itch.io

I see! I tried seeing if bombing it several times in a row without dying did the trick, but I guess I never reached five times.
I think giving the boss a new expression for each HP (or maybe a growing crack in its face) would be even better, but an HP counter would be a big improvement for making it clear what's expected of the player.

*e* the completion animation is very cute.
The boss is hard but fair once you know how it works, although I do have a few issues;
- The bombs take a long time to respawn, so I spent a lot of my time just running in circles to pass the time, which wasn't very interesting - I got tired of the running SFX very quickly.

- some spawn points of the boss are much easier to reach than others from the running-in-circles route, meaning you could randomly have a much easier or harder time with the boss depending on which spawn locations it picks. I had one attempt where I hit the boss three times in a row without needing to change direction.

In room 11, my first solution to the new switch was be to just activate it and wait it out, rather than sliding under it - putting a block or spike that you have to slide under instead would require players to do the slide without giving them the chance to just make the level more boring for themselves in easy mode.

I really can't figure out what you're supposed to do in room 16. Bombing the face doesn't seem to do anything except randomly change its position, but that I couldn't find anything else to do with it. It's also strange to see a random element like the bomb's spawn location suddenly introduced at this late stage; it's a big departure from the deterministic "memorize the correct sequence and timing of inputs for each stage" approach of all the previous levels.

If you bake the lights or upload a build from before the new lights I'd be happy to test it for comparison

Hello, IIRC you were a bit pensive about how the new lighting was gonna affect performance, so I tried it out on my old potato of a laptop.
I can't compare with previous builds since I didn't save any from past Demo Days and I don't see any on your page, but it's sadly unplayable; 20 fps in the starting corridor and all the way down to 8-10 once any actual fighting starts.
For comparison, the same machine can run Risk of Rain 2 at a barely-playable 20 FPS even when lots of enemies show up.

Hello again.
Fun as usual, but I didn't notice much in the way of differences since the last build I played. I hope progress on all your many planned assets and levels is going well.

Gave it a go, but it's not really my thing so I only played through the first ten levels.
My only real feedback is that the level end screen takes way too long to sum up your collected flowers.
I don't know about getting hurt making your ranking worse - on the one hand it's kinda boring that there's no fail state, but on the other, your control over your trajectory is kinda limited and I could see it getting frustrating.

The bee's cute though, and the varying finish animations are a nice touch.

Nice. My main issue was finding my way through the dark caverns - I feel like even weak fire effects should maybe generate more light. Surprisingly managed to not burn myself to death. Getting a good flamethrower going was hard but satisfying. But I mostly just flambé'd the goblins directly because it was simpler.

Only real bug I noticed was being able to summon winds in the void outside of the caves. Unless the glowy stuff in the caves isn't supposed to look like it's glitching out of this universe.

I do wish the wind wasn't quite so weird looking. You need a particle that visualizes it for gameplay purposes, but if it picked up motes the color of the underlying dust instead of the rainbow particles we have now, that'd be a big improvement I think. Or maybe a Wind Waker-style white swooshy shape.

Anyway I rate it great/8, but you know I'm biased.

Played through the first level again to check out the new models (and also get another go at the dang necromancer - I failed to beat her with Arcana and crew, but Vania came through).

Yep, it's exactly as rad as I expected.

Shame about no new model for best boy armor-formerly-known-as-Frank, but hopefully he'll get an upgrade down the line.

I will say though that it seems like Fiera's got a bust size increase and it's making some of her animations look weird, like when she crosses her arms and they just get swallowed up into the boobs.

There's also a few of the comedy scenes that were improved by the more simple faces on the old models, but overall it's a vast improvement and a good investment. Please keep up the good work.

Like a kick downwards that doesn't take you all the way to the ground? I'm a little leery of making the player more mobile in the air since the enemies already have trouble keeping up, but I'll keep it in mind.

>It only feels unfair to me because I never got any chance after getting ragdolled.

Oh! Right, yeah, sorry. I don't explain it very well (it's mentioned in the damage state descriptions I think), but you can still slide around on the ground by pressing dodge when you're knocked down.

Thanks for giving it another go!

