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Demos are focusing on self-contained story bits I have in mind

Thats pretty cool, like little appetizers really. Actually i didnt figure out the fighting at all today, but then again im limiting myself a bit because i dont want so see everything from Dirk at once. Want that exploration feel next DD again too and it is easy to max out all stats once you figure out one way to get out.

Seems like you have a rough plan, thats good. Stay assured i will keep an eye on Dirk's adventures, in both worlds that is!

Finally got around to trying it again after last DD.

Briefly glanced over the other comments, most things were already mentioned like the default control scheme being a hassle for different keyboard layouts, flickering exclamation mark for interactions and such.

Speaking of the interact indicator: sometimes it acts weird, like it shows up when standing to the right of the bard, but not to his left. In both cases you can interact with him.

Some events need indicators for needed player input or be automated. For instance when asking the admiral about the southern shores, he says he has to go, but nothing happens. I waited for around 10 sec until i hit a key and suddenly he moved.

Starting the game i was in the room with the guy at his desk (narrator?), but was quickly ported to the first level. Not sure if i hit a button that did it or if its normal this way. After beating the game once, i ended up there again but i could take my time and interact with stuff.

I saw that others got stuck in the oustide level. This happened for me as well but at the ladder way off to the right.

Went down the ladder, tried to push the rock and decided to jump up to the top. From there i couldnt move away I had 2 or 3 agility, not sure anymore.

Tried a lot more with items and using/combining them, but i think i missed how i can deselect the current item instead of closing and opening up the inventory again. If theres such a function, its not intuitive enough for people like me.

Another minor thing: did you increase the charm requirements to talk with the woman? I think last DD i took charm as the initial stat and she told me about her missing bird. Now she told me to go away even with 2 charm. When increasing to 3 she would properly talk to me.

Anyway, thats about it for the issues i encountered. The charm of that game is off the charts nevertheless and i want to see more interactions and events. The escape ending was pretty good and i wonder what the over arching story will be. I hope its not gonna be a collection of seemingly unrelated stories that just happen to contain Dirk. Keep it up and show us more cool stuff (or just more polish) next DD, Chad Plunders demands it!

Thanks for playing and glad you like it!

First of all, when did you download the game? I was really busy trying to get rid of the stutters this weekend and uploaded new builds like crazy. You wishing for starting equipment makes me think it was an "older" build, because thats something i quickly put in too. Guess you didn't have proper loading screens with a progress bar either? That MIGHT fix some stutters.

I liked how weapons and armor appeared on your character, but did not like how they didn't on the companions.

This is a new one for me, it should show on the companions. Didn't see this happening on the streams of other players. Maybe i broke something in my recent builds?

Will also take a look at the store bug you mentioned. While way more stable than before, the inventories are quite a pain and the stores themselves have a few bugs that are hard to get rid of (sometimes it has more pages than needed, no idea why).

The door bug may also be semi fixed. The bug existed for quite some time and its hard to pin point it due to the proc gen and other issues that take priority. Seems like in rare cases the whole tile isn't properly uncovered, which made me hotfix a LoS check for doors. But that would sometimes leave neighbouring walls still invisible. Gotta work on a proper fix!

Your QoL suggestions are greatly appreciated! Revival of your buddies was frequently asked by people, so a hint seems reasonable. I will also make an option to review hints that were already triggered, because people tend to only read half of it, if any. Item comparison is quite a little beast to tackle im afraid, so it will take a backseat until i iron out the more annoying problems you and others encountered. It will come however! Item hitboxes are a good point and are easy to adjust.

Thanks again for playing and leaving feedback!

Played this one in one of the last DDs, so i knew what i was getting into.

Now im wondering, if the Hardlight Array was always like this? Paying incrementally more power to get 1 power for also paying money seems new to me and a bit pointless. Since everything needs more and more power, the 1 power you get from it already gives diminishing results here, so this seems way too punishing. Softlocked myself a few times because of that. For instance, you can let the player almost bankrupt himself by just right clicking the array until he has nothing left. After having no chance to achieve my quota, i was rightfully fired. Unfortunately there was no option to start a new game or go to the menu, so i had to close and restart the game. In general it needs some kind of "Back to Main Menu" option.

