I gave it a few minutes, here's my impressions of the movement.
The priority of pressing a direction before jumping seems deliberate, and who am I to argue against deliberate control decisions. But I think I'd like to have maybe, 20 milliseconds of leeway where you can press jump and then a direction, and you're not gonna fall off your platform like a goober.
I liked throwing stuff and the special attack - they feel fun. Using the dash to reach a wall is fun, and in general I think the more you let the player dash about, the more fun they'll be having with the movement. And you obviously have the possibility of player progression with double dashes, upward dashes, shorter cooldowns, etc.
The moving platform worked better than I expected, since those are always real weird in games. When you jump, you're losing all your momentum though. It's a thing you can get away with, and in fact most players probably expect it to happen, but see if you can change it to retaining momentum and see how that feels. It might not be an improvement. But, aside from that, I like that you can cling to moving platforms, so you've got a lot of potential in using that in levels to carry players across hazards.
Controller support worked flawlessly.
Graphically the game's fantastic. The binary rain is cool, and the particle effects when the player is against a rainy wall are a neat touch.
I could give or take the sword attack you have at the moment. Depends on how the enemies turn out, I suppose.
I feel like the little item droppers are missing just a little something from being a really nice bit of skinner boxing. I think what I'd do is, make the hitbox 1.5x bigger, hitting one of them causes you to phase through to the other side of it (if attacked by melee), resets your energy completely (allowing you to dash again), gives the tiniest freeze-frame effect (see: all of vlambeer's games), and makes some sick flashies and particles.
Anyway, those are my (mostly worthless) impressions!
I am toying around with ways to release the player from the wall at the moment. Pressing jump just a fraction of a moment before pressing a direction away from the wall does release you as it should but as akachan suggested below - perhaps an additional press to release your grip from the wall for a straight fall is necessary or maybe even not needed. Replaying Ninja Gaiden this morning - you needed to press away from the wall to do anything to remove yourself. Not that I wish to emulate that system 100% but I am pulling influences from that system while allowing the player to do more from a wall stick for this game.
Dashes also work to attack things and make the player invincible during that time. Special pickups allow the player to have an endless pool of energy for 8 seconds and go nuts with attacks and zipping around. There is also a mechanic, while not achievable currently with bad box guy setup - where if you destroy 3 enemies with 1 special attack, your energy meter fills back to full instantly and time slows for a quarter of a second. This mechanic will be used from time to time for aerial traversal - or completely removed and energy cost halved to allow for double zips when needed. I don't want perfect enemy setups that just automatically lead the player into triggering insta-full energy happening - feels like handing things over to the player too much, IMO. But reducing it's cost by 50% and allowing its use twice in a row wouldn't break anything. It deals more damage than any of your other attacks but it does have a drawback of sucking juice from your main attack until a recharge. So abuse of it is limited.
I originally had physics act more like real-world physics on platforms where jumping while moving would retain momentum but it didn't feel "gamey" enough for my liking. Platforms will not be moving that fast during actual levels so there will be less of a chance at making errors on platforms when jumping but the possibility to fall will still be there if the player doesn't want to maintain control of their jumps.
Sword attack is something that will probably exit the game as I am unsatisfied with how it feels to use. Quite uneventful in my own opinion. It could be the animation or the quick stop when attacking. I have tried allowing the player to run and attack but since he does move fairly quickly there is a lot of running into enemies. I do like the run-n-gun feel of throwing things and I feel that ranged combat if I can nail down energy synergy between your shuriken, shuriken power ups and zip can lead to more flexible encounters with enemies than having straight melee encounters. It allows for more verticality in combat between the player and enemy AI so that means I can get tricked out with level geometry design to aid the player as well as challenge them. So I am leaning hard on removing the main attack. It would definitely help bridge the gap between borrowing the movement and traversal from Ninja Gaiden and the combat and level design of Mega Man, especially with shuriken power ups.
I am unsure exactly what you mean by the item droppers phasing you to the other side. They are just droppers that drop things by chance when struck and I really do not feel the need to introduce a mechanic to destroying them as they offer goodies when you strike them. There are also more pickups than what they currently drop - these are only a handful of what are currently implemented. Some allow you to do more things, different weapons, etc. Will be up to the player to decide on what to use.
No. Fuck no. These are not worthless impressions, lol. These help me out during this stage of rebuilding more than you know and I cannot thank you enough
I was gonna say that. Glad I'm not the only one.
Also, I didn't like how you get stuck to the wall even if you're not holding a direction towards a wall. And how pressing jump while on the wall makes you fall down. I feel pressing down would be way more intuitive for that.
I will remedy this today. Dunno why I haven't thought of adding a check to make sure the player is pressing towards the wall to stick. I cast rays based on the direction of travel and if the ray intersects roughly 3 pixels from a wall I initiate the wall stick. I do this 1 frame before the player hits a wall to allow for rapid succession wall jumping. It's a bit of predictability I add to check the frame before because I know many people like hitting jump the frame before a character lands on the ground to initiate another jump instantly - so I carried that over to wall stick, as well. It's an old trick from an older era but I wanted to bring some of that to STRAFE.
BUT - seeing as how even I get ahead of myself, especially with a controller, and hitting jump before I press away and wind up falling, instead - I will need to tighten this up further.
When I connected my DS4 just via Bluetooth the D pad didn't work, but the analogue stick and the face buttons did. It controlled well enough. When I connected it via Bluetooth, the D pad worked, and a good D pad definitely made a difference.
I'm not the best at games that control like this, but I certainly didn't feel like there was anything wrong with the input. It was all me falling off things and failing jumps and walking into laser beams. I hope that's worth something. Tough, but fair. From someone bad at games like N+ and SMB and games with that kind of locomotion.
The current layout of the laser box section is roughly inadequate from a straight jump to the top of another platform. They are not quite setup for that. That is just my distance check for surface distance so I can better decide on how high the jump should be, what feels like a good jump height without being ridiculous.
Also, I am toying with the idea of allowing a double jump. I am considering allowing different power ups as you progress through the levels that act as passive abilities. One of them being reduced special cost and double jump.
I would definitely like to add secret areas and there ARE secret levels in the game you can get to (hell, the main enemy isn't called
MOOSE CLONER [muse clpwner har har] for nothing). Some of these areas will be accessible only after getting passive abilities which allow you to reach areas that you couldn't before.
That doesn't mean you have to start a new game - as any level you've completed you have access to at all times.
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Thanks all for this feedback. This is an extremely important time to test these things and make them perfect. I really have no choice but to knock this shit out of the park so I need the player to feel amazing to use. Tight, easy to learn and fun. The game has no real "hook" that sets it apart - it's very much so a "fun and forget" style game but those, i feel, can be just as important to a gamer's arsenal of games as the epic experience that you dump countless hours into.
The problem with "fun and forget" is that pretty much everything has to hit the right notes otherwise, due to the nature of the non-experience, will be far worse to partake in for the end user. I hope, outside of various tweaks, I am hitting these notes.
So I value all of your feedback incredibly. It is really amazing for me to read and think about, improve upon things I've missed and take a step back and reevaluate a few things that could be tighter.
I'll post new builds when I can.
Invaluable, for me. Thanks again all so much!
