Great visual artstyle, great models and animations, great designs and not so great combat.
First of all - thanks for not limiting the dodge rolls with stamina or cooldowns, that's very nice of you. But that's kinda it, unfortunately. Combat feels very repetitive, different combos don't seem to distinct visually from each other, and for me it devolved into button mashing. I dunno, I don't like clicking bosses to death to be honest - I'd love to have some abilities or something to work with.
I honestly don't know if a combo system could work in an orblike boss rush game. Bosses seem cool, and the first one is manageable - but when second boss specializes in huge AOE attacks - the last thing I want is to click him to death.
I definitely would like to play more, I do like the artstyle - I just wish the gameplay was a bit more exciting.
Hey, mate! Yeah, thanks a lot for playing. I watched your playthrough and had lots of takeaways. I sincerely appreciate the complete honest feedbacks and I wouldn't trade it for anything else, I'm gonna cook it again. In terms of combat system, I still believe in it tho, and I believe I can make it more fun and exciting. I hope next time you won't feel as much frustration. I feel bad that your time with the current version wasn't a good one, but do know I appreciate it.
Jusha has got style and juice up the wazoo. I don't know how much more I can say on that. I think the art direction and the feel and weight of attacks and animations is really really well done. It feels GOOD to play. I'm assuming you're going to introduce roguelike elements eventually (that's on the branching paths after the boss fights make me think of). No doubt it's a great combination for a game and along with its artstyle the future for Jusha is bright.
You've definitely got a great knack for making boss fights. What you have is mostly solid so far, but the blacksmith feels quite bad to fight; with a tiny bit of tinkering though I think that fight could be turned into something really fun (all the ingredients are there just needs some slight changes).
Below I'll list some of the issues and criticisms I have:
-In the starting area you can dash off the table and over the steps that the red wolf is laying on and then walk around in his body. Can't go past the rocks so it's nothing too crazy but figured I'd mention it. -At one point I was able to spam execution (at least on the lizard) to keep moving the character back to the start of the execution indefinitely. It looks pretty silly. Not sure how to replicate. (Did it once more and this time was after the Q weave attack I think...) -Lizard boss seems to have two attacks where it comes up from the ground and does an AoE around it. One smaller area and one bigger. I couldn't tell if there were any identifiers for when one or the other would come out so I always just dashed really far away. Also, the second, larger AoE attack had a hitbox where I would sometimes get hit while, from my perspective, be outside of the *dust* that popped up from the shockwave (it might need the hitbox to be shrunk a little bit or have the dust expanded or be more dense so it's easier to read... not sure). -The blacksmith boss attack patterns are fine, but it's really annoying to traverse around his room when there are multiple objects to run into *and* I can't see the entire play field. This makes it easy to get locked into positions where I thought I'd be fine dodging but clip onto a small obstacle or I can't see the angle his ground smash is going to come out at as I am on the other side of the room (and am in some situations generally pushed in that direction because the AoE on his other abilities are taking up most of the other side). I think being able to see the entire field would make this boss much less annoying to fight. -At one point the game started changing to windowed mode for some reason. My game actually launched fullscreen with "windowed" default selected, but at this point I tried selecting fullscreen to stop it from auto windowing the screen. The game did go fullscreen but the resolution was off and I had a black bar at the bottom of the screen. I also accidentally checked off vsync and, not sure if that was part of why it did this, but afterwards the setting menu was bugged and always showed up on pause. I tried restarting the game to fix this but the settings were saved and I couldn't find a way to change it back (any options I tried highlighting were also offset from my cursor making it difficult to even mess with the menu). -Would be nice to have a run button or at least have your normal movement speed be *faster* than spamming the dodge. I don't like jamming on space all the time to get outside of the range of attacks (like big lizard AoE). -I wish I could press space and dodge in the direction of my cursor. Would be nice to have that be an option.
Looking forward to seeing your progress next Demo Day. Game is looking great with a lot of promise.
A fantastic game that (for now) focuses on boss fights and it sure delivers! The two available bosses brims with quality both visually and mechanically. And this dev is not afraid of challenging the player, which is great!
I grinded the blacksmith for a while due to not knowing that there was a combo system available. This will surely be more clear in future builds!
Some minor things: I feel like you should make it visually more clear when the player was hit by an attack. Sometimes I wasn't really sure. The chip of yellow on the healthbar made it even more confusing as I kept thinking that that was health I just lost.
Oh my I feel bad, yeah the combo system is the core game mechanic, yet my dumbass didn't explain it clearly enough for players. UI is indeed still rough; I'll address all those points. Thanks for playing mate.
The graphics are nice but my computer absolutely did not like running it to start with, probably something to do with realtime shader compilation or something. It calmed down after a while.
The controls feel intuitive enough, the concept of interlude attacks is really fun and I like that it rewards you for doing your "rotation" properly. That being said, i'm not sure it's for everyone and I feel like it will add another layer of frustration on an already frustrating genre, but it does feel good once you get the hang of it.