Told you last time already that i like the flavour of the game and its nice to see a bit more of it. The score in the top right alternating between current balance and the goal quota is both nice and sometimes annoying since you cant always get the information you want at a glance and need to wait. Its not that bad however, since the game puts no pressure on the player. The planet selection could use some little addition that makes it clear you have to double click. I clicked only once to start and wondered if it takes a second to load or something.

Are the second building actions new in this build? Cannot recall if they were there last time, but i like it.

Other than that, i dont have much to say. Its mostly the same game i played before and i became even worse at it.

I downloaded, i played and i liked it.

Has been a long time since i played Healed to Death, so im pretty happy about the option to turn the hover selection to click only. Theres two little things about the settings that i dont like though: just like the button to exit the game in the main menu, there is an "exit" button to go back to said main menu. At first i was anxious to click it and looked for another one because i thought it would quit the game. And the other thing is, when you are in a fight and you want to check keybinds, the white enemy labels  make the white settings tab labels harder to read. Maybe put a dark transparent background on the whole screen when in settings to get some contrast. But thats minor things.

As a fellow Godot enjoyer i recognized some issues i had myself: 

• when being prompted for the next level, the star particles freak out. If i remember correctly, i had the same happen to me in my game and it was due to the process mode of the particles. The prompt probably pauses the game and the particles inherit the process mode from there, thats why i set my particles to "always", so they still emit when the game is paused. Its less jarring, but of course in some situations this doesnt convey the pause state very well.
• hitting the space bar sometimes triggers "random" UI elements. Its not really random as its always the last one the player used (like the map or the inventory), but its confusing at first. I didnt find space in the keybinds, so i guess this is default Godot behavior? At least i had some issue with the focus behavior of buttons in the past and my fix was to turn them all off, so they only trigger when i hit the key i assigned to them
• stutters, but thats something im working on too. Trying out to do threaded load requests for all kinds of things in the loading screen, instantiating and adding them to the scene and removing them again, just so they existed at one point in time before you actually encounter them. Will see in the future how smoothly that works

Speaking of loading screens, i noticed you have one when you start the actual run, but you dont have one in other scene loading situations and theres just the grey background. Also small thing, but easy to make a bit nicer to look at.

Gameplay wise i have little to complain about. The party members mindlessly walk against walls if their formation is blocked, which is the most annoying if you stand at a shop and want to look at things. Inspecting items is mostly great, however i couldnt figure out what some looted spells do until i slotted them in because they didnt have a tooltip before. The orbs are hard to read at a glance due to the waves. They have little contrast to the empty space above, so they act more like a distraction from the actual numbers which you need to rely on. Finally, i found a ring and its sound effect was pretty annoying, especially when moving it between members and hearing it more than once.

In the end of my second run i had a crash, which happened when i was finishing casting my healing circle spell with the protective circle upgrade. Sorry i dont have more information about that crash, but maybe that helps.

Despite all that i really enjoyed the game and am amazed by the progress. Its really coming together and you can already see where its going and how addicting it could be. Different healer classes also feel different. I played the templar on the second run and felt like he was more of an offensive guy which needs to look more after his resources than the chill priest man. The town building is nicely done, it felt intuitive and gives you the metaprogression feeling you need when playing such a game. Looting, equipping and managing your group is awesome, but i may be biased having build my own party system for my game.

Keep it up man, it seems pretty bug free at this point. Hope you will tackle the aesthetics of the characters and the enemy diversity soon. Looks like most of the important systems are in place and work well together. Great game!

Funny that you mention the fire rain spell. I was about to reply that you CAN learn and do it, but after checking it seems i forgot it for the loot tables. Theres still 7 other spells to find. However the sorceress companion can learn it early on and can use it on groups of enemies.

Working on the lag and pushed out a new build not long ago, that may or may not mitigate that.

Thanks for playing and the feedback. Will keep these things in mind!

Finally a new essay, missed these.

Interesting how many things you figured out others couldn't, like the pickaxe and gold interaction. For the lag im still trying to find the perfect solution and while you were playing i uploaded a build that loads and instantiates all kinds of things in the loading screen as opposed to background loading without instancing things in previous builds. Its difficult to iron this stuff out since i can only test it on two machines, both of which cache some data between sessions...

The classes have different starting stats and can find/equip different types of rare auxillary items (witch can get spell boosting ones, warrior gets stuff for physical combat) of which there are only 1 per class at the moment. Additionally, because of the current feedback, the warrior starts with a shoddy sword now and the witch already knows the fireball spell. For the future i want to implement some non-magic abilities, but im not sure yet as of the specifics, but it might be a good idea to make some of those class dependent.

