Feels great to move around and the art style is gorgeous. Everything feels very polished and professional. Beat the first three levels. Played on normal and again for a bit on the hardest difficulty. Load times are almost instantaneous and everything feels super snappy. I took a few notes while playing.
+Would be nice if stealth melee one-shot the grunts. Having to hit them twice felt awkward. The tutorial says the spike deals more damage while moving but it was pretty inconsistent in my experience. Hit detection was also a little wonky so a larger hitbox could help there.
+I got really stuck on the second level. There's a light on a ledge nearby the bridge you need to drop down. This had me convinced that I needed to platform across the trees to get there, and it had me feeling like DSP as I tried and failed to do so. I probably would not have found the switch if not for the comment here mentioning the same issue. Putting the switch up there next to the light and putting a secret in the old location would probably smooth things over.
+ The SMG is pinpoint accurate which makes dealing with the recoil a little finicky, since being one pixel off causes you to miss your target. Adding a little dynamic bullet spread and upping the damage might improve how the gun feels.
+I spent a lot of time keyhunting in the third level. Having a button to press that shows all the key and door locations through walls would cut down the friction for players who hate this sort of thing by 99%. I think this would prevent people from getting frustrated and ragequitting without taking anything away from the overall experience. That being said, I'm particularly challenged when it comes to this sort of thing and it could betray what you're going for to add a hack like this.
+I appreciate how the human enemies aren't pinpoint accurate. They honestly seem a little *too* inaccurate as they weren't ever hitting me from further than point blank range.
+Not sure if this is a bug, but on the hardest difficulty drones seem to spam a ton of grenades to the point the sound effects start overlapping. If this is a joke for the hardest difficulty it was very funny.
Thanks for your feedback! It’s getting very close, I’ll be taking down this dev build soon and replacing it with the cut-down Steam Demo so you picked a good time to try it.
Would be nice if stealth melee one-shot the grunts
It’s all down to timing, the strike has to connect before you physically run into them.
Hit detection was also a little wonky
Sometimes obvious hits will occasionally miss so I don’t think it’s the hitbox, but I’ve had a very hard time catching this.
I got really stuck on the second level. There’s a light on a ledge nearby the bridge you need to drop down.
I don’t want to remove this light because then it’d be too hard to see the grunt up there, but I can put another light on the ledge you need to climb to get to the switch so it’s more obvious.
might improve how the gun feels
The SMG is intended as a backup weapon and I am intentionally avoiding anything that could make it a workhorse.
Having a button to press that shows all the key and door locations through walls
Oh hell no
They honestly seem a little too inaccurate
As long as you’re strafing, I’m trying to replicate the role of the hitscanners in Doom which can’t hit the side of a barn if you only move laterally in relation to them.
If this is a joke for the hardest difficulty it was very funny.
It wasn’t necessarily meant as a joke, but I’ll take it.
Going into Ctesiphon I was expecting a lot more of an emphasis on sneaking. The title screen was going for that Metal Gear look and the main character's forehead bandana gave off stealth vibes. With how fast I was I pretty quickly threw that notion away.
The game has a simple artstyle, but it's kept cohesive throughout all the levels I played. I think you did a great job with that and nothing feels out of place. Really enjoyed the freeway/bridge in the second level with the armored vehicles parked on it. Not sure why exactly. It contrasted in a nice way against the rest of the tropical/foresty look and felt quite *cool*.
I didn't encounter any bugs at all. The whole game, including the UI, felt very solidly put together. Everything works well without issue. It feels very polished in that regard. Although not bugs per say, I encountered a few things below I'll leave as critiques:
-In the first level I jumped into the water somewhere and had a difficult/long time finding my way back to somewhere where I could get on land again. Unless I missed something it doesn't seem like you can *jump* out of the water? Would be nice to have that. -Going in for a kill with the spike at one point (had no ammo in any other guns) and after picking up a gun it automatically switched to it; nearly killed me :( -Jumping and crouching in the air kills my momentum a bit and it doesn't feel intuitive. For being faster paced game I kept naturally jumping and holding crouch to try to extend my jump, but I had to remind myself to jump without crouching to get further instead.
It's not exactly my type of game, but I know others would enjoy it and it feels nearly like a competent complete game I'd find on Steam. I don't know what else you need to do before it's complete, but I'm rooting for your success when you eventually release the game!