Which running animation do you mean, specifically? The one where she maintains her stance or the normal run? I'd like to try and make the game non-goofy if I can.

Everybody's complaining about hit feedback, so I guess I gotta give it a look.

You're probably right about animations being too, fast, but I'm stubborn and haven't convinced myself I can't make it work yet.

Other people are simultaneously complaining about the jump attack being impossible to hit with and too OP, so I'm gonna have to take a good hard look at it.

Thank you for giving it a try!

I'll try fine-tuning the quick attacks - maybe making them push the enemies less would make them paradoxically more useful.
I've also got some changes to the targeting planned that should make their short range a little less of a problem. (I probably also need to better explain stuff like using dodges to get in close)

Holding your special attacks is intended - you can just hold heavy attack while inputting jump or dodge for the same result.

I'll make sure and change the menu's timer - probably disable it entirely on certain submenus.

Hey, thanks for giving it a try again. And please, there's no need to apologize for your honest opinion.

Your points aren't wrong, but I mostly have to answer them with "it's a work in progress". Like the animations are wonky and bad, but they're significantly less wonky and bad than when I started work on it, and hopefully I'll get them looking pretty good at some point. Check back in a couple months and I'll probably have (awful) facial animations on top of my barebones Combat Demo for you to bully :D

PS don't remove the holo-strippers from Green Cheetah please, they're peak cyberpunk Immersiveness

I'll take a look at it, thanks.

Thanks for giving it another go. Glad to hear I'm improving a little. :)

Which attack do you mean when you say the bodyslam? The player's aerial attack downwards?

And yeah, I'm looking forward to adding story and environment too, but I figure I gotta get the core gameplay in order first.

Thanks for giving it a try!

Yes, this was mostly small bugfixes and menu stuff compared to last DD. Slacked off a little too hard.

The enemies don't start out very aggressive but gang up on you more as the waves progress.

Much better camera and controls since last time. Good goddamn job.

There are a few hedges that are big enough that they probably should block the camera, and the way there's a delay before the camera zooms out again is a little weird, but this is a big improvement overall.

I somehow managed to get myself stuck inside the pumpkin-headed scarecrow and had to restart. 

I guess the evil sorceror got the best of Pepper after all... (seriously though it was much easier to get myself stuck than it was to actually pick up the pumpking spirit)

The drop shadow when jumping makes platforming much easier. I got to the end of the floating islands on my first try this time.

The moving platforms seem to make the camera really choppy. Probably can be fixed by putting the camera's movement in LateUpdate instead of Update or something.

Pretty cool! I've played Battle Network way back in the day, but I haven't really touched the FTL or StS-style games that seem to be the other half of the inspiration. I don't see any issues with the game's central premise, though splitting my attention between picking cards and focusing on positioning in real time was pretty rough on me.

The art was generally nice, but on my second playthrough the game opened with scene with bad guys conversing where all the portraits looked really bad or out of the style.

I played with a keyboard, and I felt like it played just fine.

Bugs I encountered;

After starting a run, the view scrolled so far to the left that the entire map out of view at the start. On my third run it focused on the starting node correctly though

One of the enemies flashed pure white (from damage, or its own attack, I don't remember) and didn't return to normal until I hit it

On picking start a new game after losing a run, the planet selection screen revealed all the planet graphics and focused on the wrong one (Izit and Randar were still labeled "???" in the menu). Also it wouldn't let me select any of the planets.

Not a bug, but seeing a(n unskippable?) trailer and being prompted to go to the store page at the end of every run felt a little aggressive. I'd suggest making the trailer skippable and just put a link to the store page in the main menu screen.

Gave it a try. Fun times!

If you could get the dialogue to show the character's name in a static location while the actual dialogue loads, that'd be better.

walking and running sfx both have a weird cadence, like it's tap tap, tap tap, tap tap, instead of being evenly spaced like tap, tap, tap,

I see you fixed some of the grammatical issues since last time. Nice! I think I still caught Carmilla using "I" as the object of a sentence once, though...

The new cutscene on entering Gwen's room is nice. Jump scare got me a little. Although the first image is probably the worst spritework out of all the cutscenes.

I think the main menu is slightly off center?