The punch after spell casting has been there for quite a while and isnt intended, was just low priority. You are the first to point it out though.

Will check out the other bugs you mentioned. 

On loading, the Dungeon doesn't save.

To be clear: levels save within the session. Once you go back to the main menu the data is gone and will be randomized again when loading your character. So porting to town and back should result in the same dungeon with the same corpses and loot laying around, while loading a save from yesterday should not.

Level 4 is different to the others, but is still very empty. It has 2 encounters though and will be the entrance to the next area which i will finish until next DD.

As always, thanks for playing. Your detailed feedback is greatly appreciated!

Quickly tested it and i sometimes get it too.... so it must have snuck in with the latest changes :(

The stutters are so annoying: i did the instancing thing too a while back, which resulted in the game not respoinding for a few seconds (because i needed to instance a lot of different items per level) and could even lead to a crash on weaker machines. Currently im trying to just let the ResourceLoader load everything needed in the background before it gets used. This seems to work for some people more than for others. My other (weak) laptop runs relatively smooth that way, but a streamer yesterday had visible minifreezes on multiple occasions.

the level loaded but the loading screen didn't fade away and it stayed up

Thats a new one. Just got to reproduce this and it seems to happen if you switch levels while the fading of the loading screen isnt done. Will fix that.

Thanks a lot for reporting these things, really appreciate it!

So i downloaded version 5 today and started fresh with an arabian themed scimitar man. Dont remember all the details after the run, but it was the last nation i think. Started at the tutorial, this time the door seemed to open correctly using the lever, but the enemies couldn't get to me like they still collide with it. From the camp i talked to the bossman and took his order to go to the battlefield. The cursor stuff filtered me from this part last time, so having cleared that up opened up the game for me personally.

The big battle was a real hassle. I think other comments already told you about the issues of group fights with allies, but it felt really detrimental to join a fight because of them shoving you around. You had little control over your character in such a big group of people. Hitboxes of attacks made that even worse: the attacks with the scimitar seemed to sometimes not hit at all using the light attacks, so i mostly spammed charged ones. Dodging is almost impossible, because pressing Q didn't instantly roll me away, maybe it needs to cancel the current action and it doesn't? Locking on is very confusing too if theres more than one person. That got even worse with the three-headed-giga-sranc down in the tower. I had to lure him into the hallway and not lock onto him to have a chance of beating him and i did. Its hard to say, but i had the feeling his buddies helped me by shooting arrows in his back. Had a little laugh when i looted him and i got the turtle shell charm three times, but that turned into sadness as "requirements not met" prevented me from using it once again. So much for describing my experience with the whole run.

Had some possible bugs and other issues in there too:

• before entering the tower theres a chest, when interacting it doesnt seem to do anything but remove the prompt
• interaction prompts feel off, because they appear but sometimes you still need to adjust your distance before you can interact
• pressing C to open the character sheet shows 4 buttons to its right, one of which disappears when hovering... sadly i couldnt read what it was for because it disappeared too quickly
• had a few cases where the game didnt respond, but this only happened when starting the game and focusing something else before it booted up properly and when quitting.... dont think this happened in a build yesterday
• finally less a bug and more an annoyance: while sprinting its hard to stop doing so, you seem to need to fully stop moving... releasing both shift and W isnt enough if you press W again briefly afterwards

Apart from all that, i checked the witch once again for the right click action (the shield) and it doesnt shoot projectiles anymore. The general appeal of the game is pretty rad i can now say after having seen the real thing. Big meaty battles, with lots of slashing sounds and blood is disturbingly satisfying. Ambiance and music do a lot too, like others said and it delivers that feel of a big war going on, which is great!

Just doing my part!

Will check again tomorrow with a fresh mind and try a different class. About the CenterMouse thing, maybe put in a little icon for mouse buttons instead of spelling them out, this might avoid confusion for idiots like me. I remember Elden Ring having a small black mouse icon with a highlighted button doing this, which works like a charm.

Did a quick check on the new version and i think theres something really wonky with the input handling. I can now rebind keys as i like and for some actions it also works when pressing the key, but others, like showing the cursor, dont. I only now understood that "center mouse" meant to click the middle mouse button lol. Which makes sense, because the default binding now says M2. But rebinding it to P for instance, doesnt work for me. Putting other actions on the same key do, however.