(Oh also the music was pretty good, too. The second level's music, for better or for worse, was extremely comfortable and nearly put me to sleep in the middle of blasting.)
Going into Ctesiphon I was expecting a lot more of an emphasis on sneaking.
The temptation to make an immersive sim continues to haunt me…
In all seriousness though, I do actually intend on adding light stealth mechanics in that I’m going to make spotting more gradual as it’s currently completely binary. I’ve wanted to do that for a long time now and just didn’t get around to it.
The title screen was going for that Metal Gear look
I haven’t thought about this in a while, I do want to redo the title screen background as it’s still a placeholder from many years ago. Going to try and ape Vanquish instead to imply a little more SPEED.
The game has a simple artstyle, but it’s kept cohesive
Very deliberate. I’ve stuck to a specific workflow have intentionally not experimented much. I’m getting sick of it though and really looking forward to branching out with whatever I do next.
In the first level I jumped into the water somewhere and had a difficult/long time finding my way back to somewhere where I could get on land again. Unless I missed something it doesn’t seem like you can jump out of the water? Would be nice to have that.
No there is no jump out. You can crouch while approaching to sort of “mantle” onto a slightly higher ledge, but I made a point of making ledges low enough that you shouldn’t need to, it should be enough to move towards a ledge and you’ll step onto it.
That level is due for a big overhaul soon as I’m going to be putting together the demo for Next Fest, and particularly the first little island has a bunch of places where there aren’t nearly as many ways out as there should be.
Going in for a kill with the spike at one point (had no ammo in any other guns) and after picking up a gun it automatically switched to it; nearly killed me :(
There is an option under Settings/Game Options to disable Auto-Switch. I originally didn’t have it but then people complained about having to switch to new weapons. I do get a lot of complaints about how it switches to weapons that you already have though, I might just remove that part.
Jumping and crouching in the air kills my momentum a bit and it doesn’t feel intuitive. For being faster paced game I kept naturally jumping and holding crouch to try to extend my jump, but I had to remind myself to jump without crouching to get further instead.
This isn’t intentional, crouch is supposed to make you move at walk speed but only on solid ground and I’ve only been checking for if you’re underwater. That said crouch doesn’t really extend your jump, just that crouching in mid-air causes your collider to shrink upwards instead of downwards which raises your step height.
Oh also the music was pretty good, too
All credit to SystemST91 and fellow agdger JensVide!
I don’t know what else you need to do before it’s complete
Well the plan is another level, a boss fight, a couple more portraits, a bunch of level design polish and dialog lines, and some missing essentials like controller support and exclusive fullscreen. I don’t know if that will be enough but that’s what I’m doing.
large parts of the level seem to completely lack illumination. also, the death scream of the main character continues even while restarting the game which is kind of weird
This one used to be more linear but there’s an important switch you can miss so I added a loopback and now that means it’s possible to go in circles without progressing.
i cant get past the advertisements level because rockets keep falling on my head and oneshotting me and i dont want to be a noob and use saves or lower the difficulty from abandon all hope and i spawn in with no shotgun boolet so i have to resort to stabbing the big mech man for 10 mins (maybe im supposed to go in the river but that always got me nuked)
bit cringe to automatically switch to the SMG if i pick up ammo for it when im in the middle of using the shotgun
bit cringe to let me switch to a gun that's out of ammo and then when i try and shoot it in the heat of battle it just uses my only railgun shot instead
ui/hud good, level design and texures good, epic game (pls add checkpoints so i dont have to feel like a scumf#$% pressing the save button)
Every level should be beatable even from naked but often on Hard or Harder you’ll have to know where some of the secrets are and run past some enemies until you can grab a more powerful weapon.
bit cringe
Once upon a time I didn’t have auto-switch at all because I think it’s lame, but there is an option to turn it off in Settings/Gameplay which I always use.
pls add checkpoints
The open plan levels make checkpoints really difficult to add without sometimes getting those annoying instant death loops, quicksaves were meant to be the compromise.
Tried the new map with the level selector but it crashes whenever I try to save. Also this harsh shadow seems unintentional since it also hides enemies in that one obscured part, not sure if it's related. Saving on the other maps works fine.
