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Happy to read that! Thanks for verifying that the game was running fine once you got that issue sorted out.

Also thanks for the kind words! Once I have a Linux build I'll let you know. Have a good one!

Hey you! I just read your review.

Many thanks for the 5 stars! Very happy to read that you had fun with the demo and enjoyed an approach to action combat that's not the usual souls-like combat we get so often nowadays.

Hope you enjoy future demos as much as this one. See you then! :D

Hi Fixer! Many thanks for trying out the game on Linux. I'll try having an actual Linux build the next time I release a new demo. Out of curiosity, what version of Proton did you use on your Linux machine?

Happy to hear it works fine on your Steam Deck. I've used mine to try and optimize the game as much as possible on it, should run pretty well there!

Thanks for playing! Glad you liked it :D

Many thanks! Hope you like the stuff I have planed for the first act after the prologue (the demo area). Should be cool!

Thanks! Happy to read you liked the boss, as it was the part I feared the most before developing it.

I belive it's challenging but not too hard. Hope I can strike a similar balance in future bosses.

Haha many thanks! Glad you like it, and no worries I have no plans of abandoning this project, although it'll be quite a while until I can release it lol.

That said, I plan on releasing more demos with more content. See you then!

Hey many thanks for playing! Glad to read you enjoyed your time with the demo. :)

The zombie section is there kinda to teach the player that they don't really need to beat all the enemies at all times! So no worries if you skipped that, that was the idea (although killing them might net you some nice item drops if you are lucky).

I've read more complains about the current way in which blocking works but honestly I can figure a "solution". Blocking is meant to allow the player block in any direction at any given time and it should block in the direction you are pressing on the left stick or the WASD keys. Let me know if that isn't the case!

The finishers are done by holding down the button. A normal press should never trigger them. Right trigger will be used later once I implement the magic bow, so the finisher input needs to stay as it is.

Hobgoblins were too much fore sure! I just updated the demo and nerfed them so they flinch when hit in the head, making them way easier to deal with.

The demon has some code to prevent it from doing the same spell twice in a row... but it was bugged lol. thanks for reporting it! Should be fixed on the last update. I also reduced the AOE radius of some of his attacks like the melee flash, which was a bit higher than it should.

Many thanks again for playing and for all the feedback! 

Hey there! Many thanks for playing and for the feedback. :D

I don't know what you mean with the first bulletpoint, you can climb without having to worry about the camera at all! Just press "up" on the left stick or the W key and the player will mantle.

I've modified the welcome screen to insist a bit more on the tutorials. Both sprinting and the shield bash are explained on the tutorial section, but I believe people aren't paying a lot of attention to that lol. Once I have NPCs around the area I'll have them point out that stuff so it's harder to miss.

Later on the player will have up to 16 life crystals, which is why some items can heal that much. That said I'm considering having 8 during the prologue, but first I wanted to check out how difficult the game is for people while just having 4.

The hit and run I see a lot of players doing sure wasn't intended. I believe the gobs and the zombies are perfectly fine and manageable as is but the hobgoblins sure were too much, so I've nerfed them so now they flinch when hit in the head, making them way easier to deal with even in groups.

Thanks again! 

Thanks for playing!

About blocking, it's complicated because I want the player to be able to block in any direction at any given time, so the thing that matters most is the direction you are pressing on the left stick/WASD keys to determine the direction of a block. I believe the player could get used to it after some time of playing the game so for now I'm leaving it as it is, but I'll review it further if people keep complaining about it.

I believe I've fixed the invisible harpy bug. Also glad you were able to deal with the demon! I was worried it could be too much for a first boss. In the last update I've made his hitbox bigger, so it's easier to deal damage to his weak point now be it with aerial attacks or the Sky Rend skill.

Thanks for the feedback! :D

Many thanks for playing and for the feedback!

Hobgoblins sure are way too overtuned, and they've been nerfed in the last update. They now flinch and interrupt their current action when you hit them in the head, allowing the player to deal multiple attacks in one go instead of having to do so much hit-and-run.

Happy to read you enjoyed the level design! I'm the kind of dude who looks behind every nook and cranny in a game and love feeling rewarded when doing so, so I'm trying to put some of that in the game.

I'll try improving the art direction but tbh, I wouldn't have a lot of faith in me being able to achieve it but I'll try my best!

Thanks for playing! And also for recording it, the video will help me a lot. 

Glad you enjoyed the combat! Sadly the goblins pushing each other into the water is a bug that I've already fixed. When unable to reach the player they are supposed to resort to ranged attacks (throwing rocks) instead of chasing forever without even going unaggro.

The difficulty in the later part has been a pretty common complain and I'll tone it down, as I'm toning down the demon as well: he'll have 80% of his current health, a bigger hitbox and I'm refactoring the blue magic missiles attack so they work in a way that's easier to evade.

