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Making an action-platformer-rpg about collecting monsters. Have any feedback for me?

A topic by Some Pixel Guy created Apr 28, 2019 Views: 534 Replies: 5

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Hello people of Itch!

It's essentially all in the title. I have a long winded explanation of what my project is and more general information about it on my game's page:https://some-pixel-guy.itch.io/game-currently-untitled

The game currently does not have a title but it does have 8 levels that you can play in any order and 5 different characters you can play as at the moment. (I do have more available, just not in this demo build) The game works by first selecting a team of up to 3 monsters to bring with you into a mission and then using whatever combination of monsters and their unique traits and abilities to finish the mission in various different ways. The mission will reward you differently for completing it in different ways. For example if you speed through a mission, you will receive a high speed reward. If you defeat a large amount of enemies in a mission, you'll receive a high attack reward but not necessarily as high a speed reward if you spent a lot of time in the mission. The basic objective of the missions is to complete them and collect orbs that you can then use to make your characters stronger so you can then go back into the missions and maybe finish them in different ways than you did before or even access areas of the mission you couldn't previously for some reason or another. I've already written more of a long winded description than I wanted to, so here's some videos and hopefully those will help get you interested! ^.^

Basic Platforming Mission

Basic Combat Mission

Any feedback I can get would be extremely helpful for me, especially if you happen to play the game and find any bugs or you have a suggestion about how an ability should work, how a character should move, how an enemy should behave... etc.

Oh.. also, if you've got any random questions about my project, do feel free to ask away and I'll answer any questions that anyone has as well!

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Diguifi Studios5 years ago

First of all: your game is awesome, the idea of switching between monsters to activate certain "skills" is really cool and creative.

Now for the feedback

- I noticed there's already some sound in the game, but the introductory text says there's no sounds at all

- Was I supposed to double jump in the air when switching from the little ghost to the pink blob?

- It's not very clear what the left-mouse button skill is when you're with the ghost

- The falling leaves have an inverse behavior: when you fall, they fall faster, when you move up, they fall slower

- I got stuck for sometime on the shop menu as soon as I clicked a monster to inspect at the garden (I didn't know how to do anything else and it's not very clear what to do here, but I managed myself out of that screen when I started a mission, but I couldn't figure out how to equip or buy a monster besides the ghost and the slime)

- If you select a monster on the shop then type 1 or 2, sometimes the camera moves to position 0, 0

- There are some very hard (or impossible) parts to get by without getting damage at the meat grinder level (on the green smoke stuff)

- There should be a counter of enemies killed on levels where the mission is to kill certain amount. I played one for over 5 min and it felt like they were infinite

Overall the game is very promising, looks awesome, feels good and its very creative, with very complex routines, such as the upgrade store and mission system. Congrats, I'll sure be willing to see the full version.

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Some Pixel Guy5 years ago

Thanks so much for the feedback! I always appreciate when someone takes the time to check out my game and let me know what they think!

I'll try to go in order addressing the points you made:

-The sound was honestly just added as a rush job to give the game a bit better of a feel. I totally forgot to update the starting text to reflect that. Good catch, I actually already put out a little patch to address something you mentioned later in your message before I really thought about this point, so I'll definitely get on this and some of the other stuff you mentioned over the course of tonight and tomorrow.

-Yes you are supposed to be able to double jump from any point, no matter what... as long as you haven't already jumped or performed an action that recharges your double jump while midair. I'm probably giving away a little nugget that someone would rather discover on their own but there are several instances in these levels where it would be advantageous to save your double jump for some creative movement while you're in the air. Though what specifically you can do with that is up to you. I wanted the system to be very freeform and forgiving in how you go about your movements.

-I know... you can't tell exactly what skills you have and what mouse button they're bound to while in a mission. It's something on my endless to-do list... and it's pretty close to the top so expect that to change shortly as well.

-The falling leaves effect does have an odd behavior, and it's not really necessary for anything so I just removed it. Honestly, I totally forgot it was even going on having playtested my game so much... I don't even see them anymore lol...

-This one is another thing I've definitely got to work on and is near the top of my priorities list as well. I realize that despite the rather simple appearance, getting into and understanding exactly what my game really is, I feel is probably going to be rather confusing and off putting in these early stages of the development process. There are already some pretty complicated systems that I built into this game and they don't immediately show themselves as something that are available to you and that you can do, for instance you can change your skills, you can chain certain skills together for certain effects, some characters have vastly different stats and uses, I could go on but I think the point's been made. Generally working on my game's accessibility is probably the #1 thing I've got to focus on for the moment.

-THIS POINT!!! You sir... have done me more of a favor by pointing out this bug than you even know. I thought I had quashed all of the major bugs that destroy the game feel before I released this demo. I'm very glad you caught this one for me so early on. It would have been rather embarrassing to have it persist when there's such an easy fix. This is actually that fix that I mentioned that I made to the game earlier, I just patched up this bug real quick. It shouldn't be happening anymore.

-The meat grinder level is quite difficult, yes... that's why it's called the meat grinder. It is possible to get through the end of that map without taking any damage but it is by no means easy. That map I feel perfectly shows off the thing I love most about how everything in the game is set up, but it also perfectly exemplifies how insanely steep the learning curve for game difficulty will be if I'm not careful with how I set up the early game content in the future. Figuring out how to teach people all of these different game mechanics through gameplay without it feeling like a super long and handhold-ey tutorial will definitely be a learning experience for me. If you've got any suggestions for how I could go about tackling parts of this problem, I'm all ears!

-There actually is an enemy counter in the pause menu, but that goes back into the point that I already made. It's not apparent enough in that specific mission type. I'll add an enemy counter to the top of the screen in the combat missions so that people don't feel like you said, the mission feeling endless.

There's definitely quite a bit of work that I've got to do to polish up my game more, and the feedback really does help a lot. I'm working with a pretty big concept so it's pretty difficult for me to get my head outside of that space and to look at it from an outside perspective... but I guess that's what other people are for, so thanks again!

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gravelblock5 years ago (1 edit)

Hi Some Pixel Guy,

It's an interesting idea you're working on here. I actually was thinking of doing something similar in the future, but it's not for anytime soon! Everything Chao Garden-like always attracts my attention :) I've played for about 45 minutes, maybe an hour. Here's my bit of feedback:

There's a bug with the UI when the Shop menu is opened without closing the Mission menu, and vice versa. The Open/Close button text is not correctly updated. It makes navigating the UI confusing. Also about the UI, I often would click a monster's name to upgrade it and realise I forgot to close whatever menu I had open. It a small thing but it gets irritating. I think menu navigation in general is a bit annoying, since the Open/Close buttons and the menus themselves are at opposite sides of the screen.

I found it weird that monsters are controlled with WASD, but the garden camera is controlled with the Arrow Keys. It seems to me it would be better if it was the same in both places.

Sound is really broken for me. It sounds very glitchy and gets too loud when I get many items at the same time.

I think you should be careful with making projectiles fade out slowly. It's hard to tell when they're fully gone and at what opacity they stop being dangerous. The gas spouting plants are confusing because of that.

I'm wondering about what kind of length you're aiming for with the game. I have no doubt you plan to add more levels, but I'm not sure how many times I can play the same levels over and over with little variance between each run. I think replayability is probably your biggest challenge with this project and I'm courius about how you'll tackle it.

I'll end on some positives :) I like the verticality of the levels. It's something I struggle with in my games; I find I naturally make flat levels. The movement is solid. The game is easy to get into; I understood the menus and controls pretty quick. Its an interesting idea like I said, so I hope you manage to finish the game!

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Some Pixel Guy5 years ago

Hey! Sorry it took me so long to get back to this. I'm always busy doing this, that, or the other thing it seems... but anyways, thanks so much for taking the time to give me some incredibly detailed feedback! I'm going to get to each of the points you brought up in the order you brought them up in. So here goes!

-Thanks for catching that one... truth be told, the implementation of those buttons was a suuuuper rush job and I just wanted it to work because I realized AFTER releasing an update (silly me...) that those buttons didn't actually do anything, so I kinda just did the scripting equivalent of vomiting all over my screen to make it work in as little time as possible. I've patched it up and it's going to be rolled out with the next update I'm putting out. (this Friday, May, 10th if anyone's wondering)

-I know... everybody else who gave me detailed feedback screamed at me about that too. I fixed it. Everything's WASD in the currently in this version, again... the next update. Also in regards to the camera, I've added a feature to the missions which will allow the player to use the free camera to look a certain distance away from themselves in order to scope out an area, identify a point of interest that they might want to go towards, or make a plan as to how they're going to approach a platforming challenge. There are probably many other potential uses for the feature that I haven't listed, but those little tidbits alone sounded cool enough for me to want to add it. I like adding things that will allow me to "let loose" a little bit more and go as crazy as I want with the project's vision while still remaining in a scope that can be completed on a reasonable timescale and budget.

