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I hated the music so much I muted the whole game.

Funny looking game. A lot of the presentation was very jank, but so far as I can tell the rogue bones are solid, though I don't have much experience with rogue-likes.

Wasn't for me but it was an interesting time.

Reasonable take. That's been something I've been thinking about for a while, whether that would be an option toggle or maybe a button the player can press to swap between the two. Not sure yet.

Thanks for playing. Had you done the puzzle the way that I'm showing here? It's certainly not impossible that something bugged out, especially if you're playing on Linux with wine or something.

Hey, thanks for playing. I'm glad you liked it.

Had a fantastic time with Velocity Noodle 3(d). Something I think I failed to say is I see zero reason why there's a portrait of the girl on the bottom left of the screen.

Cool prototype. I wish I didn't hit a wall shortly into the interview with Terry, because I was having fun with it.

Goofy but fun game.

I’m not sure how I feel about a big bar taking up so much of the top of my screen, but honestly I think I can get used to it.
I made the potentially regrettable decision to make the game a very specific resolution, so everything is built around that resolution, HUD included. I definitely understand the frustration though.

Why do my character’s hands flay around like that?
Honestly? Just something I haven't fixed yet.

I wish the water texture wasn’t so noisy, it’s a bit rough on the eyes and you start right off the bat on the beach
Honestly never thought of that. A lot of the tile textures were bought from a tile pack. But I want to eventually get to a point where the ocean has realistic waves coming in and out, so maybe some day I'll get there.

I kept trying to click on the pamphlets instead of using the keys to switch to them.
I'll add that to my to do list.

It would be nice if there were a few reactive things, like
Fleefer, are you okay??? Jokes aside, reactive things, like physics objects to push around. I'll do my best to keep that in mind too, because I agree.

Thanks for playing!

I wish the attacks came out quicker, but I feel that's a "Me" thing and just personal preference.

The attack speed thing is a common complaint I get. I'm wondering if that will become less common once I eventually add smaller and faster weapons. But for now, I still appreciate the feedback. 

I'm not a huge "Material crafting" guy, but again, just personal preference.

I'm actually not a material crafting guy either. Something that Moku does that throws people off is once you get a material, you have it for good. So anything that requires wood, you already have wood once you find it one time. Similarly, consumables are infinite, it's simply a matter of how much you can hold. I still haven't found a good way to communicate these things in game, so it confuses a lot of people.

Anyway, thanks for playing. I appreciate it greatly.

Played for about half an hour. Tried to record but I fucked up on one of my resets so you get a black screen for a while. I understand if you won't want to watch the whole thing, so here's some cliff notes.

• Game locked in the tutorial as well as while trying to sleep
• Performance seemed just fine for me at the hotel.
• I successfully got all three hotel photos and turned the lights on, but navigating was weird.
• Your hotel front water spigot was not obvious at all. I'd put a light shining on it or make it sparkle.

Fuck fuck fuck.

Just like JuicyChicken said, combat is very hard to follow here. Some sort of indication when enemies are going to die would be nice, as well as a way to figure out what order attacks are about to happen in. 

Definitely need a tutorial. There were some things that were just as baffling as the last time I played. Also I think the only way I was able to close the game was Alt+F4?

Thanks for playing!

Gave Ellie and Osh a go. It was very cute. I'm sure you're aware of all the problems I point out.

Thanks for playing! It was fun to watch live.

Yeah that's fair. I'm not a fan of traditional survival mechanics with resource gathering, farming, grinding, etc. But I love survival mechanics from survival horror games, so in the moment resource management is my jam. Maybe I should add more randomized fruit spots, now that I think about it. Either way, I'll keep your experience with it as a data point.

Okay, just checking. Those are the only food items available in the current demo.

This save data was very useful, thank you. I figured out what the bug was pretty fast, and it had to do with world state flags. I appreciate it.

Thanks for being so constructive, and apologies for the crashes.