Tried the new map with the level selector but it crashes whenever I try to save
I just tried saving and it crashed for me too. I’m a little busy tonight but I should be able to fix that soon. EDIT: It looks like I exceeded my limit on point lights, just had to bump it up and now saving should work fine. I also put in a safeguard to prevent it overflowing in the future.
Also this harsh shadow seems unintentional
It is definitely unintentional, and its weird how it’s clipping certain parts off. That has to be a shader problem but I don’t know if I’ll be able to recreate it on my own setup. Does it do that on every map or just the new one?
I loaded a couple of maps through the level selector and it seems that dark shadow is only in the new one, it might be related to the point light issues.
I think you might be right actually, does it still happen with the hotfix?
Because I had a bad bounds check in the map loading code which was writing into the memory immediately after the pointlight array. A pointlight is a pretty big struct so it definitely could have written all the way into the fog settings (it was also overwriting the number of point lights which was why the game was crashing when saving because it was trying to serialize a brazillion lights and hit an invalid memory location)
I’ve now fixed the bounds check but because I bumped the light limit already I won’t both uploading another hotfix unless I need another fix for this fog issue. If it’s not this bad bounds check then it’s probably going to be something to do with the fog maths in the shader, but if you’re not getting this problem on map 5 then I’m pretty sure it is actually from the point lights.
For those trying out just the new map (Comm Station), I’d recommend doing the map before it first (Multiport) just to stock up on ammo. Otherwise the map plays quite differently with you not having enough ammo to deal with all the mechs until you find the Jetgun.
Also, the way I’ve done saves can mess up existing ones every time you play a newer build of a map. I’m going to add a checksum check to warn you about this, but generally end-of-level saves/autosaves will be safe enough as the bugs won’t matter if you’re advancing to the next map anyway.
It was all a happy accident, I just always made a point to keep circle-strafing and poking viable.
a bit stingy on ammo I feel.
This has been a difficult tight-rope to balance, I design around the existence of the regular grunts being an effectively infinite pool of SMG ammo and then try to have most ammo pickups emphasize the “mid” weapons like the shotgun and plasmagun. Easy is also more generous and Hard even more stingy.
I like some of the enemy placements haha got jumpscare a few times.
I sometimes forget some of them myself, I’m really happy with how much I’ve managed to do this, lol.
One thing i forgot to add, as the game has quite a few platforms to jump, might be good to consider a grace collision/period so the jump feels nicer, I got used to it, but I think it's a nice thing to have.
Ignore the “price”. Every download is flagged as a demo so you can’t actually buy the game anyway.
The new level is more polished than most first drafts I’ve done but it’s still not quite complete.
There is a bug on the new level where one of the mechs will just spot you immediately from across the map. It can’t actually hit you from where it is so it’s probably not a big deal but it can be a bit surprising.
Comments
Feels great to move around and the art style is gorgeous. Everything feels very polished and professional. Beat the first three levels. Played on normal and again for a bit on the hardest difficulty. Load times are almost instantaneous and everything feels super snappy. I took a few notes while playing.
+Would be nice if stealth melee one-shot the grunts. Having to hit them twice felt awkward. The tutorial says the spike deals more damage while moving but it was pretty inconsistent in my experience. Hit detection was also a little wonky so a larger hitbox could help there.
+I got really stuck on the second level. There's a light on a ledge nearby the bridge you need to drop down. This had me convinced that I needed to platform across the trees to get there, and it had me feeling like DSP as I tried and failed to do so. I probably would not have found the switch if not for the comment here mentioning the same issue. Putting the switch up there next to the light and putting a secret in the old location would probably smooth things over.
+ The SMG is pinpoint accurate which makes dealing with the recoil a little finicky, since being one pixel off causes you to miss your target. Adding a little dynamic bullet spread and upping the damage might improve how the gun feels.
+I spent a lot of time keyhunting in the third level. Having a button to press that shows all the key and door locations through walls would cut down the friction for players who hate this sort of thing by 99%. I think this would prevent people from getting frustrated and ragequitting without taking anything away from the overall experience. That being said, I'm particularly challenged when it comes to this sort of thing and it could betray what you're going for to add a hack like this.
+I appreciate how the human enemies aren't pinpoint accurate. They honestly seem a little *too* inaccurate as they weren't ever hitting me from further than point blank range.
