itch.io

Game is simple but kills my index finger. Got a 122.200 score.
Feels very polished. Didn't expect that i can shoot enemy projectiles, thats neat. Tried all the weapons, but found the starting gun to be the best since you can spam it easily. Even the smg sucked in comparison. Maybe the laser is nice too, but rocket launchers are the worst.

I think something is missing to make the game really shine. When the game gets harder and the ring closes in, lots of idle enemies were way out of it. I couldn't get more bosses and there was no way i could make a comeback. Only chance for a good score was to spam as much as possible at that point.

Lovely art, shooting and hitting feels very impactful (sometimes a bit too  much impact).
Crafting menu doesnt block the stash button. Clicking its position while crafting switches to the stash.
Didn't understand the items/crafting etc. Not sure if i could switch weapons?

Froze the game in the second area. Had a chest that didnt disappear on pressing down. Held down for a while, wanted to click an upgrade and the game was stuck.

Really cool polish since the last times. I like how the xp orbs now have gravity and its easier to collect them. The player sprite compressing on landing is cool too. I think the chests are new, thats good too. I dont understand those litte plants or flails (i think they look like little flails). Levels look and feel more like levels.
Keep it up!

Man what an experience!

This game might be cool, but the controls and the menus kill me via confusion. First i tried the settings, where i was stuck and didn't know how to get back.
Restarted the game and immediately tried to start it. Character creation is pretty cool. Suprising amount of options there! I noticed however, typing in the name "Chad" would change my gender. The currently selected option to the left probably always listens for keystrokes even if the input field is active.

So i made my legionary from the north named Chad and went forth. Expectations were high as i saw what looked like a big overworld map. Hit some keys, accidentally swung my sword. Went on to collect some stuff which i wanted to try on. The inventory handling is a bit tough, the game was probably designed with a controller in mind.

Checking out the character sheet overwhelmed me. There's lots going on and the font/style made it a bit hard to find out what's important. The big world map is amazing at first glance. I had no idea where i was in that world though. Probably somewhere in the north, since i chose it as my birthplace.

Now to start the adventure! Went south because the minimap showed a red dot. Stood next to it, couldn't interact and lost life. Went back to my home town, entered the dungeon (had to figure out how at first) and found out nobody wanted to fight me. Found a portal out and went further north. Entered a different place. Here everyone was in a fighting mood and i DIED.

What I liked:

• Visual style, especially the classes selection just oozed sovl...lots of work was put into that it seems
• Orb/Souls-like mix is intruiging. Thought of doing such a thing myself
• Seems like a lot of stuff is already blocked/thought out and in the game, even if its buggy. Probably easy to polish for a proper prototype

What I didn't like:

• Controls are maddening. Sometimes the mouse works, sometimes space works, sometimes enter. Sometimes none seems to work
• Menu visuals need some fine tuning. The game world itself is great, but menus are sometimes hard to read

A few minor things i noticed:

• Character sprites don't always match the equipment. Running around as legionnaire had some armor parts stay still while the body wiggles
• In the northern town dungeon (Yaka?) the ground sprites of the grey paths may have had a wrong Z-index between segments. Maybe not, had the feeling sometimes anyway

Thanks for trying!

Good find with the potion, i will check it out. Glad you like the additions!

Thanks for playing and the feedback!
Do you mean the dwarf went to a robe and picked it up himself (bug), or you clicked a robe and he put it on (no bug)?
Will try to improve the menus/tooltips/intuitiveness. Maybe i put skills directly into a free slot when learned. I assumed the player knows PoE and similar games, where you click the skill slot on the bottom bar to select skills. Maybe i need some easy to skip tutorial hints?

I would have enjoyed if the game dangled a carrot of telling me when to leave

Maybe quest rewards? The dialogue is currently very simple and barebones, maybe that can improve to give the player some ideas.

This feels like a Dungeon Keeper like with bad UI and little explanation. Apparently its turn based with randomized upgrades each win?
To onboard players better, maybe start off with small enemy waves that get increasingly huge. I failed to understand the excavation system which somehow gave me more monster points. So at first i had a single gobbo protect my villainess...failing miserably of course. Next run i had so many little gobbos i couldnt even find a place to put them. Game could be cool if fleshed out.

Biggest todos are:
1. Conveying how the game works
2. UI scaling and positioning. Found out the fate screen can be scrolled by holding the mouse. Maybe a scroll bar should be added to at least indicate it.