I really liked the clock puzzle! Nice work.

You also fixed so that you don't shoot when tabbing back into the game. Thumbs up.

It seems like the footstep SFX is bugged when using the shotgun. It never stops playing, even when standing still.

I've never heard of an Armillary sphere before; I think "astrolabe" is a more commonly known word for it but maybe I'm crazy.

The greenhouse puzzle was very unintuitive for me. I ended up just brute forcing it. How were you supposed to figure it out?

Overall this game is turning out very nicely! Thanks for letting us try it out.

It's censored because you didn't uncheck the "SFW mode" toggle in the Audio/Video menu :p
Thanks for giving it a shot.

Very nice as always. 

I noticed tweaks to some of the old levels and I liked them pretty universally, as well as the levels I hadn't seen before. Fine work.

Thanks for giving it another shot.
I uh, forgot to exit the peaceful stance when you lock on. Oops.
The other issues are ones I'm sadly well familiar with - I just haven't figured out how to deal with them yet.
Still, I suppose it's a good thing you're not running into too many problems I didn't know about.

Also, thank you for the kind words about the player character. I have a hard time telling if I'm making any progress sometimes.

Falling through the ground a bit is a bug that's universal atm, but I can't get the character to get stuck in the knocked-down state after dying. I'll make a note of it though, I doubt it's exclusive to you.

Thank you for playing! I'm glad the central idea of the combat system shines through. SFX is hard (^__^);

Also thank you very much for the bug report on not getting back up, that hasn't happened to me in testing. I'll have to check if it's consistent. Which piece of geometry was it, do you remember?

Target on middle mouse is a good idea - matches up better with the game pad equivalent of R3, too. I was keeping it in reserve for a grab/throw system, but I guess putting that on the "use" key might make just as much sense. (in any case I really gotta get around to implementing re-bindable inputs)

Hello, played it for 45 minutes. Looks nice and atmospheric despite the low fidelity, and I didn't notice any major bugs. Dialogue system worked pretty well for the most part - I especially like the little encyclopedia hyperlinks to tell you about the world you're in.

Stuff I noticed:

Tiny thing, but you'll want to name your folder something like "Project Arcane" instead of just a version number. It's easy to lose it if you just extract it in a folder with a bunch of other stuff.

Pressing enter when entering a name for your save should really count as pressing continue, instead of adding a line break.

You really stick to stuff. Like if you jump into a wall, you don't fall down until you let go of the movement key. Letting you slide along the walls more easily would feel much better I think.

Dialogue choices seem to pop up before the text I'm supposed to respond to has finished displaying. I feel like it'd be good to display the dialogue I'm responding to as I consider my options, anyway, rather than in sequence.

I beat the sign puzzle by accident and I'm not sure how I was supposed to work things out properly. Kind of annoying that the top sign says "downtown" but that's not an option you can select - like how am I supposed to know Main Street counts as downtown but not the Dockside?

I hope that sign puzzle was the one thing you were supposed to be able to solve in the demo, cuz in the junkyard I can't even figure out what the question is after going through the whole place two or three times.

Anyway, my brainlet inability to solve puzzles aside, game seems promising; just needs to work out some of the kinks and burrs and then it should be smooth sailing (for people who don't suck at puzzles, anyway).

Dirk! He's finally here! All the dialogue seems fun, if kinda janky in places.

Apparently I'm not very good at the game because even though I played through it several times I still couldn't figure out how to find any alternate endings to the goblin one. I really though the lockpicks I found would work to free the bard...

I got a blue screen, I think while talking to the nobleman. Or maybe trying something with the broken lute right after talking to him?

Error

player.lua:240: attempt to index a nil value

Traceback

player.lua:240: in function 'dialog'

player.lua:778: in function 'update'

main.lua:184: in function 'update'

[C]: in function 'xpcall'

Hello, this looks like a decent start.

Issues I noticed while playing:

Text color is not sufficient to tell apart the characters when you introduce 3 of them all at once like that. Like, there's nothing to indicate which color aligns with which character.

Vampire Lady's font is distinct, but a little hard to read.

The art is pretty nice. Am I wrong or was this not always anime-styled?