Whats really confusing for me though, when playing as the witch, left/right clicking uses spells and i can only attack physically when im out of mana (which happens now, yay!). Strong attacks seem to randomly use those spells on slots 1 and 2? 

Anyway i can confirm that mana consumption seems to work now, equipping the staff on the witch does too and she doesn't start with a shield in the inventory anymore. And theres now a projectile firing off when using the right click heal spell?

Yes probably, its hard to iron them all out if you made a lot of stuff before cleaning it up correctly. Uploaded a new version that should fix some of it, or at least it did for me. Hard to test these things locally due to caching.

Thanks for checking it out!

Hey thanks for playing and letting me know about the stutters! When testing myself, the only notable stutters i encounter are when starting out and walking towards one of the NPCs, not sure what thats about. Other than that its mostly lag free for my weaker laptop (i think i missed preloading the acid/fire puddles of the throwing goblins though). Did you have any other instances of freezes/lags?

Theres no really good reason to let the player start with no equipment, but you start out with a little bit of money and recruiting the dwarf he tells you to better buy a weapon with it. Spells are a bit strong right now, so starting out with one could make things trivial in the beginning, but i get where you're coming from. Maybe i can come up with some weak starter spell/ability for the witch.

Oh man you can charge attacks? I remember i saw the bar, but holding the mouse button didnt fill it up. Thinking about it now, of course it doesnt, i was out of stamina! Hope you submit next time again with an updated build, would like to see more and maybe use some spells if they're planned.

A surfboard you say? Maybe an opportunity will reveal itself at some point, who knows... Anyway, made me look up the origins of that screen, guess i will need to at least watch a video on it. Named the guy like this because i just looked up dwarves from european folklore. 

I can try to adjust their behavior to avoid harmful areas, but im afraid it will conflict a lot with the rest, making them useless as soon as theres a few puddles around.

Glad you like the shops and that theres no worse feedback than the dwarf dipped in acid. Thanks for playing again!

The intro is absolute kino!

Started my ordeal as a swayal witch, just because of her transparent appearance! Turned out, her magic doesnt use mana. Good for me, i could heal every little wound with a right click now. The atmosphere is classic Vita Brevis, a calm and harmonic, yet sad music and historic surroundings are always nice. The sprite men at the camp looked funny up close, especially waving in the wind like they are foliage. Only went down to them to die because i didnt find the way forward. I followed the other trail before up until the chest and killed some pale men (Sranc i think they're called?).

Anyhow, the jank is strong in this one and maybe stronger for someone using a german keyboard. Got stuck in conversations multiple times because i had no cursor to pick answers. The settings told me its the arrow down. This was a lie however as it did nothing. Rebinding to that key was not possible because it said "the key is not available". Sometimes i managed to get further in a conversation because i somehow retained the cursor from looking in my inventory beforehand i guess. Said inventory betrayed me at first too: i swapped my staff for the shield i had in there, just to see no shield on my witch. So i wanted to switch back, just to get the message "requirements not met". So no staff either. Didnt really matter since the witch is too strong even with her bare hands and mammaries.

The movement and controls were weird for me. Tried controller at first, but its useless in the menu. When in game, it kinda works, but i dont know what button does what, so i switched to mouse and keyboard. The mouse sensitivity was a bit too weak for my tastes and i didnt find an option to change it, but i managed. Another bug of the options menu when in game, is that the keybind settings overlap once you hit escape while having them open once. Open the menu again and voila: keybind settings above the rest.

Tried a second run as Coithus Grimmel (which is a really funny name to me) and tried the tutorial. A few new things happened there, like trying his beast summoning skill but not seeing any summoned beast, the control options for the summon were visible though. I wish i could play around with that and see what everything does. Then i headed to that closed gate with the lever. I pulled the lever, but nothing happened. Approaching the gate made the enemies behind it glitch towards me, some roman soldiers appeared out of nowhere to help, but to no avail. Coithus penetrated the floor and fell into the void.

Oh and one more thing that i noticed: all the VFX, like blood splatters and fire/smoke from spells seem to be locked onto its characters position/rotation, making it look really weird. This can probably be fixed pretty easily and make the battles look way better.