As always, thanks for blessing me with such a thorough review of your experience!
Some really great finds there with the bugs, made me create around 5 new tasks i can tackle after DD.

Ganna is the appeal follower while Dirk is supposed to be a joke cameo guy. Maybe he will be recruitable at some point. Gotta admit that I didn't think too much about the dialogue/story stuff while making all the other stuff.
Overworld areas can easily be done already. The town is actually generated just like the other levels, but it's just a single big "room" with a hardcoded seed. Got some ideas floating around for some wilderness areas etc. Just vague stuff right now though.

Amazing, thank you!

Oh i forgot to add: i had some stutters whenever i used a weapon for the first time. Probably missing projectile pooling?

I remember this game from last year, seems like its evolving really nicely!
Got the cross thingy that shoots whenever healed early and i noticed that it would also shoot after a round was won and the HP is reset.
Im not sure if im bad, but the horizontal/vertical combo start for the sword is really annoying and i always get damaged in the early waves because of this.
However the rats and pets i do like (im a lazy person). They seem really strong though. I got 2 rats, a drone and an upgraded spd buff for them and they did the heavy lifting until the end for me.
Oh and i noticed that the default difficulty was the highest when i started the game.

Love the shop.exe! I think i got all enemies and items.
When starting i literally ran into the lockers and was stuck for a second. Wanted to take a screenshot but then i was able to move again.

Didn't have any real bugs, just small things that are expected from a prototype:
- The explosive gas tank didn't explode when shooting at it with the minigun, had to swap to the shotgun to make it go boom
- Decals are sometimes placed midair
- Shotgun puts a surprising force into the ragdolls. Enemies fly at the speed of light even if the pellets already penetrated someone earlier
- Putting the whole room on fire (including corpses) produced a bit of lag. Wondered how burning stuff will affect gameplay

It works. The promise on gore in space was delivered. Please deliver more next time, thank you!

Works pretty well. Had to look up the controls a few times, which was sometimes a hasse because when hitting ESC the last selected menu was still active. So when trying to look up controls i had some settings open, confusing me. Was expecting to always get to the pause menu from the game. Wording is inconsistent in that matter too: the menu item is called options, but when clicking it its called settings. The options/settings have a "back" button, but the controls have a "return" button.
While writing this i had the game running in the pause menu and the music stopped at some point. Resuming the game didnt restart it. I think in my first playthrough it never stopped playing?

Love to play me some new Dirk!
Died to some zombie, thought i would see what happens when you are dead and was positively surprised. Thank god Chad is still a Chad!
Also the first time i did a lot of jumping and climbing. Seems solid so far, just a few places that let me latch onto that didn't seem to make sense.
I think i locked myself into the tavern by trying to throw the torch to the ground. It accidentally landed the wrong way and is now unreachable.

Really like where the story is going, UI and controls are still weird but i get used to it by now. May still need a rework at some time.

Played it in german and went with max strength and some int. Turned out i didn't get any spells. Took the two handed sword and went into battle. First thing i noticed is that there is no defence. Can't block or dodge, so had to rewire my brain into face tanking everything and pop a potion sometimes.
The quick bar is nice, however if some item count goes to 0 its not removed. I don't know if there is a way to remove items from the bar, i couldnt find one.

The attacks are nice with the red spot for crits, but its not always clear when you are able to swing your two handed sword again. It really takes some time and its a bit frustrating that there is no indicator. The curved sword was better in that regard and let me clear the level way easier.

The music is nice, but i think i already wrote that ages ago in an earlier demo. The style comes along great as well.
I had a few weird occurrences with enemies, namely that a dead diseased dude was still giving me the life bar at the top with 0 health. Also some enemies seemed to swing their attack when they died? At least those spark particles and that sound happened next to me. Its hard to tell and even harder to time to really test it.

If this game gave the player a chance for learning, like a small level 1 with only boring enemies and then increase the amount of mechanics, that would be great. Had a lot of conditions put on me which i didnt understand by just looking at the icons.

Great stuff though, keep it up!

Spent way too much time playing this game!

The general incremental game flow is there and it feels like one (hence my long play time of multiple hours). However some things aren't feeling good yet.

First of the descriptions/ui is confusing. What does fire do? Or weaken? Especially confusing was the mason upgrade for faster processing. Does it mean the masons spend less time at their building? The numbers that pop up to the top left are nice, but also confusing. I guess its something like DPS? 