+Not sure if this is a bug, but on the hardest difficulty drones seem to spam a ton of grenades to the point the sound effects start overlapping. If this is a joke for the hardest difficulty it was very funny.
Thanks for your feedback! It’s getting very close, I’ll be taking down this dev build soon and replacing it with the cut-down Steam Demo so you picked a good time to try it.
It’s all down to timing, the strike has to connect before you physically run into them.
Sometimes obvious hits will occasionally miss so I don’t think it’s the hitbox, but I’ve had a very hard time catching this.
I don’t want to remove this light because then it’d be too hard to see the grunt up there, but I can put another light on the ledge you need to climb to get to the switch so it’s more obvious.
The SMG is intended as a backup weapon and I am intentionally avoiding anything that could make it a workhorse.
Oh hell no
As long as you’re strafing, I’m trying to replicate the role of the hitscanners in Doom which can’t hit the side of a barn if you only move laterally in relation to them.
It wasn’t necessarily meant as a joke, but I’ll take it.
Going into Ctesiphon I was expecting a lot more of an emphasis on sneaking. The title screen was going for that Metal Gear look and the main character's forehead bandana gave off stealth vibes. With how fast I was I pretty quickly threw that notion away.
The game has a simple artstyle, but it's kept cohesive throughout all the levels I played. I think you did a great job with that and nothing feels out of place. Really enjoyed the freeway/bridge in the second level with the armored vehicles parked on it. Not sure why exactly. It contrasted in a nice way against the rest of the tropical/foresty look and felt quite *cool*.
I didn't encounter any bugs at all. The whole game, including the UI, felt very solidly put together. Everything works well without issue. It feels very polished in that regard. Although not bugs per say, I encountered a few things below I'll leave as critiques:
-In the first level I jumped into the water somewhere and had a difficult/long time finding my way back to somewhere where I could get on land again. Unless I missed something it doesn't seem like you can *jump* out of the water? Would be nice to have that.
-Going in for a kill with the spike at one point (had no ammo in any other guns) and after picking up a gun it automatically switched to it; nearly killed me :(
-Jumping and crouching in the air kills my momentum a bit and it doesn't feel intuitive. For being faster paced game I kept naturally jumping and holding crouch to try to extend my jump, but I had to remind myself to jump without crouching to get further instead.
It's not exactly my type of game, but I know others would enjoy it and it feels nearly like a competent complete game I'd find on Steam. I don't know what else you need to do before it's complete, but I'm rooting for your success when you eventually release the game!
(Oh also the music was pretty good, too. The second level's music, for better or for worse, was extremely comfortable and nearly put me to sleep in the middle of blasting.)
The temptation to make an immersive sim continues to haunt me…
In all seriousness though, I do actually intend on adding light stealth mechanics in that I’m going to make spotting more gradual as it’s currently completely binary. I’ve wanted to do that for a long time now and just didn’t get around to it.
I haven’t thought about this in a while, I do want to redo the title screen background as it’s still a placeholder from many years ago. Going to try and ape Vanquish instead to imply a little more SPEED.
Very deliberate. I’ve stuck to a specific workflow have intentionally not experimented much. I’m getting sick of it though and really looking forward to branching out with whatever I do next.
No there is no jump out. You can crouch while approaching to sort of “mantle” onto a slightly higher ledge, but I made a point of making ledges low enough that you shouldn’t need to, it should be enough to move towards a ledge and you’ll step onto it.
That level is due for a big overhaul soon as I’m going to be putting together the demo for Next Fest, and particularly the first little island has a bunch of places where there aren’t nearly as many ways out as there should be.
There is an option under Settings/Game Options to disable Auto-Switch. I originally didn’t have it but then people complained about having to switch to new weapons. I do get a lot of complaints about how it switches to weapons that you already have though, I might just remove that part.
This isn’t intentional, crouch is supposed to make you move at walk speed but only on solid ground and I’ve only been checking for if you’re underwater. That said crouch doesn’t really extend your jump, just that crouching in mid-air causes your collider to shrink upwards instead of downwards which raises your step height.
All credit to SystemST91 and fellow agdger JensVide!
Well the plan is another level, a boss fight, a couple more portraits, a bunch of level design polish and dialog lines, and some missing essentials like controller support and exclusive fullscreen. I don’t know if that will be enough but that’s what I’m doing.
large parts of the level seem to completely lack illumination.
also, the death scream of the main character continues even while restarting the game which is kind of weird
This is a really tough one to track down, are you definitely using the hotfix build?