Hunger is one of those things where I feel like the game is better for the friction. I'm trying to capture the friction from survival games while not having it be a traditional survival game. I want it to be an action game with survival elements. Though I can definitely add a difficulty setting to make it not a thing for players. I am wondering, did you find the other food items that gave you different buffs?

Yeah I've also been thinking about the EXP loss thing. Right now it's set so you can protect yourself from losing EXP by eating kalo poi, but you're right that it still feels like a fairly large punishment early on.

For the balancing, yeah, you're right about the difficulty. It's simply something I haven't touched in a while due to working on other aspects.

Bizarre crashes. I'd be surprised if trying to load the game constantly gave you that error, because while I have seen it, it's pretty rare in my experience. I don't suppose you'd be able to get me that save data, would you? It should be some place like C:\Users\sleepl\AppData\Local\Moku, assuming you're playing on Windows and not on Linux with Wine or something.

As for that last one, do you suggest I have the player hold the pose at the end of an attack a little longer before going back to the basic pose?

Yeah that's a simple fix. It might look a little awkward but it will be easier to understand than what you have currently. Either just hold the follow through, or make the return to idle a lot slower.

Any ideas for a better dodge key? V?

I'd make the dodge key ALT probably, but that's just because it's easy for my thumb to reach without accidentally hitting SPACE. In the future you will probably want to add keybind customization.

When you say predictable do you mean the attack impulses send you too far? Because that's something I noticed in your video. That is REALLY damn weird, because that isn't how it behaves in my testing. If you've seen the MP4s I post on the threads, you'd probably noticed the attack impulses aren't rocketing you around. It's much more manageable there. I'm going to have to look into that somehow.

Yeah, the biggest thing is definitely the impulse. I had a friend test it, and the game behaved the same on his computer. If I had to guess, it's an issue tied to frame rate. As far as I can tell, I'm running LFD at 144 FPS on a 144 Hz monitor. If you have a more frame limited monitor, such as a 60 Hz monitor, and Unity is tying the game's frame rate to your monitor's frame rate, and the physics aren't properly set up for it, physics impulses could become massively over tuned at higher frame rates. This is a very common problem, even in professional video games. Mind you, like I said, that's just a guess. I don't know for sure.

EDIT: I tried setting my monitor to 25 Hz and ran the game again. It didn't seem to make a difference, so I could be wrong.

If you must know, the purpose of pause attacks are usually to be more multi-hit style combo extensions.

Yeah that's perfectly fine. My main issue with the combo system is still the fact that the player character goes into an idle stance before continuing the combo.

Hey thanks for playing.

A lot of the art still needs a lot of work. At some point I'll be overhauling player and enemy appearances.

I might end up changing the frying pan in the future so it's a bit less cumbersome to use. Otherwise the game is fairly based on timing and positioning for attacks, as opposed to focusing on twitch reactions.

I could probably add little pushable things here and there. Definitely not a bad idea.

Apologies for how much I was rambling. I'll try to recap and add things below.

• Smooth animations really are everything here. If the player character animation goes back to idle, players will assume the combo string has been broken. The recovery time after a swing should be a lot longer. Worse comes to worse you can let the player dodge cancel the recovery animation.
• Swapping between sword and fist should either be instant (probably best for a fast paced game like LFD,) or should only be (and mostly always be) possible when in idle. It felt extremely finnicky and I have no idea why.
• Dodge should not be E, that way the player can control all of WASD.
• Standard attacks should be predictable. I shouldn't be flying all over the place just by hammering the basic attack button.
• Non-standard attacks should have a point: IE, chase attacks, stun locks like juggles. It seems you have these but they're still very finnicky. Your running chase strike is way over tuned and should stop at the enemy it targets. Your upper cut juggle is probably fine, but at least right now there doesn't seem like much of a reason to chase them up to try to attack in the air. You might even want to add some sort of AoE attack, like a spin attack, to hit enemies all around you if you get surrounded.
• There needs to be better camera controls, such as turning the camera and having the camera face the enemy better while targeting. The camera does try to keep the enemy in view, but in my experience, targeting cameras tend to feel best when they try to roughly keep the player between them and the enemy.
• Something as simple as decreasing the jump gravity could go a long way into making the jump feel better. You can also reduce the jump strength to match if you don't want the player to go higher with lower gravity.

