itch.io

Oh shit nice, I'll check it out when it launches. Pleasantly surprised to find out you're making a serious project because I figured you only made shitpost games, but even your shitpost games have something compelling about them that's hard to describe.

Remember, picking up a plank is faster than reloading. Also

To The Top >>>>>> every other track 

Fucking hilarious, olde timey pie slicing that is not even remotely polished or flashy. I laughed quite a few times and the game stops before it gets old. 

The horse was a real human bean 😭

the only thing that I would change is having guns auto pick up when you walk over them if you don't already have a gun, there's no melee or anything so no reason to not always want a gun. 

Fairly charming and has good potential, but has a number of easy to fix flaws

- no way of telling how much health you have as far as I can tell 
I don't think that this one really requires an explanation, if something on screen is already serving as the health bar it is not at all obvious. 

- cutscenes get very repetitive on the second/third/nth time playing a stage

This is fairly easy to fix, I would either not take control away from the player while cutscenes/text are playing and add some collectibles in the environment to shoot so that the player has time to reload their guns in the downtime and stays stimulated/engaged/has something to do on repeat playthroughs

- aiming with the mouse feels off 

This one is kind of tricky and I won't pretend like I know how to make this feel better. If it were my game I would try a few things and see how they contribute to the feel of the game. 

1)  have the majority of the screen covered by a bounding box, when the cursor reaches the edges of the screen pan just a bit in the direction that the cursor is in (see attached image, I think it'll make more sense) 

2) ditch the crosshair and attach laser sights to the guns, I think the crosshair and 2d movement of the mouse makes depth perception harder than it would normally be. Usually you're getting the depth/3D feel from the gun in your hand when you're playing this sort of game, I don't know how to describe it properly but something feels very off with the 2d crosshair and 2d mouse movement with no tangible connection to the 3d world 

All that being said it is very fun and charming. I can't think of any projects on itch shooting for this rail shooter style game and hitting the mark as well as this one. 

One time I took shrooms with my friend and walked around the city. For whatever reason shrooms make me act like a gullible child and I managed to get talked into signing a petition to put Andrew Yang on the ballot and like two other initiatives I couldn't even begin to tell you the purpose of. 

This game is like that in game form

Very enjoyable, loved the artstyle and the little nods to House of The Dead and Resi, rest of this comment is going to be little things about the game I wish were different but I really want to emphasize that I enjoyed it a lot. 

- The collision on steps is wrong, the camera bobs up and down while you're going up and down them. 

The easiest way to fix this would be to make the collision for the entire flight of stairs a ramp instead of conforming to the geometry of the steps. 

- No ambient noise / music 

This is ok, making music is really hard and no music is definitely better than bad music. It's very easy to make some simple pink / white noise ambience in Audacity and it adds a lot to a game, (video below covers this well) try it out and see how much better it makes your games feel.

You have a really cool dismemberment system for the zombies but no incentive to utilize it. It would be cool if the zombies did a lot more damage and you could gib zombies legs with one pistol shot so that it was more efficient to shoot them and leave them alive than it is to kill them outright

Good work though, looking forward to anything from you in the future

Absolutely wonderful, one of the best designed games that I've played in a while, a lot of indie games shoot for Super Metroid / Dark Souls I don't think I've played one yet that nails the gameplay design of those quite as well as this. 

What's great

Nothing exists in a vacuum, EVERYTHING the player does has consequence, and it nails that mini metrovania / dark souls "skillful" level up feeling perfectly. The game doesn't get easier, you just understand it better. The game does a great job staying consistent with it's internal ruleset and rewarding you for understanding it better.

You memorize optimal bullet / whip / throw combos for low level enemies, you make decisions about whether you're going to quickly finish off an enemy with a quick shot or take a slightly more risky approach to harvest some ammo, later you might learn that you can do cool shit like take the time to harvest one enemy for ammo and use them to kill another enemy to more efficiently get more ammo. 

Small niggle

I might just kind of suck but I wish that there was more unique markers of where you were. Obviously a full blown map would sacrifice a lot of the good feeling of exploration that the game has and discourage keeping a mental map of surroundings, but I think that if you're going for Dark Souls it would be nice if areas were named and there was a little area on the HUD that displayed the name of the current area / room that you're in. 