Thanks again!

Many thanks for playing DD-bro!

A lot of people have complained about the magic missiles, so I'll be changing that attack to something that doesn't force you to block all 5 of them at times.

And damn, having my game compared to BBI might be the best compliment I could ever ask for. Many thanks! Hope you stay around and play the next demos. Next one will just be some patches and improvements but the one after that will have some new content.

See you! And thanks again. :D

That's one hell of a compliment, many thanks!

Many thanks for playing and for all that feedback! :]

Fellow DD bro! I hope you like it a lot once you get to play it

Sure hope so! The demo will come out really soon, hope you like it!

based

Glad to read that! So cool to have people excited to try it haha.

I'm implementing a last batch of mechanics before working on the demo level. It should arrive more or less soon, hope to see you there! :)

Not as hyped as I am for you to play it!

Finally got to try your game!

First impression was very nice. The controls feel great and intuitive for the most part, and I love how the main character is animated and how he changes expressions when doing stuff like jumping or walking slow.

Played with autocam. Didn't have any major trouble with it besides getting stuck a few times, but that only happened when I was actually trying to get it stuck.

Since the controls underwater are inverted by default, everytime I ran into a body of water while running I would instantly dive to the bottom. I was playing with run toggle off because that seemed more natural to me, but it caused that issue (for me). Changing it to not-inverted fixed the issue.

Also, I wasn't able to get the hang of wall-running for the life of me in TTC, but I did manage it on Mt. Energy without too much trouble. Still, I'd suggest a little tutorial for that, didn't feel intuitive at first.

Some things I loved:

• The level design of My. Energy. Spaced enough to allow me to run, explore and experiment with the moveset, but not spaced enough to make it feel empty.
• Being able to do air dashes. That's always fun.
• The way the MC comes out of the water like a dolphin.
• Platform challenges are varied and FUN.

Suggestions:

• Send enemies flying when they die. Right now kill them is not satisfying.
• When landing on a body of water, don't set the vertical velocity to 0 but instead make the player keep some of that momentum as it goes underwater and float back up. Would feel much more natural and satisfying.
• Ledge grabbing seems to have a delay between grabbing the ledge and being able to climb at. This kills the pace a bit when climbing boxes in TTC, for example.

Things I've missed:

• A switch to fullscreen mode.
• Enemies whenever you make me wait for some platform to come, like in the Energy Plant on those lava geisers. Waiting for platforms is always boring, and having a few enemies on those could help with that.

Bugs?

• The "Goal get!" jingle seems to not be related to the Music Volume slider. That almost blew up my eardrums, but I was happy for having got a goal so it compensates. :)
• When dashing mid air, the collision on some wall failed and I glitched through the scenario. Ended up here, and I was stuck so I had to restart the level.
  
• And this is the wall I went through by air dashing into it:
  

Also clipped through this little limiter and ended up here:

Game ran perfectly the whole time and, while some aspects like me not knowing how to properly wall run at first frustrated me a bit, I still had a lot of fun with the Energy Plant being my favorite part by far. The responsiveness of the character controller is great and the music is catchy, specially inside the power plant where I had to turn the volume up again lol. I got 4 Goals on TTC (I saw a 5th one but didn't know how to get it) and 11 in Mt. Energy. Missed the one that seems related to invisible walls and platforms, didn't figure that one out.

I'm itching to see where you take this. The core is fun for sure, and I'd say I had a great time while playing your game. Keep at it, and good job man!

Lovely game, sounds just as good as it looks and plays even better. Good job!

Some suggestions:

• Add 144 on frame cap options.
• Platforms blend a little bit, like sometimes it's not 100% clear what's a platform and what's the background.
• On the bus stop fight, I was expecting to be able to climb up to the roof by attacking an enemy multiple times but I wasn't able to.
• Missed having more SFX on the boss fight, specially when being grabbed by it's tongue. Fight itself is quite fun but felt a bit bland because of that.

Some bugs:

• Paloo is cute but still reacts to my inputs while I'm on the pause menu, jumping when I press the confirm button. I played with an Xbox gamepad on Windows 10.
• Something's going on with your pixel. Not noticeable when moving or fighting, but when coming to a stop it's as if I could see the pixels "fall in place" so to speak, like they take a little moment to reposition themselves.  It's hard to explain, so I recorded a video: https://streamable.com/06p4wq
  It's specially noticeable on the little Paloos that are below the input helpers.
• Another one was this:
  

Notice the thin line between the arrows. It appeared and disappeared while I went through that section. Might be related to the other bug? I was playing on full screen, vsync enabled and at 2560x1440.