Yeah sorry about that.

Thanks for playing. Can you elaborate on the strafing sideways being awkward?

• How was it awkward?
• What input were you using, gamepad or keyboard and mouse?

• Some sort of visual indicator that you can combine an item in the stack with what's in front of you would go a long way to making the game more intuitive.
• E to interact would feel better for me personally.
• I have no idea if the attack button is actually functional.

• I love the gore and the way enemies can fly into fans and the like.
• Getting hit barely feels like anything. There needs to be a way better visual indicator that it happens, and likely more obvious wind up from enemies.
• The shotgun is great.

Gave it another go. 

Wasn't sure how to close the game at a glance without doing Alt+F4.

I swung and I gung. 

Apologies for being so negative in the end. I hope you know I'm rooting for this game.

Played your half demo.

Updating the level up screen is something I've been thinking about for a little bit, as well as how to explain how the crafting system works better.

Thanks for playing!

Thank you for your further thoughts. I think you're right about the map thing, and I'll add overworld maps to my to-do list.

You are also correct about me being fine with people missing many items. I'm not sure if I'm alright with players missing pamphlets, as those are supposed to be both story related and tutorial related, so that's for sure something I'll think about more as I continue tweaking this test area and dungeon, and going into eventually crafting the actual game world.

The taro one is an interesting thing. You do make a good point about players picking something and potentially sticking with it, so it gives me more to think about. The reasoning behind the taro being so useful is actually a cultural thing, funny enough. The game in its current state is leaning heavily into Hawaiian culture and mythology, and ancient Hawaiians ate taro mashed into a kinda wet goop known as poi. This was their staple food, and they ate it all the time. In trying to lean into that, I made it so poi is an incredibly valuable food to eat, and swapping off poi could be a risk vs reward thing once players get better at the game. I'll need to think on it more to see how I can continue to incorporate poi without making it a required item for a lot of players.

I'll also add a little text pop up to let players know when they can craft something new.

Hey, thank you very much for playing Moku! Your video was probably one of the more valuable ones I've seen, and I got a lot out of it.

• Due to your video, I'll be adding an option for gamepad players to lock movement to the 8 cardinal directions.
• I will absolutely be adding a sound for there being not enough bag space while in the chest.
• It took you a bit to recognize that you needed to access the chest to change your equipment. It made me realize I should show crafted items going to the chest when you craft them, much like how picking up the rusty pan at the start shows it going into the chest.
• You ran into a bug where the lock-on was refusing to work when the enemy was close to the bottom edge of the screen. I'll be fixing that soon and making lock on more generous, so it takes a few seconds to unlock you from an enemy if they go off screen.
• The bug you saw where you had 4 Kō Salves on the belt but only one of them had 10 is a bug I'd been unsure how to reproduce and then fix, yet miraculously you reproduced it multiple times and I now understand it. Thanks!
• At one point you were fighting a big axe guy on some platforms near lava, and you'd noticed he would take 10% damage from falling like the player does. After picking up the obsidian you tried to dodge back across and ran into something, causing you to fall. That was actually the axe guy's collision box you hit, meaning you didn't go as far. That's a bug I was 100% unaware of until I saw you do it, so I'll be fixing that.
• You also didn't really know what switching the lever did at first, so I'll likely be adding a bit of text saying something like, "You change the flow of the pipe."