This I think would be 

1) pretty easy to implement (other than coming up with thematic / creative names for rooms)

2) Help players draw physical maps or keep better mental maps 

3) Let frustrated players ask their friends if they get lost / stuck or check online and get good instructions / advice instead of just quitting for good or having to describe where they are stuck in very subjective terms 

Alright, was finally able to play. There really isn't much in the game (assuming you're intended to die at the first enemy encounter after finding your buddy in the cell) as of right now but I did enjoy the unconventional control scheme and UI. Very cool tank style controls to first person light gun transition, reminded me of Resident Evil Dead Aim. The Art style was also appealing and I liked the character designs. 

Things that need to be improved

- A map or better environmental cues

Even something as simple as names or placards above doors would help, I managed to pretty much remember what doors led to what keys in this really short demo, but if you plan on making bigger maps this needs to be remedied.

- Some indication / inventory that shows what keys you already have 

Pretty self-explanatory, I would forget what keys I had already picked up, and that problem would only really be exasperated by bigger maps.

- A longer music loop or less music

The music loop started to get very annoying, very fast. I would reccomend making a much longer music track if possible, if you pulled it from a sound library or something and don't have the musical ability to replace it I would try to make an ambient track instead. If you want help with this feel free to DM me and I can help you get started with that.

- A quick turn 

Just something like pressing back shift causing to do a 180 degree turn, or Q and E rotating you 90 degrees left or right. It's an essential component of behind the shoulder tank controls imo. 

- A better end / splash screen

I'm still not even sure if I properly finished the demo or I died prematurely because the game just quits.

Things that I think would improve the feel of the game but aren't strictly needed

- some sort of audio indicator that you interacted with a door or picked up an item

a simple universal UI bloop would suffice but context specific sounds (like door handles rattling) would be best

- footstep noises

I just love footstep noises for some reason, they're kind of a pain in the ass to implement sometimes though

Game is just a black screen for me, can hear footsteps and gunshots but nothing else.

- There is no collision on the right side of every map so you can very easily train the enemies by going off screen and then go down to juke them. 

- Pretty severe slowdown whenever you collide with a wall, physics object, or an enemy collides with a wall. 

- Visuals are simple, but not in a minimalistic way. The end screen is somewhat charming but the color pallete of the main game itself clashes pretty hard. 

- Music that plays for the majority of the game is good, but the cut to the metal music at the end is a little jarring

Where is your game? 

Managed to get outside just fine and explored to the edge of the map from every direction of the house but didn't run into any enemies. Banging ass artstyle tho.

EDIT: Sorry, I'm illiterate. Read the controls and figured out how to spawn in enemies. 

JUICE IT

8/10, will be 10/10 once properly juiced

Simple and somewhat familar premise but execute with so much juice that it's hard to care, and it still manages to defy expectations in a number of ways. 

Off the bat the sound and music is good, really fucking good. Very satisfying and creates a lot of atmosphere that the game wouldn't have otherwise. Immediately makes a good impression. 

The decision to go with handcrafted levels rather than using proc gen was a very good choice too, made playing the game a lot more satisfying initially since you can come to grips with enemy patterns before being introduced to new ones which cause you to perform the "combat dance" of the game a little differently. It seems like there's a degree of randomness with what class is available to the player at the beginning of the floor that does tap into some of that roguelite RNG fun potential. 

I had a hard time figuring out what the point of the "poisoner" class was supposed to do that the firestarter class didn't do better, but it was admittedly my least played class. Firestarter was harder to come to grips with than fighter but is very satisfying once you do. (protip: run to agro all the enemies until you reach the locked gate, then use the AOE to take groups of them out at once)

Good game, really can't think of any compelling reason to critique it as a free product. If you plan on selling it on Steam I think that a little bit of exposition and worldbuilding would be called for, but it's a very fun little game as it stands now. 

Feels pretty good overall, very responsive movement and enemies line up in formations that make it very satisfying to mow them down.

However, there are a few pretty low effort things that you can do to improve the overall feel of the game and increase it's replay value (which is something you definitely need to do with a game this difficult since you're not going to learn the mechanics on a first run. 

- make it so that you can respawn directly from the game over screen 

- make it so that either the music does not stop between restarts or put more tracks in the game that randomize on restart so you don't have to hear the same 25 seconds (which is about how long I survive in this game tbh) of track over and over again

- more clearly communicate where the player's hitbox actually is, From what I can gather it's the torso, but it's really hard to tell exactly where it begins and ends and it's heard to wiggle through tight gaps in the bullet formations 

- swap out some of the color pallete with colors that work better together from an aesthetic standpoint, I recommend using https://color.adobe.com/create or  https://colormind.io to help you find good colors 

Actually the visuals are shitty copyright free sprites, the music is all original.