Overall, a very well done game. Gameplay's super fun and I loved the visuals, specially all of Paloo's facial expressions. Great job, will play again.

Game kicked my ass.

It's a very cool game idea that kept reminding me of Magicka and it's spell system the whole way. I think the game could be even cooler with more elemental interactions but maybe I haven't seen them all.

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, and let the players focus on learning how to play. Once I got used to the game (took me a while but it wasn't frustrating at all) I didn't have a lot of trouble with it. Oh, love the small slowdown when killing enemies, that felt nice.

Something that really sucks is that I can't break barrels with the pistol. Why? That caught me off guard a few times. Also took me a while to realize I can mix the same element a few times, but maybe I was just being dumb there lol.

Visuals are nice and so is the music. Played on Ultra and the framerate never dropped from 144.

Overall I'd say I liked this one qutie a bit. Here are some suggestions:

• Make the map generation result in less empty hallways since those kill the pacing a little bit, but that might be personal preference.
• Play around with the zoom level, I believe zooming out a little bit would be nice.
• You have many elements but aside from the elemental effect, they all feel the same. Why not make it so each element is a different attack? That would make mixing them way more fun. Think of Gunstar Heroes and how you can combine two weapons into one.

The shooting feels very nice, you've nailed that! It's fun to play andthe  sound of the shots somehow blends nicely with the music.

Some ideas to improve the game:

• Make the level up a bar instead of numbers. Filling bars is nice for dopamine.
• Game's super easy. All the wizards do is walk towards you and shoot at where you are, so it's very easy to group them all together and circle-strafe them until they are all dead. Some ideas to fix this:
  • Make them move as a flock. That way, they'll avoid grouping together and might even be able to surround the player.
  • Red wizards that shoot less often but shoot at where the player will be, not where the player is. That will make circle-strafing much more difficult and fun.
• Maybe add green wizards that shoot homing projectiles that you have to take down.
• If the level would change as the game goes on that would be very cool. Columns, lava pits, moving platforms, etc.

I played it for about 15 minutes. Found no bugs and had a fun time!

Played your game on Windows.

First try with a gamepad connected: The mouse doesn't move from the center of the screen, and the gamepad barely lets me control the camera. I went back to the main menu, pumped up the sensitivity but it didn't fix a thing. Had to exit the game, turn off the gamepad and try again.

Played with the graphics on ultra and keyboard + mouse. First impression was nice, the game can look nice and your style is quite unique. The camera itself made a bad impression tho, as it kept snapping to those pillas in the hallway that leads you to the training room, although it was fine for the rest of the game as the scenarios were simpler. Adding some lerping to the zoom might help. 

The game could use an "always run" toggle. The fire worm deals a ton of damage and I'd love to be able to enter combat mode by just clicking the left mouse button.

Main problem the game has is the combat, since it's quite mindless and button mashy. I'd try making Fygoon attack slower by adding some delay to the sword attack. That'd make his attacks get some weight and look stronger, while making each attack count more.

Aside from that, I was impressed at all the effort you've put into this. The cutscenes are cool and have nice dialogue, the levels are big and not too linear. My favorite part was bonking a dog with a mace and he having an animation just to react to that followed by funny cartoon sounds. Very charming.

Found no bugs nor performance problems.

Nice job! I wonder how it'll turn out. It's quite promising and I'm amazed that some so young is able to pull this off.

Weapons are all made of foam, so don't worry they are all just pretending!

He will be missed! Altough he might still appear in the final game... mistery!

Many thanks for the encouraging word man, and also glad that you keep making progress with your games!

Pretty coool puzzle game. The music and the graphics fit the vibe of the game quite nicely.

Nothing to complain about.

I agree that the controls feel a bit weird.

Aside from that, my only complain is that I wish there were more things to do in this demo because I was having fun just removing and placing blocks. The smooth animations + the FOV stuff make it very comfy. Good job!

Found two weird things while trying your demo:

First, something's up with the "origin" of the character you control: when facing down, the attack seems to come from it's feet, but when facing up, it comes from the head. This makes it hard to aim the attack.

Second, the hitbox seems to be set to be all of the character's body, instead of just the origin point which imho should be set at it's feet. Currently you can step into the bottom's blue tiles without an issue, but not so much into the upper ones because the head hit's the red tiles before you are able to step into the blue ones.

Aside from that it seems to work well, and I like the character sprite.

Liked:

• Very cool main menu, really appreciate all the effort put into the options menu.
• Transitions between screens (like from game to map) are pretty cool.
• Character animations are very well done too.

Didn't like:

• The controls and their feel. Imho the jump is too fast, and the attack as a very long wind up. Those two things combined made it impossible for me to land a punch on an airborne enemy, which was kinda frustrating.
• A lot of "press D to interact" on objects that seemed decoration more than something I could interact with, like those pipes. Maybe you could remove the text prompt and instead make those blink or something?