That was just the notes I took while watching. Honestly you did pretty well to get as far as you did, especially considering there were some materials you didn't find and some items you didn't craft before entering the dungeon. You can find iron and Olonā (a plant used in rope crafting), allowing you to craft armor, a crossbow, a shield, and rations. You also missed finding Taro, which would have given you two different ingredients to cook with, one of which makes it so you don't lose your EXP on death. You also missed a pamphlet that would teach you about the stab attack, which is really useful to avoid hitting walls. You would have had a way easier time with the double spike arm guys if you had a shield and could just block their wild charge. Not explaining what you missed to rag on you, just giving examples to explain my thought process on the game cause I figure you might be interested.

Moku at its core is a game about exploration, discovery, and mastery over environment. Aside from a few games, I kind of hate modern survival games due to their focus on grinding for materials, and I'm much more interested in the kind of survival you see in survival horror. In survival horror games, you learn how to best deal with enemies whether you fight them or run from them, you learn how to navigate potentially complex environments, and you manage resources as you explore. That's the feeling I'm trying to go for with Moku, where you need to plan what items you'll bring with your limited bag space, manage getting hungry as you traverse the landscape, and push yourself to go further than last time you set out. This game is 100% inspired by The Legend of Zelda on one hand (mostly by Link's Awakening on the Gameboy), but mechanically it also takes a lot from Dark Souls, including attacking with the shoulder buttons and the general difficulty.

One small mechanic you complained about was the injury system, which I completely understand because it's not tutorialized at all. When you get hurt, enemy attacks include an injury modifier, usually 10%, which makes it so 10% of the damage they do is applied to your health cap, meaning you can't heal it back unless you rest at a tent. That was the chunk of your health bar that was striked off with the black diagonal stripes. Being on fire has a massive injury modifier at 50%, making it incredibly dangerous. This mechanic is to add another layer to the health system, making it less feasible to just bring a bucket load of healing items to damage sponge your way through the game.

Another mechanic you complained about was wall hits, which I am of two minds about. On one hand, I want your weapon and attack choice to matter beyond just going for the most damaging option. Hell, normally that option is grab attacks because they do massive damage, but doing grabs when facing multiple enemies is a huge gamble because you can get hit and get stunned out of the grab before it completes. You also might choose a stab, because it won't smack against walls. But you also might want a swing, because it can hit and stun multiple enemies at once. So I like the mechanic for those aspects. On the other hand, it's 100% true that enemies straight up ignore hitting walls right now, and that's something that will be fixed later on. Everything is test enemies right now, so there's a lot of details they lack, such as their own attacks hitting walls, causing them to need to pick attacks suited to the space they're in as well.

There was another funny little thing that I'm not actually sure how to fix. When you crafted the Leiomano (which are real Polynesian swords, pictured below,) you of course immediately went to cut the bush to pick up the Koali ʻawa (which is a type of Hawaiian Morning Glory). You then proceeded to move on instead of going to the crafting table to craft the Kō Salve with the Koali ʻawa. The crafting table sparkles any time you can craft something, because any time you can craft something, you just should, because of course you don't lose the resources for crafting and there's zero downside to crafting everything immediately. That fact is far from intuitive with most games having crafting resources be finite though, and the sparkle is the most obvious thing I feel I can do right now without downright dragging players to the crafting table by the ear. That all is fine, players should realize before long that the sparkle means go craft. But that does occasionally lead to a scenario where a player is able to craft the Kō Salve, but doesn't, and then gets the tutorial for the Kō Salve and gets confused. It is 100% an understandable mistake, and I have no idea how to solve it yet.

Moku still needs a lot of refinement, and I will be getting there eventually, including even the font stuff you mentioned. Once again, thank you. I'm glad you were able to see part of my vision in the time you played.

Thanks for playing! Yeah the sword stab thing is a bit of a hold over from when it was, well, a traditional sword. The current weapon is a leiomano, which is basically a Polynesian style sword, a wooden paddle with shark teeth around the edges. I could definitely imagine decreasing the EXP cost for earlier levels. Also, very weird bug you got. Are you able to reproduce that or was it a one off thing?