Yeah lol, the audio system is very fire and forget so I didn’t add any way to halt sounds in progress.
the hotfix seems to fix the lighting issue!
Oh thank god, everything still makes sense
This game is awesome. I have nothing else to say, will continue playing later. I'm stuck at the second stage but it feels like a full game already
Aw shucks
This one used to be more linear but there’s an important switch you can miss so I added a loopback and now that means it’s possible to go in circles without progressing.
Oh glad to know that it wasn't just me being stupid
i cant get past the advertisements level because rockets keep falling on my head and oneshotting me and i dont want to be a noob and use saves or lower the difficulty from abandon all hope and i spawn in with no shotgun boolet so i have to resort to stabbing the big mech man for 10 mins (maybe im supposed to go in the river but that always got me nuked)
Thanks for playing, glad to hear you liked it!
Every level should be beatable even from naked but often on Hard or Harder you’ll have to know where some of the secrets are and run past some enemies until you can grab a more powerful weapon.
Once upon a time I didn’t have auto-switch at all because I think it’s lame, but there is an option to turn it off in Settings/Gameplay which I always use.
The open plan levels make checkpoints really difficult to add without sometimes getting those annoying instant death loops, quicksaves were meant to be the compromise.
Tried the new map with the level selector but it crashes whenever I try to save. Also this harsh shadow seems unintentional since it also hides enemies in that one obscured part, not sure if it's related. Saving on the other maps works fine.
I just tried saving and it crashed for me too. I’m a little busy tonight but I should be able to fix that soon. EDIT: It looks like I exceeded my limit on point lights, just had to bump it up and now saving should work fine. I also put in a safeguard to prevent it overflowing in the future.
It is definitely unintentional, and its weird how it’s clipping certain parts off. That has to be a shader problem but I don’t know if I’ll be able to recreate it on my own setup. Does it do that on every map or just the new one?
I loaded a couple of maps through the level selector and it seems that dark shadow is only in the new one, it might be related to the point light issues.
I think you might be right actually, does it still happen with the hotfix?
Because I had a bad bounds check in the map loading code which was writing into the memory immediately after the pointlight array. A pointlight is a pretty big struct so it definitely could have written all the way into the fog settings (it was also overwriting the number of point lights which was why the game was crashing when saving because it was trying to serialize a brazillion lights and hit an invalid memory location)
I’ve now fixed the bounds check but because I bumped the light limit already I won’t both uploading another hotfix unless I need another fix for this fog issue. If it’s not this bad bounds check then it’s probably going to be something to do with the fog maths in the shader, but if you’re not getting this problem on map 5 then I’m pretty sure it is actually from the point lights.
Both the fog and saving issues are solved with the hotfix.
For those trying out just the new map (Comm Station), I’d recommend doing the map before it first (Multiport) just to stock up on ammo. Otherwise the map plays quite differently with you not having enough ammo to deal with all the mechs until you find the Jetgun.
Also, the way I’ve done saves can mess up existing ones every time you play a newer build of a map. I’m going to add a checksum check to warn you about this, but generally end-of-level saves/autosaves will be safe enough as the bugs won’t matter if you’re advancing to the next map anyway.
Gunfight feels good, I like the style of gunplay, a bit stingy on ammo I feel.
I occasionally feel lost on 2nd level, not sure how to fix it tho, maybe it's just me.
I like some of the enemy placements haha got jumpscare a few times.
Nicely done!
It was all a happy accident, I just always made a point to keep circle-strafing and poking viable.
This has been a difficult tight-rope to balance, I design around the existence of the regular grunts being an effectively infinite pool of SMG ammo and then try to have most ammo pickups emphasize the “mid” weapons like the shotgun and plasmagun. Easy is also more generous and Hard even more stingy.
I sometimes forget some of them myself, I’m really happy with how much I’ve managed to do this, lol.
Thank you!
One thing i forgot to add, as the game has quite a few platforms to jump, might be good to consider a grace collision/period so the jump feels nicer, I got used to it, but I think it's a nice thing to have.
The physical approach wouldn’t work, but I could do a Coyote timer a fraction of a second. Yeah alright, why not
A couple of notes: