I wasn't expecting a Deus Ex clone so I skipped all the story as usual for the demos
Most of my time has been spent on the second level that has some interesting choices, I like the music as usual but enemies with no hitback or loss of aiming on hit means usually a damage trade unless you perfectly aim your headshots, I notice that there is a sound for headshots but not a bigger blood splat when an enemy is killed by it, I would suggest to exagerate a bit with the effects.
I found a bit frustrating to find small weapons on the floor that has almost the same colour of the pavement, I found slow to heal with with items on separate slots but that adds to the jank charm so I wouldn't see it as a bad thing
Overall the game sound cool, feels familiar with deus ex gunplay but at the moment the map is too monochromatic and I understand that would be the design but I found a bit boring to watch after a while.
Overall my impression is good, I had fun but I rage quitted cause the demo was quite hard
Play kusoge
Kuromagi Jam's itch.io pageComments
Ouch, some of those deaths looked like wall punchers. I wanted to add a difficulty select that would make enemy reactions slower and get rid of their armor, but I prioritized prettying up the level. They do have some recoil imparted when you hit them but they recover just as fast as your recoil recovery so it’s really only the SMG and maybe the shotgun that can take full advantage.
It is intended that enemies win fair fights. They’re bigger and better protected than you and you need to use stealth to fight dirty. I wanted to add an armor item which would have helped survivability but didn’t have time. If you walk with Alt you stop making footsteps entirely and if you can get behind an enemy (even an alert one) you can do an instant silent takedown with the use key.
I think even with time I probably wouldn’t have explained all of that in the game as this isn’t the main project, but I might put in a tips screen or something if I come back to tinker with it.
I would suggest to exagerate a bit with the effects
The particles are based on the projectiles based damage and if I switch it to final modified damage instead that ought to do this without any special handling. I think I’ll do that.
at the moment the map is too monochromatic
I had such grand plans to fill it with flashing ads and storefronts but I just didn’t have enough time. As I’ve said elsewhere, this game is a diversionary side project to test out systems I hadn’t tried before and the main game will have a color palette more like the first map. In the second I was intentionally evoking the UI’s color scheme.
Overall my impression is good, I had fun but I rage quitted cause the demo was quite hard
You were incredibly close at the end! The last shrine was in the big room with the shotgun, just that you’d entered it from the bottom instead of the top.
Couldn’t respawn with a key so I had to restart from the main menu.
I skipped this to save a little time, I didn’t think it was important enough. In the full game you’ll want to load a save anyway.
You could make it so that if you press the “Shoot” key when you are out of mag ammo but still have reserve ammo the player automatically reloads instead of dry firing
I had this in Ctesiphon but I always play without it. This being more of an imsim I’m going to resist adding this option to make shooting feel more deliberate and encourage other options.
When you run you could make the player pull her arm back a bit so there’s more of a difference in your viewport when running vs. not running.
She does already but it is pretty subtle. I tied it directly to velocity to keep it simple but pulling it too far can look janky if I don’t smooth it so I didn’t bother. Something for the full game.
Jumping while running feels off, like as if the velocity resets every time.
This actually started as bug but I’m probably going to end up keeping it. In mid-air you have your full sprinting acceleration but it’s counteracted by vertical velocity too and I boosted Mokoto’s sprint speed compared to when I first set this up in the engine and so it causes you to slow down. I have an idea for this in the full game though that different cyberlegs can affect how this mechanic works to unlock stuff like bhopping and strafe-jumping.
Items that aren’t guns, like food, clip into the walls if you get close enough which is weird since guns are exempt from this.
Could you share a screenshot of this? It doesn’t happen on my machine and they’re both rendered in the same code block, buffered into a renderpass that gets processed after a depth clear so there shouldn’t be any z-buffer interaction at all.
In “Level 1: Peaceful”
Yeah that level’s a mess, it’s a cut down version of my testing level for the collision system. It’s more a curiosity than an intentionally designed place. I might put in some time to polish it up later but it’s a very low priority.
I also noticed that enemies can hurt each other after one of them walked in front of another one that was attacking only for him to get instantly popped by his mate, pretty good.
They will absolutely kill each other after friendly fire even if the first shot doesn’t kill. Just don’t interrupt them after they start shooting each other or they’ll put aside their differences again, lol. I was going to add an extra trace to check for friendly fire before opening up but this was funnier. In the full game I’m going to make the behavior faction or character specific.
Thanks for trying it out, I got a good feeling about this one.
Oooh, y’know I think I know what it might be. The first-person renderpass is flagged for sorting but I don’t think I’m setting any sort values for the commands so the order will be whatever the built in qsort defaults to for resolving draws.