This is the paragraph where I rant about the dash. It's my personal opinion, but I can't stand on-demand infinite dashes in action indie games. Dashes like that severely limit your design space when designing combat encounters. Everything just becomes "dash out of the thing" and it turns development into a nightmare. You can't telegraph something for too long because the player has this funny button that they can use to get out of it, so you make the telegraphs shorter, but then combat becomes way too frenetic. If you leave the dash the way it is currently then this is honestly the biggest hurdle you will face in the development of your game.
When killing blacksmith I was holding down M1 to do the 'finisher' and it kept resetting until I let go, but that was the only major bug I found, everything else went fine.
I had fun. It's really cool and I want to see a lot more of it. There's lots of paths you could take like just being a boss rush mode or maybe having exploration-connected sections without enemies a la SotC just for fun. Great entry.
Thank you for giving the game your time and the detailed feedbacks.
I'll think about the dash.
I'm glad you enjoyed the rotation type of the combo system, as that will likely there to stay, as I think I could make it really good. I just need to guide the player better and adjust the frustrating level of the enemies. What I want is to give player the feeling of agency when doing cool stuffs (right now it's not that cool yet haha).
The settings menu doesn't work, windowed puts the game into full screen.
It needs music and what I'm guessing is roguelike elements. The game also needs better telegraphing with more of a delay between attacks. The second boss feels almost instant with his attacks outside his first slam.
Keep in mind to take more from Bloodborne instead of Dark Souls in terms of player allowed aggression, aka allowing the player to be aggressive instead of defensive with only attacking during weak points.
Thanks for playing mate, the blacksmith definitely is a bit overtuned from what I saw, it's kinda a blind spot for me, as I get too used to playing the game haha. I hope you had a good time with it.
I love the character and boss designs! atmosphere is very fitting and consistent. The execution animations are really cool. I think my feedback matches what others have already said
Don't know if this is an unreal thing, it prompted me to update my drivers but worked as is.
Similar opinion with the mouse for aiming, although I don't know if you have plans to use it in future mechanics.
I'm pretty bad at these games but I do think the restart adds tension. however current implementation means it's better to just run off to the side and restart whenever you're approaching low health, rather than risk dying.
If you dodge while restarting it keeps playing the animation i think? but cancels the restart
Not related, but your game's girl is so god-damn cute.
Thanks for giving it a shot, even tho it's not your forte. Yeah, I will work on the mouse aiming thing and scrape the restart idea and think of something better.
Cool game. I like how the giant skinless beast's eyes follow you around the room. Is that the eponymous Jusha?
Anyhow, the Souls games have already conditioned me into slaying monsters on behalf of mysterious female handlers so the premise works for me. I think you can afford to put a few more words on screen at a time. Also, you don't want to move the text around so much.
The gameplay is pretty good already, but right from the start I noticed how the player character attacks towards the mouse cursor, but dashes in the direction that the player character is looking at. This should be consistent.
The animations look really good but I would like to see more feedback for when the player gets hurt.
At first I thought that the best way to play was to spam basic attacks but after a little practice I was able to mix special attacks into the mix as well. This is a great sign for an action game.
Nevertheless, I don't understand why restarting is a special power with a setup time nor why you've got to fight the lizard again if you die at the blacksmith. This could work if say, the lizard and the blacksmith were 2 phases of the same boss fight but they feel too thematically disconnected for that and you heal between fights anyway.
Maybe make it a risk vs reward thing. Beating all bosses without restarting could have a secret reward attached to it or grant the player a score multiplier or a completion mark that's reset if they use a checkpoint.
About the lizard fight, it probably needs some kind of intro animation because it starts attacking the instant the player spawns.
About the the blacksmith fight, I think his ai broke a little bit a couple of times. He starts walking back and forth near the lower left corner and ignores the player until you get close to him again. I like how he has a sword but chooses to defend himself with his trusty hammer for the most part.
Finally, a minor issue I encountered was that the level is partially visible when it finished loading but before the fade in transition animation plays. That's probably an easy fix.
Great job, finished in 23 min. Looks good and I like the animations. Player animation transitions could be a bit better.
Some player attack FX did not show up til I died once.
Dialogue text is hard to read while its being printed, it should be left aligned so it doesn't move while it's being printed.
The lizard's digging ground attack sometimes hurts you outside of the dust cloud AoE, shouldn't happen.
Character doesn't always turn towards where you click and attack. Probably should.
The "ultimate" attack doesn't really feel worth doing.
Hard to tell when you get hit, needs some more sort of feedback.
I am wondering if playing the same boss when restarting every time would get dull quick, I guess you could always have multiple different ones that can spawn or something.
Bosses need slightly more attacks I think, or movement options. Seems pretty easy to cheese them into using the same attacks.
The character's different attacks aren't all that interesting. Spamming at random seems good enough right now.