- The controls need to be tighter, they're frustrating. Please check #1

A common complaint, but I haven't been giving any concrete advice on how exactly they can be tweaked to feel better. Nothing in that Twitter thread looks hard to implement, I'll try to tighten the physics up for the final release.

- I can maybe understand why you want the camera zoom to change on room size

It's mostly due to the very limited number of art assets I have available and an inability to make more. The camera can be used to show the player things that I want to show them and a room can be made distinct simply by having it's own camera angle.

-  When zoomed out I have to lean in to see my avatar in the torchlight

There's a second brightness adjustment slider during the tutorial in one of the most zoomed out portions of the game, did you miss it or did it not make a difference for you? I don't really have an issue with contrast between the background and character but I think that might be down to having playtested the game enough to be familiar with the way it controls and where the player is relative to the torchlight to notice.

- The music and sound was great though

I'm pretty relieved to hear that, it's where the bulk of the effort went for the project. 

- there were enough lines that made me think it was written by a 14 year old

What in particular didn't sit right with you? Originally the game was going to have only two pieces of exposition (at the beginning and end of the game) and the writing on the walls was added later to serve as an unobtrusive way to communicate the correct path to go and give a sense of progression since the game has no inventory system or anything like that. All of it was written after levels were made and just built around individual scripted sequences rather than as a part of a cohesive whole so I guess it's not surprising if it comes off as cringe.

Thank you for the solid constructive criticism, especially the link to the Twitter thread on platformer feel.

Oh I apologize, I deleted the control message from the tutorial unwittingly.

WASD to move, you have full control over the character from the beginning of the game and can just ignore the brightness adjust if it's not relevent to you. 

Thank you! I still plan on finishing this game up but horror is definitely one of my pet genres so you can expect more in the future.

I'm sorry, I'm not sure what you mean. Can you be a little more specific about what issue you're having? 

Have you ever thought, "Hey, I wish Gmod's prop hunt, Silent Hill 4, Shadows of the Damned, and Resident Evil 4 could all be combined into a roguelite FPS"? 

No? Well that's probably because you're a mentally healthy human being, the developers of this game are off their meds but the end result is pretty cool tbh. All of the disparate influences come together to make a very charming dark comedy game that manages to bring the spooks and feel very good to play. I only wish it would be localized to English a little better. 

Very clever and well-polished game, especially considering how quickly it was made. Post-jam patch really ups the ante and makes the game a lot more enjoyable, atmospheric, and less exploitable.

Dev is an extremely cool and helpful lad as well. 

Thanks Andrew! Every comment is really good motivation to keep working on the final release, make sure to check that out when it's done. 

Thank you for playing! I really appreciate you taking the time to play through it not once, but twice. I've taken a lot of the feedback from you and other people who have played and pushed out a new update, it probably won't be that interesting to you but if you'd like I could contact you here or on YouTube when the full release drops.  

It should if you died :)

I wouldn't worry that much though, you only missed out on about 15 extra seconds of gameplay and some half-assed outro text. How did you enjoy the demo overall? 

Transformative. A master class display of game development prowess that carefully weaves an addicting arcadey gameplay loop with a mature, touching narrative. 

Easily my favorite off of the PS1 horror disk, there wasn't a single second that I was sure about what was going to happen next and by the time it was over I was fucking hungry for more.  I can't even begin to imagine how much time and effort went into making this short little experience as polished and exciting as it is, but I know that whatever you put out next is going to be an instant buy/download from me. 

**SPOILERS BELOW** 

Very cool game, reminisicent of the first person sections of Silent Hill 4. (which I absolutely adore) 

Everything felt very cohesive and well thought-out, I particularly enjoy when devs take the effort to make the gameplay interface in a horror game non-traditional. In a game this short there's no time to fully get up to speed and comfortable with an intentionally clunky control scheme, and the decision to tell the player upfront how much ammo they can expect for the entire game is a smart one that discouraged me from experimenting with the gun to figure out how to quickly get a shot off.

One minor nitpick, I'm sure I'm not the only person who immediately decided to see if it was possible to shoot yourself when I saw how the gun was able to rotate freely. Having the gun from the very start of the game made it so that I felt comfortable doing so relatively consequence free. The ending for doing this and the ending for seeing the game through to completion are the same, which I think really detracted from the ending. Either holding off on giving the gun to the player until they were more invested in their progress or having a separate ending for players who see the game through would have went a long way to making the ending less underwhelming.