Overall I think it has potential, specially with more polish put in the controls.

Very charming FTL-like!

Things I liked:

• Overall gameplay is fun.
• Creature design is great, reminds me of Star Control II.
• Being able to change the radio is a very charming touch.

Things I didn't like:

• Weapons charge way to slow with only one crew member. This made the tutorial an absolute slog.
• Text fonts are very inconsistent, I'd say stick to one and use it everywhere.
• UI could be better.

Overall I liked my time with it, and with more polish I could see myself playing the final version. Good job!

Thanks for trying it out! Glad you liked it. :)

Thanks for trying it out! Glad you liked it. Main sources of inspiration have in fact been Fallout and Live A Live, so I'm happy to read that some of their DNA is present in the game.

I'll try to respond to all your feedback! If I skip a point just assume I'm adding it to my backlog of tasks.

Options! I just need a sound slider at least please.

Sure! Next demo will have a proper title screen with Options and all that stuff. I just didn't have enough time before DD to implement it. ^^u

Would be nice if enemies (maybe only some) would wander around

Indeed! I'd like to implement some sort of stealth system, maybe by using invisibility scrolls, smoke bombs or some skills that let you go unnoticed. Having the enemies being able to move around or even patrol would add a lot to that.

Keys to move?

Yes, numpad keys are a must, and I'm also considering arrow keys + some key held down for diagonals.

Are animations like attack planned? Just the two frame animations are already better than many other RLs though

No. I'm planning to have the player sprite reflect the equipment you have equipped at that moment. If I had to animate all that that would be way too much work, specially for someone who's really bad at drawing.

I'd like to be able to look at what a weapon's skills (I know you can see the skills) do without having to equip it first

That'll be displayed when you inspect an item, by right clicking it to open the context menu and selecting inspect. That window, which still has to be implemented, will also show some extra info on enemies, like which status effects / passive effects they have and some more stuff.

Shield block seems incredibly strong, but I suspect it wouldn't be that simple later

I'm considering putting a cool down on some skills to avoid abuse. Or maybe adding some unblockable attacks, I still have to think more about it.

About the goblins: I noticed the AI might be bugged when it comes to targeting the player with stones, since they don't seem to check if they are in range before doing so. Should be an esay fix, so I hope they are a bit less annoying on the next demo.

So yeah, thanks again for all your feedback and the time you put into playing the game! See ya!

Great game, felt like a mix of Nuclear Throne and Serious Sam, which obviously is fun as hell.

I like the visuals, the spritework is very nice and so is the enemy design. Sound design feels on point specially when it comes to killing stuff, since the weapon firing sound + the splash sound of an enemy dying makes it feel meaty and satisfying. Music is great too.

Only minor complaint is that sometimes at the end of the level items would get stuck on walls trying to get closer to the door, but it wasn't really a problem. Another thing is that the map screen could auto-scroll to were you are, instead of asking the player to press the W or S buttons when selecting an stage.

Very good work! I'll keep playing this one.

Very cool and fun game! I loved the art for the characters (why is the blue fairy SO smug?) and the tutorial screens, and the music is relaxing and fits perfectly with the rest of the game.

Only complaint I can think about is the constant switching between fairies, specially when it involves multiple red strong fairies, since it meant:

• Having to switch from blue to red.
• Manually grabbing the blue one with the red one.
• Having to switch back to the blue after she has been thrown.

Makes some stages more tedious than anything else. If the red fairy could grab the blue one when the blue one pokes the red one, that'll make it much more straight forward, since it'll be:

• Blue pokes red.
• Red grabs blue, then throws her.
• You are automatically back to controlling the blue one (since you really never switched fairies) and are ready to keep poking around.

Aside from that, I really enjoyed my time with the game. Puzzles were becoming more complex at a nice pace, and I never felt bored or frustrated. Hope to see you making it, the game deserves it.

Very cool roguelike game, had a hard time at the beggining not knowing how it controls, but after a while it felt fine. One thing about the controls is that I don't like having to press ESC to cancel a skill, but maybe that's because I'm used to right click for that in my game. ^^u

Another minor complaint is that there's times when you can't click to move to the next room and have to use the arrow keys. Or that was my impression at least.

But yeah, aside from all that I had fun. Music is nice, animations are well done and I like the overall vibe of the game. The "resource management" aspect between MP and SP is fun too and it makes the game feel like a puzzle game of sorts at times.

So yeah, had a good time with your demo. Keep it up!

Pretty fun game. I loved the graphics and overall atmosphere, and specially the spritework. Good job!

Only minor complaints are that the camera feels not very smooth, and that the game elements look a bit too small on a 1440p monitor. I tried the web version btw.