Hopefully you can make use of my descriptions to polish and fix things, because it seems like a possibly larger long-term project with lots of potential and fun to be had. Couldn't help but see all those things in the keybinds like shape shifting, which makes me want to see it in action!

Juice and polish awaits in Mortreon!

Tried the german localization and didn't encounter any errors from what i've seen. Keep in mind im bad at the game and died a lot, so might not have been that much text that i saw.

The menu polish is off the charts. Pressing buttons is really satisfying and even though everything looks pretty simple, it has a lot of charm. Audio is really good, the music gives that desperation vibe from the original Diablo i think, which is amazing. 

The game itself is a bit rough and unfriendly to noobs like me. After i died the first time, i quickly opened all chests in the starting room and got up the weird looking ladder (i'd say make it only one sprite or give it the simple 3d style of the chests with pixel textures). However, i was helpless as some greedy gobbo smacked me and i forgot to equip a weapon. I know that being unarmed is supposed to be an exremely big disadvantage, but disabling attacks in that state seems inorganic to me. You could make your fist deal 1-2 damage or some ridiculous low number, since weapons seem to have a way higher rating from what i understand in the inventory. 

Inventory UI is another thing that needs more polish. Some icons are not clear in their meaning. Weapons for instance seem to have an attack rating, a stamina cost and something thats symbolized by a yellow thing... is that speed? Tooltips might be great for that. Other QoL improvements would go a long way too, like using items by double clicking instead of being forced to click the big button on the bottom of the screen, which is annoying if you just selected an item in the uppermost row.

On my third run i found a poison dagger, but it didn't seem to trigger any poison effects on hit. Is it bugged? Is the effect something subtle i didn't notice? In the end i always die to the larger, armoured enemies as i cannot deal damage to them. Maybe im just unlucky with the items, but since its an alpha version balancing is probably not on the table yet, so thats fine.

Visually and audio wise its a feast for an early demo and it shows lots of potential.

Played it a few times in the past, but this time i tried a controller with it.

Some things i've noticed for the first time:

• when being locked on but still in idle stance, walking backwards has no animation
• when being in fighting stance and walking, the knees bend backwards sometimes
• navigating the menu is really hard with a controller, its hard to see (if not sometimes invisible) where the current focus is. For instance if you try to scroll through the control bindings i thought at first i'd need my mouse for that, but i actually hat to press right twice to get that menus focus

The hitboxes are super punishing. I think that was always the case, but using the controller i now just abused jumping and then using the dropdown kick to bonk enemies on the head. Cleared multiple waves with it rather easily but it seems to be the "wrong" way of playing to just spam the same action. Tried to use my hands too at first, but even in practice mode it was hard to connect to the enemy (especially the midget sized ones). Generally using a controller works great however, can't complain there.

The protagonist starts to look really cute, great work on that! From taken freshly out of the matrix, to chemo patient to a real cutie is a glow up you rarely see in your life.

Still fondly remembering Shufflepuck Café from my earliest childhood, this captures the aesthetics really well i think. Theres already a lot of polish for the little content it has. 

Now im pretty bad at this game, but i can see it being really fun in a chill way once theres more meat to it and some rough edges are ironed out, which is mostly usability stuff.

The billboard sprite numbers when counting the points are not really visible in the little top right viewport. At the same time, the point counting can drag on for a bit, especially when theres like 5 pucks on the field and most aren't moving. Watching each one be counted gives the player pretty much no new information and takes a long time. Maybe let the player press a key to speed it up or add an option to tell the game how fast its supposed to be.

Options in general are needed, both for display settings as well as for the audio. Control binding maybe too, which might be easy since its just a few ones right now. Even if theres no rebinding, there should be some prompts at first to let the player know what to press. Arrow keys for positioning/turning is intuitive enough, but i smashed my space bar before realizing i had to use enter for shooting.

Pretty sure you are already aware of most if not all of these things, but here you have it in written form by someone else. Keep deving and make a great Shufflepuck successor, my nostalgia demands it!

Fellow Godot enjoyer is progressing fast!

Compared to last DD things really take shape, lots of new things you put in the game. Very nice!

First thing to encounter is the stutter that others already pointed out. I had the same issues (which im hoping i've fixed by now, but lets wait for the DD verdict on my game) and the thing im doing currently to avoid it is to use the ResourceLoader.load_threaded_request(<instance>, "", true) for all kinds of instances i will soon need. In your case thats mostly the enemies and various projectiles i guess. A proper loading screen might do that as well and has the bonus of not showing that grey background when starting a game.