Sprint meter depletes even while standing still if you press sprint. should probably check to see that you're actually moving

Okay, strange bug; First time I played the game I could open my inventory but could not equip the guns no matter how or where I clicked; Unfortunately, I couldn't get it to happen again on subesequent playthroughs, so I can't tell you why it happened.

You shoot when clicking back into the game after tabbing out. Might be annoying in a survival horror

You'll probably want a text popup for picking things up or using doors like you have for interacting with stuff in the world.

Grammatical issues I noticed:

Vampire Lady intro

shalln't is not a word I'm pretty sure, it contracts to shan't

She says "sleep with I" instead of "sleep with me". but you want to rephrase it as "sleep here" so it doesn't sound like she's asking the teen girls to have sex with her.

"I shall show thee to our humble dining room" - "thee" and "thou" are both singular, so it should just be regular ol' "you".
"I will show thou to thy room" Here you do need "thee" instead of "thou". Except I think she's talking to all the girls, not just Meredith, so it should be "I will show you to your rooms"

Thanks for playing!

>16:10

I have a 16:9 screen myself and haven't made the slightest attempt to make things work for other screen sizes, so that makes sense. I'll put it on The List.

>Default Sensitivity

That's interesting, one of the streamers told me the default felt set for controller. But maybe he had preferences saved from an earlier DD. either way I definitely need to figure out how to tell if the player is using a mouse or a game pad and change sensitivity accordingly.

>starting wave

Yeah it's not really meant to go over 2 digits. But I feel like nobody has done it outside of messing around to see what would happen, so fixing it has never been a priority. I should at least put in a warning though, you're right.

Anyway, thanks, I'll keep up the good work. 

Man this game's really something. I played it for about an hour with mouse and keyboard - mostly stuck getting my ass kicked at Tier 1 Fame 5. I'll try to find the time to give it another shot with a controller later.

I think the combat is good? I'm putting a question mark there because I didn't get very far into the game and haven't had time to wrap my head around stuff like the power system. At the tier-1 fighting I was doing, I feel like the only thing I was really doing was spamming punch and rarely blocking to counter a legionnaire (which felt really good). Unlocking moves like shooting missile barrages while Vanquishing around with your rocket knees seems like it can change the feel of it a lot, though.

The garage system is interesting, if very intimidating. You've got quite a task in front of you getting a player to understand all of that.
The presentation is great, the menu especially. The cutscenes were also really good, if pretty janky in places, and I really liked what little story was in the demo. I felt super sorry for NX1A.

Issues:

- player taking damage really needs some more oomph. I'd lose most of my health to an enemy's attack and not even notice.

- I'd really like a loading indicator when starting a match so I can tell the game hasn't just frozen.

- When you want to retry, you can't see how much money you have available when deciding on a repair level.

- I bought the legionnaire SS enemy as the first thing and I spent a long time in a vicious cycle of not having enough money to repair NX1A because I couldn't win fights because I couldn't afford repairs. Being able to disable enemies again after purchasing them would be nice.

Stuff I'd like to see:

- Resetting individual colors to their default in the paint room

- Being able to give NX1A pale, non-human skin tones like pure white (maybe that'll be in the cosmetics part of the store idk)

TLDR this game is rad and I'll definitely be keeping an eye on it.

Thank you so much for giving it a try.

You're not the first to compare it to Overgrowth. I've got to play through that sometime.

The ragdoll state's been through some pretty big changes this update since the player got a proper stand-up animation, so I'm still fine tuning the timing. You can dodge while knocked down, which isn't very intuitive and I need to explain better. Stomp also needs a better input - I have troubling executing it sometimes too, even though I programmed the damn thing.

The damage system isn't actually based on a numerical value like HP, which is why the sweep wasn't killing enemies you'd knocked down. But the idea of having to stick close to the orb to avoid a debuff of some sort, or maybe enemies that are scared of the light, is a solid idea.

I'm glad I was able to convey to you the complex emotions of naked women punching each other to death in the dark. 

I'd wish you luck in return, but from what I've seen of Cyberdome you hardly need it :p

...At how good the game is?