When loading an image of the level pops up for a few frames before the loading screen.
You can animation cancel with dodge if you press it right after an attack. Should probably not be possible.
I think the combat right now is a bit too "hit-n-run"y, seems like the best strategy is to dodge in attack once and dodge out. The character moves so slowly, using the dodge is faster and without a cooldown so I was pretty much hammering space the entire time.
Thanks a lot for giving my game a shot and giving it feedbacks. May I know your CPU and GPU specs if you don't mind?
> The "ultimate" attack doesn't really feel worth doing.
I didn't provide enough info on the combo system, the idea is the weaves you do build up buffs so that when you execute the ultimate it would have a very big number.
> You can animation cancel with dodge if you press it right after an attack. Should probably not be possible.
This is intentional.
I'll address all other points, thanks a lot for the feedbacks, truly.
Isometric dark souls. Visuals are nice, enemy design is wonderful. If you have not played Titan Souls you should for inspiration. Had a bit of a hard time with the weave system and no estus-flasks... May be bit of a wasted opportunity to keep this as a boss rush and not just go full exploration, power ups and a bit of loot etc.
>May be bit of a wasted opportunity to keep this as a boss rush and not just go full exploration Yeah, I'm thinking HARD about this. Thanks for playing mate!
I think what little you have here is pretty engaging, but starting over from the beginning is definitely a pain point that just kills my mood to retry the harder second fight. The lizard boss has 2 burrow-underground-fuck-everyone attacks, but they both share the same animation despite the other one having a much larger radius, if you could make sure each variant has a clear tell, that would go a long way for sure.
I complained about the second boss and the combo system already in the Discord. Definitely looking forward to this once you spend more time working on it.
i genuinely do not understand the point of a restart button that does not work when you die, that is the only time i would actually want to restart the battle. I even decided to try it once before dying to make sure it actually worked and it does, but the implementation is baffling to say the least. i do not enjoy aiming with the mouse, if i move with wasd i expect the attacks to follow the direction i'm walking towards, it feels very jarring because the control scheme is similar to what you would expect in a twin stick shooter, except it's used for a melee action game? and in any case, even in a twin stick shooter i would expect the head and torso of the character to be rotated according to the mouse cursor direction so that i "fire" at the right spot. the streamer already mentioned how unintuitive the entire inner outer dodge mechanic is so i will not repeat it here the art is great, amazing even, characters, animations, shaders and all, but the gameplay is still pretty wonky overall
Thanks for playing mate, I'll make the control more intuitive.
The initial idea of the restart is to keep tension as the player progresses, to make the decision to try to kill the boss or restart, risk type of thing. Well, not a good idea lmao.
Forgot about the ability to restart, so I only tried 1 run. Barely killed the first boss on second attempt, got stomped by the chair man (I was too stupid and kept running into the pattern).
Basic premise is great.
Aiming at mouse cursor is weird.
Didn't grasp the combo/weaving system with the special attack.
Thanks for playing mate, your feedback is well received, I'll fix the aiming with mouse cursor.
The combo/weave system is not well explained, bottom right corner there's a button that explain the skills, the idea is the weave will boost your damage/stagger.
-I find it odd that my guy got up on his own, maybe I'm just too used to other games, they tend to make you press a button or wiggle the stick when you're collapsed in an event.
-Initial tutorial prompt is too much, hard to retain all of this at once before you even play. [later] I realize after the fact I (probably) could have noodled the controls at that point, but I assumed it was forcing me to talk with her first.
-Case in point, I forgot about the dodge immediately after the tutorial until mid way through the lizard fight.
-Surprised nothing happened when walking into the monster mouth, I assume he's the guy we're serving?
-Beat lizard guy, he felt fair for the most part but the dig attack suddenly getting an AOE range boost felt not well communicated, and arbitrary. The prompt for the navigator said to drag but I'm click n dragging the dots and it does nothing? I click the glowing dot to continue to the blacksmith.
-I wish it was communicated that the boss restart was a timed ability that leaves you open, I assumed it was a debug hotkey so I didn't have to beat the lizard over and over (boring). Depending on how long these boss rush segments are, maybe a life system / checkpoint would be better than per boss resets, so it feels less bad to die outright.
-As for the blacksmith fight, it's OK so far, but I feel the attacks are less obvious than the lizard. The fact that one attack does a screen wide cross shaped floor attack kept throwing me for a loop due to how understated it is.
-Gameplay in general is alright, decent fun but it feels very repetitive since I just do q q q, then q e when I want the power slash. Since the weaves aren't combinatoric, adding a third one might be fine? Since you don't have items that feels like the direction you would go as a player, unless you can switch out your weave selection with a button, like equip sets. Also, random critical procs in a boss rush seems kind of antithetical to the genre, unless you plan on adding classes where it's all about that, like an Assassin?