Secondly, i died pretty quickly on the first arcade run, somehow instinctively pressed escape while already having the little death menu. So the death menu was covered with the other menu and neither worked at that point. Pressing escape again made the top level menu disappear, but still nothing worked and i had to quit the game the hard way.

Speaking of menus, the fullscreen option doesnt seem to do anything for me. Also is it set to exclusive fullscreen? Because that might have weird interactions with some peoples setups. I used that myself for my first demo and had some negative feedback about it. Normal fullscreen seems to work better.

Lastly a small gameplay nitpick: switching weapons gets me confused, since pressing 1 switches the weapon on the right, while pressing 2 does it on the left.

Keep going, you are doing well!

Hey, thanks for the kind words!

More content goes without saying! Got a list of basic items for later levels i want to add and an idea for the next area that will be at least 3 levels. 

Special rooms with mini bosses or puzzles to figure out, or set pieces that make locations feel unique.

I'd agree with you in an instant if it weren't so hard for me to come up with interesting puzzles lol. Set pieces and unique locations are happening (the transition level from the mines to the next area is one such place). Got a lot of ideas flying through my head, like side areas, but that always poses the question what the incentive is to go there? Unique loot per area? Possible companion/pet recruitment?

grind POE dungeons over and over

There needs to be something that makes this more interesting i guess. If the dungeon is just a different layout but the same monsters and loot, thats boring. Luckily im in the early stages where everything is about progression and getting to new places, so i have some time to figure that out.

Thanks again for reading!

Oh right the doorway/wall corner issue! This will be fixed in the next build, got that figured out for both the player and the others.

Hey, thanks for playing and leaving feedback!

If you downloaded the latest build (0.14.7 i think) you didn't even get the worst lag. Theres still lag when items spawn for the first time and a few other things, like you said its an instancing issue. Already got something in the works for the items, the rest i need to figure out as i go. 

Anyhow, enemy AI really needs some work, archers just stand still instead of going around walls if they block their line of sight to shoot you. Since i am currently working on making companions more useful, the same problem will apply to them, so i want to address that.

Pathfinding for the player im not sure what exact cases you mean. Theres the issue in the starting area where collisions just block you, because the navmesh wasnt updated for these obstacles, so thats expected. Other than that im only aware of the fact, that the pathing feels a bit off walking from tile to tile, you still get to the destination, but its not always a straight from starting position to the cursor.

Drop rates and difficulty in general will change a lot soon. Companions will get skills and abilities that makes you way more flexible and your party more durable/stronger. That will need a lot of playtesting to find a sweet spot of course.

Hope i can iron out those freezes and lags until the next game jam in may!

The gun is great!

Is there a way to see what kind of ammo a weapon uses when looking at it in the shop? I seriously couldn't figure it out and didnt want to just buy them to see it. I guess theres some logic to it after playing a while: blue for most automatic weapons, green for kaboom guns and red for the rest. Still, i felt like i was missing this info somewhere on the tooltip.

Apart from that i cant complain about anything. No lags/crashes/bugs for me, death animations are great, music and sounds are fitting and satisfying. Its already on the gonna-make-it-highway, just needs more content.

Maybe a question since i had the laser in my last run: what are some of the upgrade effects for it? I got a -5% spread modifier on it, so it obviously had less aoe, but did it "focus" the damage too, or was it a straight up downgrade? Also not sure if the powerup from starting the level that gave me more projectile range affects the laser. I doubt it, since its not a real projectile?

Alright, i'll have a go again later today then. Gotta admit i didn't talk to Sophie again after picking stuff up, maybe that was my issue in the charm run.

Having only 1 stat point was a clear sign of what you are planning i think, especially with the corresponding descriptions of how bad he still is. Very interesting for an adventure game, thats for sure!

Finally, Dirk is here! Sorry for not having a Dirk NPC in Plunderground yet, just didn't have the time.

Anyhow, the others already mentioned the dialogue needing a hint at who is talking, like having the text have different collors in old Monkey Island games perhaps.

Control scheme was iffy for me, because im using a QWERTZ keyboard, not a QWERTY one. 

I didn't get too far in the game, but i started of with a point in charm. When i was stuck i tried agility to jump around, remembering that book on the shelf, but i couldn't pick it up. Jumped around a bit more but couldn't find a way to go on. Maybe im dumb like Dirk.

Dialogue in general is pretty neat, even though the font is sometimes hard to read (recently switched out the pixel font from my game just because of that, its a pain). Dirk seems to be the classic idiot hero of old adventure games that everyone can identify with, thats great. And i love his green hood/green cape outfit, somehow it really appeals to me.

Only watched streamers in previous DDs playing your game, first time playing myself.

Since she's new, i tried the bomber elf. Starting with only one placable bomb was a bit rocky, but thankfully she has lots of health. Kicking the bomb felt a bit useless however, even when being able to place more bombs. It seems you can only kick them horizontally? And since they go a long way i rarely hit anyone with it, so i just ran from big blobs of monsters and laid down bombs in my trail. Unlocking more and stronger bombs made it work like a charm. 

So prioritized bomb force and number of bombs and noticed that at some point i could always drop a bomb with the main attack animation. That got me wondering: is it really tied to the animation? Because if it is, there is an upper limit to the number of bombs you can drop and any upgrades beyond that become useless. 

In the end, clearing the level was super easy. A trail of big kabooms kills everyone i guess. Now add sound effects to both the bombs and the monsters being hit and the dopamine will flow!

If its not too time consuming, i'd say do it. But it also depends on whats your next plans are.

As a prototype its nice. Controls would need work as well as the tightness of the inputs. As soon as you stop moving you should be able to punch/jump, but apparently theres a time you have to wait first.

I wonder how this combat system would fit into an adventure game? It's clearly an arena you fight in, so i guess you get this combat instance once you find enemies like in some JRPG? Also if you wanna give the player the chance to switch weapons in the fight, it also needs really good input shortcuts to not be annoying, otherwise someone like me would just not do it and rely on the initial weapon setup.

The camera movement works really well and the movement/orientation of the characters do their job too. I guess thats what most of the work went into, so good job. Now do the adventure part!

Interesting premise. I think this can get a really interesting game once theres more specific goals/scenarios. For learning the concept this sandboxy version seems fine. Took me a few minutes to get it, so maybe a tutorial on rails will be necessary as you expand on this.

For the art and flavor of the game you could do a lot of fun things with the capitalism theme. Make a news feed á la Cookie Clicker that describes events based on your actions or past runs. If you fail a run you get called to a board meeting where they fire you. Stuff like that.

Very promising start! Needs a lot of QoL to really get the flow going though.

A scrub like me will die a lot, so once dead the menu should pop up on its own so you can restart the run. Always having to press escape and do it manually frustrates me more after a while than dying.

Hit confirmation is weird. The sword sounds make it feel satisfying, but the bow doesn't seem to have any indicator if it did damage. Thats not really cool. Guys without a shield gave as much of a response as a shielded dude. Trying enough times, they die however. 

Same story with interactive stuff: Some things you just pick up on your own, others you have to press a button for. Opening a hatch with a button is somewhat intuitive enough, but at first i thought i'd just have to step on the hole to progress, like normal doorways to other rooms. At least put button prompts at such things to be clear.

Honestly im not sure how to use the WP meter that builds up. Seems like theres a special ability, but i didn't figure it out. Used melee/ranged attacks all the way.

Anyway, thats probably stuff you already know or others have said, so i wanna add that i really like the art and the music. It just fits the pacing and theres nothing to complain about it at this stage. Build on this and it will become great!

Thanks for the very detailed feedback, you're doing gods work!

if you place an item it seems like its still selected and can be grabbed by pressing space/enter

Holy moly, i haven't known about this at all. It only works for equipment slots too it seems, very weird one.

My map stopped working suddenly, couldn't bring it up again.

Had this too once or twice when testing, but couldn't figure it out in time for DD

Everytime you go to a new area it zooms it, annoying.

Thats fair, i can save the zoom value between stages and load it.

Pathfinding in general is a pain. It seems the navmesh doesn't give you a straight path most of the time, because its made up of lots of tiles. So it calculates from tile to tile instead of start to end in one swoop. Also i didnt spent a lot of time for the town navmesh, since theres no combat there and it wasnt critical. Being stuck at corners inside the dungeon is a different story.

Stutters and lag are a WIP and a learning curve for me. I tried to reduce the "first time" stutters by hiding lots of stuff in the main menu. Arrows/fireballs for example shouldn't tank the performance anymore as they did previously. Going through everything right now to see what else might cause this.

