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Hello and welcome to Feedback Quest 9! My name is Hythrain, and I'm one of the hosts for this lovely event! I'm also one of the streamers, so both the game and this feedback are being done live! If you want to see the see the VOD, let me know and I'll link you to it when it's uploaded to YouTube!

I love a good rhythm game, especially if it's doing something different. This certainly qualifies as an action game.

As requested, I won't speak on the visuals or audio in the game. I'll focus on the gameplay and the general feel. However, I need to note one thing: the font you have is a bad choice. As a bitmap font, it's very hard to read. If it was a normal font with anti-aliasing, it'd be fine. I recommend either changing it or letting the text have anti-aliasing despite the visual style you seem to be going for.

Okay, onto the stuff you want covered. The first thing I noticed was that the game tells the player incorrect controls. The game tells me to use Left trigger for dashing, but I found it was the Right trigger. It also tells me to press Up on the D-Pad to summon my mandolin, but it ended up being Left. I also wasn't sure if the commands for changing targets were working correctly, but I found the descriptions of "L2" and "L3" to be confusing. Normally, "L2" would be... Left Trigger. Y'know, the one the game said was to dash. Speaking of controls, I want to recommend adding native support for non-Xbox controllers. While having the game on Steam does mean it'll benefit from Steam's design already giving some support, what it ends up doing for something like the Nintendo Pro Controller is invert the buttons to match the letter facings rather than the directional facings. So while you designed it that the player pressing the bottom face button to jump, it becomes the right face button if I'm using a Pro Controller. Having native support means you can control this directly and ensure you can make the controllers use the correct face button you want.

My general experience is that the controls are very sluggish and floaty. It feels like the game is very slow to respond to my inputs. This is especially true with the dashes, where I can absorb a very clear delay between when I press the trigger and when the dash goes off. While the sluggish and floaty feel isn't inherently bad (as enemies are also subject to sluggish movements), I feel like the dash having such a huge delay is bad. Plus the dash is just so fast by comparison. I wonder if it'd be possible to make the game less sluggish but keep some of the floatiness.

In terms of gameplay, I'll admit I didn't get far. I did love the use of timing my button inputs to the beat to deal better attacks., though. It felt really good and somewhat relaxed. However, when I got to the point where you recommend using the hook, I found it just wasn't working. After falling into the water twice, I suddenly lost the ability to summon my mandolin. At this point, I decided to call it. While it wasn't far at all, I felt like I already had enough that you could address for your next build.

All in all, I want to see more of this. I want to see where this goes. Please keep me up to date!

I'm slow at this but here is the VOD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3O1JNKNees

Reply

Hi Hythrain,

Thanks for playing and covering another game of mine (you reviewed "Meowstery of a Growing Aurora" a year or so ago), I really appreciate it.

As far as the font goes, that's very fair, I might have gotten ahead of myself with trying to set the tone, and didn't consider how legible it is.

I'll double check the control mapping/display, and I'm sorry that I messed up which input does what (and I'll look into making the controls re-bindable, right after checking the save/load bug, which most likely caused you not being able to summon the Mandolin Stand after dying).

I've also been investigating adding non-Xbox controller support, but I've yet to fully figure it out, since UE doesn't support all controllers natively (which is bizarre to me, but I'm sure there're licencing reasons or something).

Gameplay wise, the start of the level is set to 100BPM; which is most likely why it feels very sluggish, and there being a delay between button press and an action occurring - since everything is on beat. Perhaps I should have increased the BPM after the first encounter, so that it's not 100BPM until the boss fight.

Regardless, future updates will have faster areas, so that it doesn't feel as slow as it does now (for both the Player and the enemies).

Again, thanks for trying out the demo, and giving much needed feedback.

I hope you'll give the game another shot in the future, once I've incorporated the feedback I got so far.

Ivan from Sbeve Entertainment

"Gameplay wise, the start of the level is set to 100BPM; which is most likely why it feels very sluggish, and there being a delay between button press and an action occurring - since everything is on beat. Perhaps I should have increased the BPM after the first encounter, so that it's not 100BPM until the boss fight."

I'm actually referring to when trying to press them on beat. I would press in what felt like in time but was always slightly off.