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kemomic1 year ago(+1)

Thanks for playing! 

I've had comments about the stagger since the first demo, and I'm still not really sure how to address this. Part of this is that the first boss has a armoured form and a base form, and her poise values are higher when in armour. Maybe changing the hit sound during this could help to make it more clear that attacks are having a different effect? 

I'll probably be redoing the existing bosses soon, since I've received quite a bit of feedback about this. I would agree that the spear moveset is the weakest of the 3, since  I didn't really add much more than a few thrusts to that. 

In terms of difficulty curve, I don't really have the luxury of having more content to pad it out, but I could try to split Louise up into more phases so that there's some difficulty progression there. Initially, her concept was to have 2 concurrent phases that she would switch between, but as of the current build there isn't much difference beyond the armour, attributes, and one big attack. I'm considering switching this into a phase 1A/1B/2A/2B where phase 2 is the latter half of the fight, while the armour mechanics are still retained in A/B modes. 

"Floaty" is quite a vague term, so I'd appreciate if you could elaborate on this. Do you mean:

  • It feels floaty even when not engaging with enemies -> movement is floaty? Falling speed is too slow?
  • A lack of weight to hits -> needs more hit effects/more exaggerated hit animations? More hitstop?
  • Actions have low commitment -> but on the other hand, you also say that animation lock for attacks is high, so maybe not this?
  • Slidey movement during attacks?
  • Unresponsive controls/actions -> if so, which actions specifically? 
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Tada1 year ago(+2)

I give it another shot and kill the first boss.

Here’s are my SUBJECTIVE opinion on the game and how I think it could be better:

1. Stagger

I didn’t realize the stagger is based on poise until you mentioned it, it just feels random and inconsistent, hard to plan a strategy for it.

I’m not even sure if blocks also contribute to the poise damage.

I think this is more of a core mechanic of your game, personally I think it’s not good enough.

To clarify the issue, I’ll go through my terminologies for the action of the boss:

  • -When the boss uses its ability, it will have 3 phases:
    • Startup: Bringing up the sword.
    • Release: Slam down the sword.
    • Recover: Recover the sword back and move to an idle pose.

I’ll go through this in the format of I want to do something, and the problem with what I want to do something.

As a player I want to abuse the stagger mechanic, but since there’s no indication when the boss will get staggered, I will need to do a hit test to see if the boss will stagger to do follow up.

The problem is some of the startup is too fast, when this is the case, when I try to attack the boss to test if it will stagger, due to fast boss startup and long animation lock of player attack, I will 100% get punished if the boss uses an ability that has startup that is faster than player animation lock.

As a player I want to have follow-ups when the boss gets staggered, since I noticed that sometimes, when the boss staggered, my follow-ups ALSO stagger the boss, but I’m not sure why.

The problem is since I don’t know why the boss staggered, sometimes my follow-ups simply do not stagger the boss, and I get punished for it.

What I think could be better: 

Better poise indication

If we are to use poise as a value to inflict staggers, some kind of indication is needed for players to plan around it, either bar or sound or whatever, and it would be better to communicate this information clearly to players somehow.

For a bad example (only to get my point across):

  • -Poise has a bar indication, when the bar is maxed, the boss will get vulnerable state, when the state gets applied, the boss will stagger once, and any subsequent attack will also stagger the boss.
  • -When the bar is maxed, it will gradually drop in like 1-2 secs or something, after the bar reaches 0, the vulnerable state is removed, and the boss cannot be staggered anymore until the bar is maxed again.

This will remove any feeling of randomness, and players can play and plan around the Poise bar.

Boss startup should not be faster than player animation lock

This is more of a guideline when designing, but generally boss startup should not be faster, if it is faster, then it should not be too punishing.

2. Floaty

Lots of things contribute to this:

  • -Player movement:
    • I think it’s better to remove acceleration, when I move, I want it to be at full speed immediately or reduce acceleration to full speed to minimal.
    • The movement should start the moment I press the button, right in the case when I want to move to a direction that the player is not facing, it will rotate first, the move.
    • When the player stops the movement, it should stop immediately, should not slide, I can’t even tell if it actually slides after movement stopped, I just feel like it is sliding.
  • -Dash/Dodge:
    • Remove the slide-ness of the dodge OR have an animation to indicate the brake after dodge.
  • -Jump:
    • When jumping toward a direction, after landing, there it should not slide, an animation to indicate landing would be good.
  • -Attack:
    • In the first attack of the combo, there’s a subtle movement (I’m not sure if it is character or camera) that moves back when the character steps back, it might be realistic but, it just feels floaty. Or just make the camera not move back at all.
    • The movements of attack slides way too much after the attack is released, it needs to feel “tight”, the movement should only exist in the release animation, keep the movement after release minimal or not at all.
  • -Boss:
    • Same, less slide-y, avoid movements in recovery animation.
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kemomic1 year ago(+1)

Thank you for the detailed response, and congratulations on clearing Louise. Since there's a lot to look at and process here, I can't really give good solutions to everything yet, so I'll just try to communicate my thoughts on the issues and what I can try to improve in future updates. 

Stagger:

  • Not being able to see stagger values makes it hard to know when a stagger will occur, thus combos need to start with some kind of hit confirm before following up. No easy answers for this one, considering it's partly based on Elden Ring's poise system and that too was somewhat unintuitive. 
  • It feels unfair if the startup of a boss attack is shorter than the player's recovery after their initial attack attempt, because they can punish the player at no frame cost to themselves. At the same time, I don't want all boss attacks to be so slow and heavy, so I guess I can try to speed up everything and reduce frame disadvantages?
  • Poise as yet another bar sounds obnoxious, so I don't think I can do that. But as I said, no solutions yet, so I'll need more time to think about this one. 

Floatiness:

  • Although you say it rotates first, then moves, it's more correct to say that it rotates while blending towards the movement state over a 0.25s transition period. It does feel more snappy when reducing this value, so I'll try playing around with lowering it to maybe around 0.1, although I'll need to compare how it feels with existing games and see if that makes sense. (I think you're the only one to ever point this out, so I need to decide if it is a real problem, a personal preference, or something that actually makes the game feel better) 
  • There was some braking to the dodge animation before, but since it got chopped down from 60f to about 40f to blend into sprinting better, that part is not really visible anymore. Initial tweaking makes me feel like it's worse to try and extend this, but I'll need to play around with this more to really decide for sure.   
  • This part about jumping is a bit more complicated, because there isn't much of a slide here and it's more that holding a direction when landing will cancel straightaway into walking. I think I've also received comments about this in the past that made me add the transition into walking instead of leaving the players stuck in the landing state.
  • Most of the root motion movements during attacks are just matching up feet positions, but this is not 100% accurate, and there will be some minute but barely visible foot sliding. Some attacks are definitely worse at this than others, though. It's also possible you might be referring to what happens when the player is right in front of the enemy and there's no more space to move forward, but there's not too much I can do about that. For now, I can just try and review the attacks to reduce the worst offenders. 
    • Are the charged normal attacks tight-enough for you? If comparing NA to CA, then I can feel that difference, so if CAs are good enough then that gives me a solid target to refer to. 

Apart from the stagger issues, I think a lot of the floatiness comments have been unique to your perspective. While I can see how these are problematic, it's unclear how big of a problem they are and whether or not I need to or am adequately able to fix it.  There's a lot of tweaking and iteration that'll have to be done to figure that out, but I really appreciate being able to get such detailed feedback from you. 

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Tada1 year ago(+2)

Yeah, no problem, the solutions I provided are just a way to communicate my problems, overall, I think the game could have lots of potential. Good luck dude!

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