I’m going upload a new build in a few minutes could you try it out and see if that’s fixed?
I think for today’s modern audiences (fools like me) either changing jumps to not require crouching or explaining it somewhere may be helpful.
The full game will have a tutorial that goes over this, it wasn’t a given that people knew how to do it even back in the day.
if you’re going to have sprawling levels, some type of map/navigation/objective marker tool would help smooth things out.
My ambition could not be contained in this one map, because of how the PVS system works for occlusion I can make some disgustingly huge levels and I fully intend to. I might look into doing some sort of automap but it’s much more difficult in 3D and I may just fall back to using stills like in Deus Ex.
I’m curious what type of overall game design you are going to head in
The closest example would be The Nameless Mod, where it’s a bunch of sandbox levels that branch off of a hub area. I won’t necessarily have them directly connected like they are in that, I have some fun ideas involving public transport to encourage the player to not take all of their gear everywhere they go. Other than that, the full project is an unashamed Deus Ex 1 clone so it’s a safe bet to assume everything will work like it does in that.
Loving the aesthetics and keen to see what’s next!
I do love how this one turned out. I’d like to tinker with it a bit more but the whole thing has been a diversion to test out the conversation, decision-making, and pathfinding systems for the bigger game so this itself will stay as just these two levels though possibly a bit more fleshed out if I give it the time.
The game looks awesome. It’s what Eidos Montreal wishes they could’ve made.
I’ve got to print this out and stick it on my wall, lol
However, I couldn’t get the combat to work in the second stage. Enemies can’t hurt me and I can’t hurt them back.
Ach! You’re the second person to report this so there must be a way for me to repro it. Could you try it again with -v as an argument, shoot a bunch of walls and dudes, get shot at, and then send me the log file over discord? It’s at ~/.local/share/StomyGame/Kuromagi/output.log on Linux and ~/AppData/Roaming/StomyGame/Kuromagi/output.log on Windows.
Love that you are using a custom engine
Likewise! 💪
it kind of felt like the camera and the rest of the game were running at different framerates making me think there’s maybe a bug or something with the interpolation
It’s all on the same delta time every frame so I can’t really say what the issue is.
I had fun exploring the level and finding all of the shrines.
Mission Accomplished
The enemy design was very basic and could have used some more variety and challenge.
I was going to make some variant dudes with helmets and SMGs or Shotguns but I ran out of time. Their equipment is hardcoded in this prototype but in the full game every NPC will use a similar equipment system to the player character so there will be much more variety.
I’ll be doing a whole lot more of them for the main game to add variety, but yeah both of the 9mm guns are pretty tight on this one. Especially the Type-88 to balance out its poor damage.
On account of it actually tilting the screen around, I hope more serious recoil doesn’t end up giving people motion sickness. If so I might end up having an option to kick the crosshair around the screen instead like how Counter Strike does it.
okay, i got it working, and i'm glad i did!
i wasn't able to get out of the options menu by clicking any of the buttons, escape worked though!
i wasn't expecting to stumble into the backrooms
hitting ENTER to submit red paper changed the fullscreen option
i guessed red paper AND blue paper and neither worked?!
hostile part, no on screen prompt to restart once killed?
this feels super duper great to play! very exciting gameplay, very satisfying to shoot.
was the enemy damage being so high intentional? if so, i personally really liked it! it required me to be smart when choosing to shoot and when to be in cover.
every gun felt like it had a perfectly tuned time to kill, the SMG felt especially great to use. i really really like this game, the aesthetic and gameplay rock!
Very odd the options menu didn’t work but sounds like that was the worst of your problems so that’s not so bad. Yeah no restart prompt, I didn’t think it was important enough in the limited time I gave it.
hitting ENTER to submit red paper changed the fullscreen option
Playing v2.1 or later should have fixed this, or just hitting Alt again in game after you’ve alt-tabbed. Bit concerning if that didn’t fix it.
was the enemy damage being so high intentional? if so, i personally really liked it! it required me to be smart when choosing to shoot and when to be in cover.
Yes it was, to encourage exactly what you did!
every gun felt like it had a perfectly tuned time to kill, the SMG felt especially great to use. i really really like this game, the aesthetic and gameplay rock!
Music to my ears! This project is being mostly left as-is, perhaps with some tinkering later, but every gameplay element I’ve been testing and a lot of the visual style is being incorporated to my larger project and I’m hoping to bring that to demo day in either 72 or 73. My priority is getting it to look good for a steam page and not necessarily a fun demo just yet.
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