-Opening the skill menu, I now see that the slash weave actually give a big stat boost, not obvious at all. Should be an icon around the character or the healthbar. Ohhh, it's denoted by those pips by the top left I think. Not intuitive, looks too much like the special gauge it's next too (one of them is the same color).
-Having obstacles in the blacksmith fight is slightly aggravating, but I assume it's like that on purpose.
-Bug: he did the donut attack by jumping into the right side wall corner, but the visual wasn't there then suddenly it flashed. Bit weird.
-So I tried like 8+ times but eventually real died twice to the blacksmith, I give up.
Not sure where this is going, keep up the good work.
- Yeah I will redesign the format of the boss rush as a whole, dying and restarting from the start is a bit too frustrating. Initially, the idea of the restart boss feature is to keep the tension. Bad idea.
- The combo system is likely to stay, I'll add more complexity and more things the player can do, the idea is there will be upgrades that you can customize the combo and weave to have special unique effects.
- UI will be revamped, it is indeed shitty.
- Tutorial flow is shit also, I agree.
I feel bad that you didn't have a good time, but I truly appreciate the feedbacks, thank you mate! Hope you give another try next time I revamp these things.
I may have come off wrong, it's fine for where it's at, and I had fun with that mindset of playing an early game. But yes, there's plenty of things that could be done to make it better. Good luck with it!
Combat feels great, only complaint is the mouse point is a little weird, either having a mouse icon or an in-game effect to show where you are aiming would be nice.
Boss design is peak. Feels really good and well made. art design is also really well done.
Controller support would be nice. I agree with the other guy in you should have performing the execution an option instead of automatically. Sound design also is nice for what's currently in the game.
Massive GMI energy. Just add controller support or make the mouse-aim a little better. those are my only "real" complaints.
Yeah the mouse targeting will be worked on to be more intuitive and more clear, bigger for big monitor too, thanks for playing mate, I'm glad you enjoyed it! I'll also make the execution to feel more "in control".
Forcing the player to restart from the beginning if they die is annoying and cringe, having to manually restart the fight with a long animation while alive is a terrible workaround because it robs the player of close calls since it's better to restart the fight than to risk having to go back from the beginning and fight the lizard again.
The combat itself is cool, I think it's a bad idea to have one single move that boost damage because it kind of stifles combo potentials if you want to keep the damage boost on at all time but other than that it's satisfying. I wish you could cancel the backswing animations by dodging or moving.
I just tried the demo! It's looking very promising! I barely literally defeated the first boss with just 1 HP lol, the 2nd boss got me good tho, I tried. Very nice stuff. For feedback I do feel like the dodge mechanic tends to be the main way to move around, as a player you just end up spamming it for everything. I don't know if that is a bad thing to be honest, balancing it out with a stamina mechanic could be an option but of course it also depends on your goals. Attacking towards the mouse cursor was also something that got confusing sometimes, maybe auto-locking on the enemy depending in the proximity could work? Overall very nice work!
Goddamn, the visuals are great. Only feedback on visuals would be to figure out some way to hide blocking objects in the foreground, like if you move all the way to the left in the initial area.
You can bring up the navigator in said area but it doesn't seem to do anything.
I think I found two separate bugs with the 2nd E attack. First time, the swing particles appear once on both the character and offset away, like two separate swings. Secondly, I had respawned in the initial area and after some time was unable to perform it. I could do every other combo attack but not the LMB->LMB->E attack. I know I had the timing down since I was able to perform it during combats just fine.
While the visuals are awesome, the audio still needs work. Nothing to point out here except that more would be better.
The tracking on the lizard's double head slam is INSANE. Hitman homing briefcase levels of BULLSHIT.
Definitely needs some sort of feedback for the player on being hit or hurt.
Small thing- initially I thought you were supposed to crawl into the dragon's mouth to move forward, and was surprised that I could just walk all the way up in there. Just throwing that out there...
It felt odd randomly being teleported to the corpses to perform the execution. I think modern action games might have this nailed with having you press a specific button prompt to murder. Press F to Execute, basically.
I respect the fact that the graphics options include Windowed/Borderless/Fullscreen, but changing them didn't actually do anything as far as I can tell. The game still defaulted to showing fullscreen everytime. Didn't test if the window bar was there but offscreen. This isn't bad, as I usually have to tell people to fix their game as I have an ultrawide but your game worked fine on that resolution.
LMB->LMB->E I think I will make it clearer next time, it requires special points to execute which buildup by hitting the target (the bar is top left, the sword haha)
> First time, the swing particles appear once on both the character and offset away
Likely ultra widescreen issue, I will find a way to fix this.
Comments
Great visual artstyle, great models and animations, great designs and not so great combat.
First of all - thanks for not limiting the dodge rolls with stamina or cooldowns, that's very nice of you. But that's kinda it, unfortunately. Combat feels very repetitive, different combos don't seem to distinct visually from each other, and for me it devolved into button mashing. I dunno, I don't like clicking bosses to death to be honest - I'd love to have some abilities or something to work with.
I honestly don't know if a combo system could work in an orblike boss rush game. Bosses seem cool, and the first one is manageable - but when second boss specializes in huge AOE attacks - the last thing I want is to click him to death.
I definitely would like to play more, I do like the artstyle - I just wish the gameplay was a bit more exciting.
Hey, mate! Yeah, thanks a lot for playing. I watched your playthrough and had lots of takeaways. I sincerely appreciate the complete honest feedbacks and I wouldn't trade it for anything else, I'm gonna cook it again. In terms of combat system, I still believe in it tho, and I believe I can make it more fun and exciting. I hope next time you won't feel as much frustration. I feel bad that your time with the current version wasn't a good one, but do know I appreciate it.
Hey man, no problem, I understand that it's in development and you need feedback - that's why I'm streaming. So no worries there!
I'm eager to see what you cook up next (and looking forward to the controller support that you promised in one of the messages below)
Jusha has got style and juice up the wazoo. I don't know how much more I can say on that. I think the art direction and the feel and weight of attacks and animations is really really well done. It feels GOOD to play. I'm assuming you're going to introduce roguelike elements eventually (that's on the branching paths after the boss fights make me think of). No doubt it's a great combination for a game and along with its artstyle the future for Jusha is bright.
You've definitely got a great knack for making boss fights. What you have is mostly solid so far, but the blacksmith feels quite bad to fight; with a tiny bit of tinkering though I think that fight could be turned into something really fun (all the ingredients are there just needs some slight changes).
Below I'll list some of the issues and criticisms I have:
-In the starting area you can dash off the table and over the steps that the red wolf is laying on and then walk around in his body. Can't go past the rocks so it's nothing too crazy but figured I'd mention it.
-At one point I was able to spam execution (at least on the lizard) to keep moving the character back to the start of the execution indefinitely. It looks pretty silly. Not sure how to replicate. (Did it once more and this time was after the Q weave attack I think...)
-Lizard boss seems to have two attacks where it comes up from the ground and does an AoE around it. One smaller area and one bigger. I couldn't tell if there were any identifiers for when one or the other would come out so I always just dashed really far away. Also, the second, larger AoE attack had a hitbox where I would sometimes get hit while, from my perspective, be outside of the *dust* that popped up from the shockwave (it might need the hitbox to be shrunk a little bit or have the dust expanded or be more dense so it's easier to read... not sure).
-The blacksmith boss attack patterns are fine, but it's really annoying to traverse around his room when there are multiple objects to run into *and* I can't see the entire play field. This makes it easy to get locked into positions where I thought I'd be fine dodging but clip onto a small obstacle or I can't see the angle his ground smash is going to come out at as I am on the other side of the room (and am in some situations generally pushed in that direction because the AoE on his other abilities are taking up most of the other side). I think being able to see the entire field would make this boss much less annoying to fight.
-At one point the game started changing to windowed mode for some reason. My game actually launched fullscreen with "windowed" default selected, but at this point I tried selecting fullscreen to stop it from auto windowing the screen. The game did go fullscreen but the resolution was off and I had a black bar at the bottom of the screen. I also accidentally checked off vsync and, not sure if that was part of why it did this, but afterwards the setting menu was bugged and always showed up on pause. I tried restarting the game to fix this but the settings were saved and I couldn't find a way to change it back (any options I tried highlighting were also offset from my cursor making it difficult to even mess with the menu).
-Would be nice to have a run button or at least have your normal movement speed be *faster* than spamming the dodge. I don't like jamming on space all the time to get outside of the range of attacks (like big lizard AoE).
-I wish I could press space and dodge in the direction of my cursor. Would be nice to have that be an option.
Looking forward to seeing your progress next Demo Day. Game is looking great with a lot of promise.
Mate, thank you so much for the detailed feedbacks. I hope you had some good time with it.
I'll address all the points raised :D
A fantastic game that (for now) focuses on boss fights and it sure delivers! The two available bosses brims with quality both visually and mechanically. And this dev is not afraid of challenging the player, which is great!
I grinded the blacksmith for a while due to not knowing that there was a combo system available. This will surely be more clear in future builds!
Some minor things: I feel like you should make it visually more clear when the player was hit by an attack. Sometimes I wasn't really sure. The chip of yellow on the healthbar made it even more confusing as I kept thinking that that was health I just lost.
Oh my I feel bad, yeah the combo system is the core game mechanic, yet my dumbass didn't explain it clearly enough for players. UI is indeed still rough; I'll address all those points. Thanks for playing mate.
Neat game
The graphics are nice but my computer absolutely did not like running it to start with, probably something to do with realtime shader compilation or something. It calmed down after a while.
The controls feel intuitive enough, the concept of interlude attacks is really fun and I like that it rewards you for doing your "rotation" properly. That being said, i'm not sure it's for everyone and I feel like it will add another layer of frustration on an already frustrating genre, but it does feel good once you get the hang of it.
This is the paragraph where I rant about the dash. It's my personal opinion, but I can't stand on-demand infinite dashes in action indie games. Dashes like that severely limit your design space when designing combat encounters. Everything just becomes "dash out of the thing" and it turns development into a nightmare. You can't telegraph something for too long because the player has this funny button that they can use to get out of it, so you make the telegraphs shorter, but then combat becomes way too frenetic. If you leave the dash the way it is currently then this is honestly the biggest hurdle you will face in the development of your game.
When killing blacksmith I was holding down M1 to do the 'finisher' and it kept resetting until I let go, but that was the only major bug I found, everything else went fine.
I had fun. It's really cool and I want to see a lot more of it. There's lots of paths you could take like just being a boss rush mode or maybe having exploration-connected sections without enemies a la SotC just for fun. Great entry.
Thank you for giving the game your time and the detailed feedbacks.
I'll think about the dash.
I'm glad you enjoyed the rotation type of the combo system, as that will likely there to stay, as I think I could make it really good. I just need to guide the player better and adjust the frustrating level of the enemies. What I want is to give player the feeling of agency when doing cool stuffs (right now it's not that cool yet haha).
I'm reconsidering the whole boss rush format.
nice graphics. I wish I could use a controller though
Next update will have it! Thanks for playing mate.
The settings menu doesn't work, windowed puts the game into full screen.
It needs music and what I'm guessing is roguelike elements. The game also needs better telegraphing with more of a delay between attacks. The second boss feels almost instant with his attacks outside his first slam.
Keep in mind to take more from Bloodborne instead of Dark Souls in terms of player allowed aggression, aka allowing the player to be aggressive instead of defensive with only attacking during weak points.
It has strong potential.
Thanks for playing mate, the blacksmith definitely is a bit overtuned from what I saw, it's kinda a blind spot for me, as I get too used to playing the game haha. I hope you had a good time with it.
I did. Your game does have a good chunk of potential.
I love the character and boss designs! atmosphere is very fitting and consistent. The execution animations are really cool. I think my feedback matches what others have already said
Don't know if this is an unreal thing, it prompted me to update my drivers but worked as is.
Similar opinion with the mouse for aiming, although I don't know if you have plans to use it in future mechanics.
I'm pretty bad at these games but I do think the restart adds tension. however current implementation means it's better to just run off to the side and restart whenever you're approaching low health, rather than risk dying.
If you dodge while restarting it keeps playing the animation i think? but cancels the restart
Not related, but your game's girl is so god-damn cute.
Thanks for giving it a shot, even tho it's not your forte. Yeah, I will work on the mouse aiming thing and scrape the restart idea and think of something better.
Cool game. I like how the giant skinless beast's eyes follow you around the room. Is that the eponymous Jusha?
Anyhow, the Souls games have already conditioned me into slaying monsters on behalf of mysterious female handlers so the premise works for me. I think you can afford to put a few more words on screen at a time. Also, you don't want to move the text around so much.
The gameplay is pretty good already, but right from the start I noticed how the player character attacks towards the mouse cursor, but dashes in the direction that the player character is looking at. This should be consistent.
The animations look really good but I would like to see more feedback for when the player gets hurt.
At first I thought that the best way to play was to spam basic attacks but after a little practice I was able to mix special attacks into the mix as well. This is a great sign for an action game.
Nevertheless, I don't understand why restarting is a special power with a setup time nor why you've got to fight the lizard again if you die at the blacksmith. This could work if say, the lizard and the blacksmith were 2 phases of the same boss fight but they feel too thematically disconnected for that and you heal between fights anyway.
Maybe make it a risk vs reward thing. Beating all bosses without restarting could have a secret reward attached to it or grant the player a score multiplier or a completion mark that's reset if they use a checkpoint.
About the lizard fight, it probably needs some kind of intro animation because it starts attacking the instant the player spawns.
About the the blacksmith fight, I think his ai broke a little bit a couple of times. He starts walking back and forth near the lower left corner and ignores the player until you get close to him again. I like how he has a sword but chooses to defend himself with his trusty hammer for the most part.
Finally, a minor issue I encountered was that the level is partially visible when it finished loading but before the fade in transition animation plays. That's probably an easy fix.
Keep up the good work.
Thanks for such a detailed feedback!
The mouse aim will definitely get a revisit, it was inspired by POE2, but badly copied now that I see other people play.
> more feedback for when the player gets hurt.
Will do.
> best way to play was to spam basic attacks
I will ease the player into the system next time. It's like... a core gameplay and for some reason I didn't guide player enough :(
> restart
Yeah, will redesign the whole thing.
Thanks for your time mate, I really appreciate it.
Great job, finished in 23 min. Looks good and I like the animations. Player animation transitions could be a bit better.
Some player attack FX did not show up til I died once.
Dialogue text is hard to read while its being printed, it should be left aligned so it doesn't move while it's being printed.
The lizard's digging ground attack sometimes hurts you outside of the dust cloud AoE, shouldn't happen.
Character doesn't always turn towards where you click and attack. Probably should.
The "ultimate" attack doesn't really feel worth doing.
Hard to tell when you get hit, needs some more sort of feedback.
I am wondering if playing the same boss when restarting every time would get dull quick, I guess you could always have multiple different ones that can spawn or something.
Bosses need slightly more attacks I think, or movement options. Seems pretty easy to cheese them into using the same attacks.
The character's different attacks aren't all that interesting. Spamming at random seems good enough right now.
When loading an image of the level pops up for a few frames before the loading screen.
You can animation cancel with dodge if you press it right after an attack. Should probably not be possible.
I think the combat right now is a bit too "hit-n-run"y, seems like the best strategy is to dodge in attack once and dodge out. The character moves so slowly, using the dodge is faster and without a cooldown so I was pretty much hammering space the entire time.
Video of my last fights: https://streamable.com/jxfz2q
Thanks a lot for giving my game a shot and giving it feedbacks. May I know your CPU and GPU specs if you don't mind?
> The "ultimate" attack doesn't really feel worth doing.
I didn't provide enough info on the combo system, the idea is the weaves you do build up buffs so that when you execute the ultimate it would have a very big number.
> You can animation cancel with dodge if you press it right after an attack. Should probably not be possible.
This is intentional.
I'll address all other points, thanks a lot for the feedbacks, truly.
Sure, specs:
I tried it out on Linux with umu but it didn’t really work, the shaders freak the fuck out and I just can’t see anything.
Sorry mate, I'll package for Linux next time.
Isometric dark souls. Visuals are nice, enemy design is wonderful. If you have not played Titan Souls you should for inspiration. Had a bit of a hard time with the weave system and no estus-flasks... May be bit of a wasted opportunity to keep this as a boss rush and not just go full exploration, power ups and a bit of loot etc.
>May be bit of a wasted opportunity to keep this as a boss rush and not just go full exploration
Yeah, I'm thinking HARD about this. Thanks for playing mate!
I think what little you have here is pretty engaging, but starting over from the beginning is definitely a pain point that just kills my mood to retry the harder second fight. The lizard boss has 2 burrow-underground-fuck-everyone attacks, but they both share the same animation despite the other one having a much larger radius, if you could make sure each variant has a clear tell, that would go a long way for sure.
I complained about the second boss and the combo system already in the Discord. Definitely looking forward to this once you spend more time working on it.
Yeah retrying from the start is not a great idea, feedback well received, thanks for playing mate.
i genuinely do not understand the point of a restart button that does not work when you die, that is the only time i would actually want to restart the battle. I even decided to try it once before dying to make sure it actually worked and it does, but the implementation is baffling to say the least.
i do not enjoy aiming with the mouse, if i move with wasd i expect the attacks to follow the direction i'm walking towards, it feels very jarring because the control scheme is similar to what you would expect in a twin stick shooter, except it's used for a melee action game? and in any case, even in a twin stick shooter i would expect the head and torso of the character to be rotated according to the mouse cursor direction so that i "fire" at the right spot.
the streamer already mentioned how unintuitive the entire inner outer dodge mechanic is so i will not repeat it here
the art is great, amazing even, characters, animations, shaders and all, but the gameplay is still pretty wonky overall
Thanks for playing mate, I'll make the control more intuitive.
The initial idea of the restart is to keep tension as the player progresses, to make the decision to try to kill the boss or restart, risk type of thing. Well, not a good idea lmao.
Forgot about the ability to restart, so I only tried 1 run. Barely killed the first boss on second attempt, got stomped by the chair man (I was too stupid and kept running into the pattern).
Basic premise is great.
Aiming at mouse cursor is weird.
Didn't grasp the combo/weaving system with the special attack.
Not sure what feedback you're looking for.
Thanks for playing mate, your feedback is well received, I'll fix the aiming with mouse cursor.
The combo/weave system is not well explained, bottom right corner there's a button that explain the skills, the idea is the weave will boost your damage/stagger.
-I find it odd that my guy got up on his own, maybe I'm just too used to other games, they tend to make you press a button or wiggle the stick when you're collapsed in an event.
-Initial tutorial prompt is too much, hard to retain all of this at once before you even play. [later] I realize after the fact I (probably) could have noodled the controls at that point, but I assumed it was forcing me to talk with her first.
-Case in point, I forgot about the dodge immediately after the tutorial until mid way through the lizard fight.
-Surprised nothing happened when walking into the monster mouth, I assume he's the guy we're serving?
-Beat lizard guy, he felt fair for the most part but the dig attack suddenly getting an AOE range boost felt not well communicated, and arbitrary. The prompt for the navigator said to drag but I'm click n dragging the dots and it does nothing? I click the glowing dot to continue to the blacksmith.