The beginning was confusing too. There is this wall that you have to chip away, so much is clear from the get go. However i was expecting some number go up. Instead i have this pile of coke on the ground that doesn't do anything. Took a while until i found out about masons and that they actually convert the "work" to currency.

After figuring out the start, things went up like you want it for incrementals. The longer it went, the more punishing the game felt however. I remember incrementals to always slow down in a current building tier, but giving you some momentum once you build the next one. This wasn't the case here. After mages everything became a slog. Once i had some upgrades for the ka-boomers, they were super strong, but the money flow still was slow. Unlocking the trebuchets made me think it's gonna go up again. At this point the ka-boomers did like 700dps. I added a few trebuchets and they did like 20? I felt betrayed. In the long run trebuchets scaled better due to nukes and dakka, but the upgrades were expensive. I thought i should just focus on dynamite boys.

Since housing gets incredibly expensive, i was regretting getting so many pickers. I wish i had put more people into other buildings, like ka-boomers or trebuchets.

Oh and one last thing: I don't get the wall hp thing. When i kill a wall and another one spawns, is it a better wall? Or is it harder to get resources from it? Or doesn't it do anything yet and has something planned?

Thanks for playing! I really hate UI.

Luckily, this old version of the UI won't make it to next DD, i will have a better one in place (including the ESC thing).

I think it improved since last time. Cannot remember everything however.

Initially i had a problem of collecting xp when i killed enemies just slightly above my jump height. The exp would just wobble around and never come to me. Upgrades are still weird as the player doesn't know what they are, except some bladders added orbiting  balls (but not always!). Also selecting upgrades with the keyboard would be great because the rest of the controls are keyboard only right now.

Had to look up the interact button for the portal, a little hint ingame would be nice.

Its nice that there are some invincibility frames once you are hit, which didn't send me into a deathloop like last time. However when spawning in a new level (or reviving), you can jump once in free fall. I guess thats a bug and you should only be able to jump from the ground?

Its still rough but the gameplay loop is somewhat visible now.

Thanks for playing!

Weird that the game froze, maybe an issue with the NPC shops not finding valid items? Will investigate.
Funny thing about the menus is that im overhauling the whole UI right now. Closing menus with escape is one of the things that will be included. Hopefully everything else will feel just a bit more intuitive afterwards.

He just stood there for a minute until i pressed Alt+F4

Found a bug! This Xanadu man walk downwards to Alexander, checked if he can hit him and slowly turned to the side. Now he is stuck in this mode forever. I guess he didn't want to hurt his buddy, but doesn't know what to do now.

Played until the standup, the schedule looked weird. Apparently the game knows im german.

I feel like theres something missing to really make it a game thats interesting to player longer than a few minutes. The only challenge is to figure out which phrases are correct innuendos. The standup part especially made it hard for me (thats what she said) to find them. A tight deadline didn't seem correct at first, but it was.

Some stuff could be sped up, the getting ready for work thing was funny at first, but every step took so long so it became boring. The score after each stage could be summed up quicker too. The buttons in the level itself are great, but the menu could use some love.

Holy moly, DD54 was ages ago! Remade the game from scratch since then.

The feature scope of the demo is almost done, then the great polishing will happen.
Thanks for the video feedback, this will help a lot!

Thanks a lot for playing! I think you are the first one that reached the end, congrats!

The game truly is in need of more polish and especially a more intuitive UI. I put in some blinking animation to the portraits to make the player click it after a level up, but apparently thats not enough :D
You are absolutely right about the potion counter, thats planned. Currently those buttons let each companion drink a pot if their health/mana is below a threshold (so they don't uselessly drink all of it). An easier way to force a potion on specific members could be great, but hard to do in an intuitive way.

Skill trees were also a first draft the way they are now. Choosing a new tree for the MC was a bit hacky. This whole thing needs more thought and work.

Played around a bit and didn't get it at first, so had to reread the instructions.
Since there is no UI at all, i didn't understand the attack instructions at all. Had to try everything out to get the hang of it. Once i tried everything there wasn't much else to see really.