I found two of the scrolls, actually - one hidden atop the tree next to the starting area, the other in the open space in the middle of the starting building. How many are there?

I also watched more of the game on stream and realized I'd encountered a bug when I played - after killing the two targets, I left the town and went back to the start but never triggered the end sequence and figured there wasn't one. I can't remember the exact route I took, unfortunately.

Gave it a quick try. Camera's pretty bad since you can't look up or down and the camera reacting to your movement and the mouse input at the same time can combine in ways that feel weird. I'd like some kind of drop shadow under the character to help with depth perception in the air.

The dialogue is pretty wonky since it's clearly not your first language, but I like the characters. Character designs are really good for how low-poly they are.

Played it for about an hour, although I'd seen a lot of it on stream.

This game is super rad. I haven't quite managed to ghost it yet, but I did manage to beat it with no weapons and items, which was a lot of fun.

Unarmed combat  focusing on drop kicks and grappling to get the advantage is a ton of fun, although you probably shouldn't be able to block swords unarmed so easily. Maybe make it timing-based?

The damage also feels a little high for your punches. Like what even is the point of swords right now?

I also think a finisher move that works like the stealth kill on downed enemies would make a lot of sense. Maybe a falling execution if you drop on to an enemy with a sword as well? 

Guns and the invisibility scrolls are exactly as OP as they should be. They're great fun to play around with. A more balanced version of a gun might be a single-shot pistol that's very slow to reload?

I'd like a faster movement option with the levels being so big. A sprint would also let you add a slide into crouch, which would be a lot of fun when trying to stealth fast and could also double as a sliding tackle for combat.

Another movement option I'd like to see is descending to a ledge hang from crouched. That'd make getting down from tall places a lot less janky.

I had some slowdown in enemy-heavy areas.

Overall, great/10 

The costume closet unlocks again if you exit and re-enter the game.

Gave it another go. The different expressions are a nice touch, though I think the number of deaths requires should probably be different for hard and easy mode - you've got a lot more time to die over and over on a difficult part in easy mode, after all.

I actually got the alternate version on the score screen; The game seems to give you a weird score screen when you beat easy mode with 250+ deaths; I seem to always get one of these poses, rather than the regular win screen. I don't think it's related to whether you've entered the code.

I haven't tested the 500-750 range, but 750+ seems to work as normal.

Also I finally noticed the display glitching out on the floor after 12 to avoid displaying an unlucky number. That's a cute touch.

Thanks, I'd looked at your page but I somehow missed the code. The illustrations are very nice; I thought she'd look unbalanced but it's very nice.

Speaking of level transitions and score screens, are you planning to redo those for the different costumes? I'd assume not, but you've surprised me in the past.

Does her expression change based on deaths over the whole lifetime of a save, or just the current run? That's a super cool touch.

Fun as ever. Beating easy mode to locked the costume closet, which seems backwards.

The costumes seem nice, but their idle animations seems to give you a different costume. I don't know if that's because you haven't implemented the sprites yet or if it's pointing to the wrong sprites, but it seems worth mentioning.

Did you implement that code you mentioned in the thread yet? Could I get a hint?

Yeah, I got the feeling you were coming at this from a text-only background. Even though the ship has probably sailed on making it an actual comic book, I think you'd still benefit a lot from doing an editing pass to remove stuff that the art is already telling the player. Although you should probably do some A/B testing with a few select scenes instead of just taking my word for it.

Fun stuff. Things I feel are missing;

-a reason to use different attacks. The all have basically the same speed, range and damage as far as I can tell.

-backstepping when locked on

I also feel like the movement speed is a little fast for how short range the brawler's attacks are. Jumps are also very, very high.

no technical problems that I could notice. Fine work, and I love the little details like how the character changes expression when attacking.

Thanks for giving it another shot.

VFX are definitely on the to-do list.

I don't think I'll be making the player follow the camera's orientation any time soon, but I'll make a note to fiddle with how much the camera can move away from the player during lock-on. Could easily be a setting.

It seems like V-sync is on by default in Unity. I'll make a note to figure out how to disable it in the options.

Thanks for the heads-up on the ready animation stuck, I really thought I'd found all the cases that could cause that.