The metal wall was a good example, another one is that wall ledges looked like a secret zone in a wall you could dash through so I lost so much time wondering if this was a pixel-perfect dash requirement or not. Until I decided to avoid an upgrade and to move on, I had the feeling that that part was glitched/poorly designed until I god the gauntlets. That's the kind of feeling I'm trying to explain.
If you were running into those issues that often, isn't that a good indicator that they're not supposed to be accessible yet? I can understand getting tripped up on the first one or two, and maybe I'm just not understanding what kind of situations you're talking about, but after a while you've gotta realize that there must be something else to it, right?
From the start, my feeling towards the game was as follows :
1. What the hell kind of input layout is this?! (keyboard)
2. Getting the hang of it, not bad but feels clunky. Can't seem to be able to aim at anything on the ground or not at a perfect 45 degree angle (slime and bees). I had to resort to the spray bullet mod with the spread bullet for the rest of the game to not feel too bad.
3. (After getting the dash skill) Ok now it gets a bit more fluid. Still can't aim ennemies but sure.
4. (After getting the omnidash) Best gameplay feeling. I had a lot of fun dashing in diagonals. I was ready for a fat boss fight!
5. The demo ended, I was sad.
1. The keyboard inputs are based off of WSAD. I've never agreed with using the arrow keys for controls, since no other method of controlling a character in games uses the right hand for movement. Still, there's an extremely flexible key rebinding system that lets you use basically any key on your keyboard for anything you see fit, so you're more than welcome to create your own bindings if you don't like the defaults
2. Not being able to hit slimes and Edovex easily is very much intentional. Not every enemy in the game is supposed to be solved instantly by spamming the blaster - that's why the melee attack, force shot, and upgrades for stuff like the dash attack exist. They're all extremely effective at taking down the smaller, mobile nuisance enemies that are more difficult to hit with the blaster. And if you really just want to spam the blaster, there's an Auto Shot weapon type you can find that auto-targets enemies in a cone rather than shooting directly forward, or the Tri Shot chip that makes you shoot out 3 bullets in a cone to hit a wider area. Basically, it's all designed intentionally to give you more, easier options to deal with enemies that might've given you trouble as you progress further into the game. Rather than a linear power increase (i.e. Alicia deals 1 damage at start of game and 5 damage at end of game), I've focused on increasing her toolkit to deal with different scenarios more effectively.
4/5. I agree that the Omnidash makes the game much more fluid and satisfying, and there's plenty more gameplay that will come after that once we get further in development. Unfortunately the Omnidash is a very recent addition and so not much has been designed to make use of it yet
Once again, I really liked the game. I hope you can keep at it and make it as fun and fluid as possible while not making it blatantly easy. I really do hope my feedback helps.
I appreciate the feedback
Fluidity and mobility is a huge part of the core gameplay I'm aiming for, and I have plenty more powerups planned to make moving around the game fun and satisfying.
I love H-Metroidvanias. There nearly aren't enough good ones out there but this looks and plays amazingly. How do you make progress and survive with just 4k a month for 5 years? Its a shame this project isnt more well known...
Thanks for the kind words, man. It means a lot to know you enjoy the game so much. The majority of the work is done by me, though as our funding grows in recent years I've been able to hire more and more people for things like voice acting, background art, CGs, and animation. You should see how it was back in the day when we started
Not saying this as anything directed at the creator, but I found this statement to be rather odd. Is there a typo here? 4k a month is 48k a year. A lot of people don't make half that and still manage to get by. I guess it depends on where you live, but there are plenty of places here in the USA (let alone elsewhere) where that's not exactly a struggle. Unless you live on one of the coasts or in some big city, that's more than enough each month to cover all your bills with a bit to spare. After an admittedly cursory lookup, I found that the average annual per capita income in this country is actually around $29k. Granted, that shifts a lot depending on state, and even whether you're in a big city or out in the country, but still.
Of course, you
could argue that the national per-capita average income is a lot lower than it aught to be, and I'd whole-heartedly agree- but that's another topic in itself that isn't fit for this thread, that I honestly don't even want to get into on this forum.
Point is, 4k a month is well above the current average.
-edit-
Granted, that's not taking into account taxes, not to mention it's possibly divided up amongst more than one person, which does change matters; I don't know if the creator is working alone or has a team; I know they commission CGs, and I'm sure they have other production expenses as well.
Mostly I'm just pointing out that someone "struggling" to live on 4k a month, unless they live in New York City or something similar, is kind of silly.
4k is REALLY not that much money, man. We have roughly 10 team members that I commission work from - some of them are occasional, some of them are frequent. Taxes for self-employment are roughly 30%, so you can bring that 4k down to less than 3k instead. I also currently support two people on my income. People who live on half that or less, as you mentioned, are often going to be missing a huge amount of things you need to live a great life - things like access to healthy food, a safe and clean environment, money to pay for doctors visits and medicine. There's a BIG gap between "able to survive" and "living a good life", and even if I earned the full $4k with no taxes and could use it all on myself and none on the game, I'd still be barely scraping the "living a good life" portion of that. As it stands I have debt, numerous health problems and no money to see a doctor about any of them, and am living paycheck to paycheck, barely scraping by. I wouldn't trade what I do for anything, I love making games and I certainly make enough to be happy with my lot in life, but for the sake of everyone out there who struggles financially, don't pretend that 4k is a phenomenal amount of money - it's very common to struggle financially even if you earn a decent amount.