Anyway, the graphics are fine. Everything looks sharp and is actually a pleasure to look at for what it is. Having fire and smoke be cubes make sense with that theme.
The attacks i don't understand. It seems it's just differently colored ways to destroy cubes? The explosions are the coolest of course. It seems the explosion sound gets increasingly quiet once i pressed F and upgraded their frequency. I guess the different attacks could be some mechanic to interact with different type of cubes? Explosions just being a straight 3x3x3 aoe, while another attack is transmitted to all neighbouring cubes of the same type? Something like that.
I saw that there are some coins dropping sometimes and i guess this is what will be used to upgrade and maybe buy the weapons in the first place? 
The game starts off with a big cube, but maybe it should really start of with a single one or just a few and let the player upgrade the amount. This could be great to introduce more weapons. Regenerating the cubes seems pretty fast too, maybe that can also be tied to some upgrade?

Having the upgrade system and some UI will probably be the best next step as it will help to get an idea what this could become. Also cube types that do something.

Do you by chance remember what exact items were invisible? Tried to reproduce the bug but i found all kinds of weapons from goblins and they were all visible.

Thanks for playing again and finding those pesky bugs.
The second bug you described is caused by something i did to prevent a different bug just today. Seems like i always have to create new bugs for DD.... Anyway, before this behaviour your character could get stuck next to a barrel and wouldn't attack it just because of some float distance stuff so i put in rounding. I thought i put something in so there is a little bit of leeway for melee attacks, but i guess i missed something.
Will investigate the invisible item drops right away.

Thanks for the feedback! Tried to fix as many bugs as possible since DD, great that you haven't found any new ones!

Are you thinking of the old browser based demo where this game was 2D with pixel sprites? If so, you are right. React-JS didn't really fit my project so i redid it in Godot. This is the second (and hopefully final) iteration of the Godot version.

The loot topic is one im constantly thinking about. Initially i also had the idea that the town would need loot to improve itself, but im not sure how to properly communicate this or make it a mechanic. Some time ago i thought i could skip the whole gold thing for shops and just make it work like a scrap yard, where the player brings loot to pull apart. If you have enough resources you might get something from the smithy.... so basically D3 crafting. Another idea was to have pets you need to craft from rare drops. Or rune like loot that can be "socketed" into the character itself or some skills to modify them.... This is a rabbit hole that needs a lot of thought and experimentation i fear.

For now i want to refine the demo part of the game, improve drop rates to make the core gameplay enjoyable and fix bugs. When thats done, innovation will happen.

I liked your song performance. It's my fault though that some important things were bugged because i quickly changed some things shortly before and during DD  and broke things :/
Still great to have someone play and document bugs, so thank you!

The confused comments intrigued me so i tried it.
At first glance this game appears to me like its a survivors game mixed with Risk of Rain. I too was confused by the presentation. Apparently, the player needs to collect blue squares. Green dots are money? Weapon upgrades got me some orbiting blobs that killed enemies, which is very survivors-like. If that is really the idea, it might work.

But it's very rough. I ended the game when i was at around -45hp, fell down to death and respawned immediately. Being able to jump more than once wasnt clear to me, so i spent most of the time at rock bottom. I think the basic attack that just "happens" needs some visuals to communicate itself to the player.

Wow you seem to have played it a lot since you unlocked lightning spellsl. Thanks for the commitment!

First off, the UI options (and the UI scaling for that matter) will be worked on next. The resolution settings are indeed just a factor for scaling the 3D viewport, hence the muddying when scaling to anything belo 1920x1080. I quickly put the settings part together some time ago and never went back to actually make it do what it actually should.

Balancing input is always appreciated. The dungeon size really seems too big and because of that the experience gain from killing monsters will probably need to be higher too. At least in the first level to get started.
Starting equipment is a more complex matter as i will need to figure out if there will be character creation paths that will determine your gear. If so, what else will it entail? Will it give you a starting skill? Just a skill tree? Or maybe i just put in a dialogue on arrival that will gift the player something. We will see..

That troll bug is actually bigger than you might think, because you didn't meet the troll! The shocking truth is, i attached the wrong data object to that miniboss... Great find!
Inventory bugs were not known, but anticipated (never build a tetris inventory, its hell!). Thank you for uncovering them too.

Thank again for the detailled feedback!

Nice game! The atmosphere is great!
Really like how the music changes when theres danger. Enemies are a real danger too, they are not too bad at dodging bullets in the distance or preying on the enemy. I find it even a bit hard. Whenever i went into melee i cant help but get damaged.
For such an early build its very solid. Keep it up.

