve completely overhauled a bunch of the levels, nice. The new look of the second level in particular is nice, it flows a lot better though I did forget for ages to go back to the hospital once I had the green key. I think you can probably just skip that part on the top floor altogether and just change the red door into a green one and not have a red key at all.

I think you need to rethink the balance on all your weapons. The tommy gun is too useful and its too much of a risk to go around a corner with anything else. The shotgun has too few tracers with too large a spread so you have to fill the reticle to be certain of a hit. The flamethrower doesn’t really stand out and the thing I found it was most useful for, filling a room and then jumping out, is also what the firework is for.

The kick is cool (is Shanghai-dude reliving Die Hard? Where’s his jacket, pants, and shoes?) but doesn’t seem to do much damage while the regular melee is so slow and weak as to be completely useless. Definitely try the first FEAR for balancing the melee because that seems to be very close to what you’re going for.

On the level select your buttons for levels 3 and 4 work but they don’t highlight when you hover over them.

You can go through the wall under these stairs:

Was a little disappointed not to see a secret running along one of these, but I did only try one.

Nice to check in on it, I do think you’re making plenty of visual progress. I’m bitching about the mechanics because it’s what I know, but if you continue to lean into the theme as much as you are then the average random gamer on Steam might not care so much..

Works well enough on Linux except that I can’t see the laser pointer, it’s in black which definitely doesn’t match clips you’ve shown before.

The main menu is really confusing with the option highlight, you should only do highlights for either the mouse or the keyboard/controller and not both at the same time.

Controls okay except it didn’t actually pick up my controller and the mouselook feels like it has acceleration if you turn fast enough which then triggered a bunch of shader stutter so the first few seconds in game were really disorienting. You also can’t go “back” in the settings menu of the gun display, you have to just close it out with Tab. And the quit button also doesn’t work.

Art style is perfecto, you’ve got something really good cooking here. I think this will go far, your tamagotchi gimmick is a lot more interesting than a lot of ideas I’ve seen.