Is allocating stats for your companions necessary?

This topic is haunting me right now. Duneon Siege had a great system, but im both too lazy to restructure my stuff to fit that model and im also too lazy to manually command my little guys. So probably will go with a few behavior presets like you suggested. Im also opposed to have the companions be defined by whats in their weapon/spell slots. That took away all their character in DS.

Thanks again, got a few new pointers on what to work on!

Hey thanks, especially for the vidceo! Seeing how you revived the sorceress using the spell actually showed me another bug, good job! And if i saw correctly, you too had lag spikes in the beginning that pretty much went away after a while.

The pathfinding is indeed a bit iffy, especially in town since i didn't put too much effort into baking navmeshes there to prevent that. In the dungeon it should be better, but doors are still not optimal because of some collision edges.

Don't worry about brainrot, you figured out how to open the companion inventory on your own pretty quickly. Watching the streams i feared it was too hard to find or not being intuitive enough.

Theres a second level you didn't find in the video, but its mostly the same with slighty stronger enemy versions, a few better items and more bugs too.

I'll look into that too. Biggest impact until now were all the unnecessary processes i used. Theres also some things i need to tweak with AI behavior, since there seem to be a lot of calls in the profiler.

Thanks for playing and the feedback! Always good not to read about crashes or freezes too.

The wonky and janky parts need to be ironed out over time obviously, so for instance the companions freaking out when teleporting to you is mostly their cloaks/cloth physics. Didn't find an elegant way to fix this yet, but maybe its enough to just make them briefly invisible and fade them back in?

The banter you suggested was already in the back of my head too, because i would like to make them very personality based and unique. That also goes for their skills/gimmicks which is also kind of a problem on how to customize them. Dungeon Siege just gave you modular options that let you mold each guy the same way if you wanted, which i want to avoid.  The bow sorceress suggestion could be a first step towards that. 

Hopefully for next DD i can get rid of the bugs, get the FPS up a bit more and get some more content going. Maybe even give the followers some real abilities. Thanks again!

Love level 2! Finally i found a rocket launcher, but only to have it after having dealt with most big groups lmao. Its quite a nice change to have these big open spaces where you can take various paths to get to the end instead of the tight corridors of level one. Sure it feels a bit empty because it is so big, but like others said, you might still do things about it.

Im not sure if this happened to me last DD, but in the garage in level 1, the two saw-men got stuck behind the truck trying to get to me. Was the only time enemies had their pathing broken though.

So, another level and maybe a new weapon/enemy in about two months?

Pretty good, love the screaming! Im not sure what happened in my second run, i got the minigun but when i got to the room with the hanging legs/meat it was gone. Was it like a temporary pickup? When switching weapons it looked like i had an assault rifle, just to find "Assault rifle" a few seconds later.

Didnt make it to the end because i ran out of ammo and was low on health around those red streams (is that blood?). So guess i gotta get better and use my comparably hd textured foot more to kick ass.

Those sewer crocs filtered me hard! Shooting thieves combined with that made me lose to the second boss, but thats good, because with these games you need to learn how to deal with those that destroy you to get further.

Needs a volume option that not just mute, game was a bit loud so i had to turn down the volume on my OS.

Thanks for trying! Not sure where all the freezes come from, but after reading your comment i pulled out a weak laptop and it was bad there too (it has no real graphics card, so i dont really use it for testing anyways). Tried to identify whats causing these problems and made a new version with some improvements i hope. If it was really REALLY bad on your system it probably won't make it fluid though.

Thanks for playing, glad you had some fun despite the rough state.

Seems like you had the easy mode, still fighting green goblins in lvl2. Some streamer had the opposite, he got both of the yellow goblin versions which have way higher stats. 

The fireball stutter is a bummer, tried to fix it but apparently i will need to look further. The freeze on using the teleporter is a weird one. Since someone else had a save data issue with the teleporter, i guess its specific to that. Will look into it, thanks for the info on that.

Balancing wasn't really a big goal for now, theres just a lot missing still. Shield will at some point give you a block chance, defensive spells dont exist yet and obviously theres not much variation in the loot. The next version will at least have free healing in town, so you wont be as dependent on potion drops.

Im happy that it seems to run fine in general however, linux build too (which i couldnt test). That was the biggest concern for this version.