-I wish it was communicated that the boss restart was a timed ability that leaves you open, I assumed it was a debug hotkey so I didn't have to beat the lizard over and over (boring). Depending on how long these boss rush segments are, maybe a life system / checkpoint would be better than per boss resets, so it feels less bad to die outright.
-As for the blacksmith fight, it's OK so far, but I feel the attacks are less obvious than the lizard. The fact that one attack does a screen wide cross shaped floor attack kept throwing me for a loop due to how understated it is.
-Gameplay in general is alright, decent fun but it feels very repetitive since I just do q q q, then q e when I want the power slash. Since the weaves aren't combinatoric, adding a third one might be fine? Since you don't have items that feels like the direction you would go as a player, unless you can switch out your weave selection with a button, like equip sets. Also, random critical procs in a boss rush seems kind of antithetical to the genre, unless you plan on adding classes where it's all about that, like an Assassin?
-Opening the skill menu, I now see that the slash weave actually give a big stat boost, not obvious at all. Should be an icon around the character or the healthbar. Ohhh, it's denoted by those pips by the top left I think. Not intuitive, looks too much like the special gauge it's next too (one of them is the same color).
-Having obstacles in the blacksmith fight is slightly aggravating, but I assume it's like that on purpose.
-Bug: he did the donut attack by jumping into the right side wall corner, but the visual wasn't there then suddenly it flashed. Bit weird.
-So I tried like 8+ times but eventually real died twice to the blacksmith, I give up.
Not sure where this is going, keep up the good work.
Thank you for all the detailed feedbacks!
- Yeah I will redesign the format of the boss rush as a whole, dying and restarting from the start is a bit too frustrating. Initially, the idea of the restart boss feature is to keep the tension. Bad idea.
- The combo system is likely to stay, I'll add more complexity and more things the player can do, the idea is there will be upgrades that you can customize the combo and weave to have special unique effects.
- UI will be revamped, it is indeed shitty.
- Tutorial flow is shit also, I agree.
I feel bad that you didn't have a good time, but I truly appreciate the feedbacks, thank you mate! Hope you give another try next time I revamp these things.
> I feel bad that you didn't have a good time
I may have come off wrong, it's fine for where it's at, and I had fun with that mindset of playing an early game. But yes, there's plenty of things that could be done to make it better. Good luck with it!
Succesfully make it work using ndvka package
-Because of the massive amount of weird graphic bug coming from wine, not sure I played as I should
-Need a way to rebind key, I couldn't use combo (I think) with my french keyboard
-Lot of UI problem
-see the video for more info
Keep on deving.
Thanks dude! Linux package next time haha, sorry you have to go through that terrible framerate.
Combat feels great, only complaint is the mouse point is a little weird, either having a mouse icon or an in-game effect to show where you are aiming would be nice.
Boss design is peak. Feels really good and well made. art design is also really well done.
Controller support would be nice. I agree with the other guy in you should have performing the execution an option instead of automatically. Sound design also is nice for what's currently in the game.
Massive GMI energy. Just add controller support or make the mouse-aim a little better. those are my only "real" complaints.
Yeah the mouse targeting will be worked on to be more intuitive and more clear, bigger for big monitor too, thanks for playing mate, I'm glad you enjoyed it! I'll also make the execution to feel more "in control".
Forcing the player to restart from the beginning if they die is annoying and cringe, having to manually restart the fight with a long animation while alive is a terrible workaround because it robs the player of close calls since it's better to restart the fight than to risk having to go back from the beginning and fight the lizard again.
The combat itself is cool, I think it's a bad idea to have one single move that boost damage because it kind of stifles combo potentials if you want to keep the damage boost on at all time but other than that it's satisfying.
I wish you could cancel the backswing animations by dodging or moving.
I'll redesign the format itself, thanks for the feedback, mate.
Great that you enjoy the combat :D
Dodging should cancel all the animations including midswing, may I know which backswing are you talking about?
Sorry, I meant that it would be nice if you could cancel the backswing by walking without having to dodge
I just tried the demo! It's looking very promising! I barely literally defeated the first boss with just 1 HP lol, the 2nd boss got me good tho, I tried. Very nice stuff. For feedback I do feel like the dodge mechanic tends to be the main way to move around, as a player you just end up spamming it for everything. I don't know if that is a bad thing to be honest, balancing it out with a stamina mechanic could be an option but of course it also depends on your goals. Attacking towards the mouse cursor was also something that got confusing sometimes, maybe auto-locking on the enemy depending in the proximity could work? Overall very nice work!
Yeah I'll revise the mouse targeting to be more intuitive.
Thanks for playing and the feedbacks!
Thanks for your feedbacks mate!
LMB->LMB->E I think I will make it clearer next time, it requires special points to execute which buildup by hitting the target (the bar is top left, the sword haha)
> First time, the swing particles appear once on both the character and offset away
Likely ultra widescreen issue, I will find a way to fix this.
I'll work on all the points, thanks!