Ran well, but the UI doesnt like rescaled screens. Once i put it to fullscreen the crosshair was gone and the labels in the mission prep screen didnt make sense. Since its Godot, those UI elements are probably not anchored and just positioned by hand?

Also ran out of ammo because i didnt know how much i've left. After emptying the first clip i thought there was unlimited reloads, but i was wrong.

I like the game idea, but i also liked to play Payday2 ages ago. Interesting to see how this is gonna evolve. Since its so early, there isnt much more to say.

First time playing this. Like others already said, it looks great!

Im too bad to kill the two guards at the door, the slow attacks that cannot be cancelled are a bit frustrating. Unfortunately i didn't find any respawn button, so i had to alt + F4 to try again.

The UI for character creation is extremely small for big screens. I barely missed the name input at the bottom after hitting new game. Maybe a big title saying "Character Creation" or "Who are you?" would help? Also hitting new game made the game freeze for a while. I guess it needs some kind of loading screen/indicator.

The music in the main menu is nice, but very loud. Options didn't work for me (probably not implemented).

What i like a lot, is the feeling that you can just take anything in the rooms, like skulls, bottles etc. Gives a bit of a Morrowind-Soulslike vibe.

Keep it up, curious how it will evolve (and if i will git gud enough to get out of the tutorial).

Thanks for playing!

There is indeed still a lot to do. Gold is waiting for NPC shops, which will take some time to be implemented in a good way. Loot tables are really not optimal right now. Im currently mostly taking care of crashes and big bugs, like the walking around at 0hp (thanks for reporting this!).
The weird resolution options (which are more like a graphics quality setting) need some love. I just put something together  to test low-end to high-end machines.
Sprinting was requested a few times now, so it might come at some point! Just wanna make sure its not becoming a dopamine zoom fest like PoE or D3/4.

Oh and the music is just a first draft/placeholder. Better music is being worked on.

Thanks again for playing and giving valuable feedback!

Thanks for playing!
Great catch! Will fix this asap.
The minimap will indeed get some improvements in time.

the first battles during the tutorial should have 100% win rate

To be transparent here, i skipped the tutorial lol. The masked chick was a bit tough with the dragon. I could get the fire attack off easily but i dont think it did much damage, the other attack always led to a tie. Maybe i should check out the tutorial next time.

Thanks for sharing the logs. Will investigate.

Great progress! The crash on unequipping the armor didnt happen this time.

The initial fight after picking up the stick became way way easier, which is great for a tutorial. However, once that fight started the music stopped. I think i remember a real banger playing in battle last time, wish it played this time too. From this point the whole game had no music for me.

After waking up in bed in full armor (just like in real life), i stepped out of it and heard a lot of steps being spammed by the game. Probably some collision stuff?

The dialogue is great, but i only spoke to each NPC once. Next time i will annoy all of them at least twice. Its nice to have references to AG and some humor in it. The 2d illustrations are great too. Im still wondering about the skill system, which was already present in the last version. Hopefully this will be usable in the near future.

Not gonna talk about clunkyness, QoL or UX stuff, which seems already known. Keep it up!

This game is really polished and looks amazing!

Its significantly harder for me than Pokemon. Pokemon has this momentum where you are pretty strong from the start (with almost no mechanics) and your group grows nicely while teaching you more stuff until you reach some tough enemies that you need to grind for. It also has this thing where your starter mon has some abilities that KOs enemie with 2-3 shots. This game made me die on the first opponent twice lmao. Once i got the hang of it, i often had 2-3 enemies at once with only my little fire dragon at my side. Those cricket like enemies for instance took a lot of damage which made the momentum really vanish as it took a lot of spamming the same attacks again and again. I probably missed something to get into the flow of the game.

Some little things i noticed:

• Going to the town market and choosing the Buy option makes the guy ask what the player wants to sell. This made me go back to the Sell option which says the same thing.
• There are menus where the mouse doesn't do much. At the start i thought its nice i can play with keyboard and mouse so this was a bit weird. Specifically looking at the beastiary in the camp only a bunch of buttons can be used with the mouse. I thought hovering/clicking on different monsters would work, but it doesnt.
• Group fights become a bit confusing when one enemy is dead. I fought 2 Scaratheons, killed one and it almost looked identical to the one thats still fighting. Maybe muting their colors, greying them out a bit or making them slightly transparent can signify them being out combat more?