-You have identified my Achilles heel... sound. I actually have very little experience working with sound in the engine I'm using to create this project and it happens to do some really funny things when you try to adjust sound levels in the engine... so I'm figuring that I'm just going to have to make a couple different versions of my sounds that play at different volume levels to alleviate the issue. It's probably going to be a pain in the rear, but it won't actually be a ton of work... just another thing to add to the endless list of things to do.

-I really appreciate that you made this particular comment about the fading projectiles because I wasn't sure myself if people would be confused about the way they fade or not. Nobody else has mentioned anything about it to me, so the fact that you have just lets me know that it's probably something that other people have noticed and maybe even something that has given people a negative view of the game... I'll probably do something like make them destroy at 30% or 40% instead of the 5% they do now... it is pretty bad now that I'm really thinking about it. I'll have to play around with it and have other people play around with it too to really get an idea of how I should approach that issue.

-In terms of game length... honestly, if you can knock out the whole story of the game in less than 12 hours but find yourself having so much fun playing the game that you continue to play for the extra stuff... that's the sort of "length" I'm trying to go for with this game. I aim to give this game as much replayability as possible in a non random and non "this game is going to take forever to come out" kind of way. The approach I'm looking at right now is sort of taking some elements from Warframe in the sense that you will have access to a variety of characters with a rather limited set of abilities, but a number of other unique traits that make the particular choice of character you make all the more important for what you're attempting to do, some elements from Spelunkey in terms of the way it generates "random" maps from predetermined chunks... which Warframe also does but Spelunkey does it in a 2D environment and in a way that makes somewhat more sense for me to look towards, obviously elements from Sonic Adventure 1 & 2's Chao Garden which I feel like I shouldn't need to explain if only for the purposes of this response not being the length of an actual book........ and the last big point of inspiration, and really the biggest one is Pokemon Mystery Dungeon which reimagined the existing "mystery dungeon" format in a way that I don't think any other game... even my game could come close to, but again... my post-mortem and analysis of those games could be another book all in itself. From PMD, I mostly just want to recreate the feel of having a "team" that you're working with and despite the game being very singleplayer focused... the player not feeling like they're essentially alone in the world they're exploring (which is how I personally feel in a lot of games... but again... another book)

I feel like I've slightly deviated from my point, so I'll close this one with... I know I have issues with replayability... It's the thing that is on my mind 24/7, when I feel like I have a proper solution to it... I'll implement, test, and deploy it immediately, and... umm... hopefully not a) go insane. b) give up. or c) run into a brick wall in development that will cause the game to just not be feasible to release.

Again, thanks for the feedback... thanks for ending on a positive... really helps when actively typing a response to a message. If you want to talk to me about verticality in level design, or my approach to things, or generally want to know more about the concept for the game... because you mentioned everything Chao Garden-like attracting your attention. I feel like you would adore the idea I have for the full concept of the game. I definitely intend to finish the game, even if it has to be something I end up just having to do in my off time and releasing as a scaled down version of what I originally wanted to create for free, but hey... that's the biz... so it's whatever either way.

I'd strongly encourage you to join my discord server because I feel like there's a much better back and forth we could have that could help us both improve in our quest to become better game designers... plus I have cake! There's a link to it in my game's start menu if you're interested. I really would like to keep the group full of people who are genuinely interested in the project and are willing to give it feedback when they've got the time to, however infrequently. Thanks again for the feedback, like I said earlier... really appreciate it!

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gravelblock5 years ago(+1)

I didn't think about Pokémon Mystery Dungeon, but now that you mention it the influence is obvious. I really the idea of those games too, even though I only played Explorers of Time.

I don't have a Discord account and don't plan to at the moment. I've never really been invested in online communities. I'll give you a follow though to see where the game goes :)

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