Diari Demo

Found this game through your devlogs on Youtube a few months ago, and I immediately loved what I saw. The visuals are amazing, the soundtrack is too (I listened through the entire thing during my last game jam and found so many cool tracks - kinda reminds me of Hyper Light Drifter and Celeste), and being a platformer, it seemed like exactly the kind of game that I would want to play.

And then I played this demo, and as much as it pains me to say it, it feels really unsatisfying to play most of the time.

I spent today going through and finding things to say here and finding a few new bugs on the way, so hopefully these issues can be fixed eventually. Sorry if it sounds very negative, I love this game so much, it's just that I don't want these issues to ruin the game. (This is going to be a very long comment, sorry :( )

My main gripe with this game is the very unforgiving hitboxes.

You probably already know this, but generally in games, you want to give things you want to hit bigger hitboxes than the sprites, and things you don't want to hit smaller hitboxes than the sprites. If the hitboxes are exactly the same size as the sprites or bigger, people will think they are dying for no reason since we're so used to games with smaller hitboxes like this.

Here are what I guess the hitboxes in Diari look like from ramming into spikes slightly too much while testing:

The player hitbox is absolutely fine for the ground, walls and ceilings, but most certainly not for hitting spikes. Occasionally is is possible to die without Aimacra and the spikes' sprites touching for a single frame.

Perhaps a solution that could work is making the player take damage from a smaller hitbox (maybe about half the size of the other one) than the one that deals with ground collisions? Either that or you could make the spike hitboxes absolutely tiny, but you can only go so far with that...

I mean you are kinda nerfing the entire game by doing this, but at least it's a bit more forgiving for the player. Besides, it's hard enough already :') (You could go back and restructure certain parts to rebuff them though...)

The platforming is mostly quite solid. The spin mechanic felt kinda lame at first - there wasn't exactly much to it except for a double jump that you can normal jump after (and a barely-noticeable-at-first speed boost), but when it got to the box section it felt kinda cool, knowing that you couldn't jump while holding the box, but could spin. Essentially what I'm saying is spin-only interactions are pretty cool and maybe there should be some earlier in the game - also those thingies you spin into and get a speed boost I saw in the devlogs look pretty fun!

The platforming does seem to be way more dependent on animations than it should be - cancelling these animations (which it is very easy to accidentally do) makes it very easy to trigger all sorts of bugs. I'll list them here (I have footage for all of them but I'll only attach it if neccessary because this comment already takes too much space):

- By pressing Z, and X in quick succession to use a jump and spin quickly, the spin animation doesn't even get a chance to play, making it awkward to tell what how many jumps you have left, especially if you accidentally hit a button or mashed them in annoyance. It'd be cool if as well as making the spin animation actually happen in this scenario, there were be separate jump / spin particle effects...

- Buffering jump before hitting the ground waits for the land animation to play out in its entirety before Aimacra jumps again. This effectively locks the player to the ground for a short time despite the player wanting to instantly jump as soon as they hit the ground, which can be irritating when you need to react quickly to a saw hurtling towards you.

- Sometimes when you also hit Z and X in quick succession (this might be a frame perfect or something, it was a kinda inconsistent bug but still annoying) you get locked into a crouched sprite which persists when you hit the ground. You cannot spin or roll in this state (as you can see from my keypresses in this gif), and the only ways to cancel it are to jump or grab a wall.

- By pressing X while still holding Z from your first jump, you consume your spin and your jump at the same time, causing you to spin higher than usual (minus the actual spin animation for some reason) but not be able to jump afterwards. I call it the "super spin" and I absolutely love it - it'd be kinda cool if this was made into an intentional bug that you learn of in later playthroughs like Celeste's wavedashing or something. If it is turned into a feature it'd probably need something to visually distinguish it from other things though...

Sorry I'm trying to give constructive criticism but it's probably coming off as way too negative, I actually have a bunch more stuff that I found but I need to go now so I'll come back to editing this comment tomorrow...

Edit: I accidentally left it 6 days to come back to this comment despite me saying "tomorrow" :') I was going to continue to critique the platforming, but I'll get the rest of the bugs out of the way first as that's probably more important...

- Projectiles continue to spawn when in the first death cutscene (I didn't notice this in any other cutscene). During this cutscene the amount of memory taken up by Diari slowly but surely increased - since it only seems to happen after this one cutscene I can't say it's a huge issue but if somebody afked for a while with this cutscene unfinished it'd be kinda awkward...

- Speaking of cutscenes, you can jump over the trigger for the Sirestias' note cutscene. This is honestly kinda cool for speedrunners and second playthroughs (there's no way to quick-skip cutscenes / dialog so this bug really helps) - it's just not that obvious. Doing this also disables the asking the player how they are doing cutscene, the first death cutscene (although if you've only died once it happens directly after you trigger the note cutscene), death messages and probably some later on I didn't bother testing for.

- It's probably just my potato laptop (as soon as I encountered the Aimarca running animation in The Other Side the level ran at like 2fps or something lol), but the game's speed drastically drops whenever I enter any area with greenery, as you may be able to see in some of the gifs. The lack of a frame skip option (an option that would make the game run at less frames instead of every action being slowed down - tbh I'm not sure how you'd implement something like this) is kinda annoying, especially when opening the diary menu takes an agonizing 10 seconds... Seems a bit weird that it only happens in the green areas, when the areas with other colours run at full speed at 60 fps despite them not looking that different visually.

- You can easily animation cancel in the menu (it was probably easier for me given how slowed down everything was) to get the menu looking pretty cursed. Here's an example: (also I had no idea this drawing was meant to be of rolling at first - I thought she was just on the floor to look at the laser at eye level lol)

- You can pretty easily die with the diary menu open to gain control of your character and the menu at the same time.

- Uh I don't really know how this one happened, it kinda just happened when I was trying (and failing) to guess the saw hitboxes like my drawing of the spike ones earlier

- When you hug the right wall when going down into this room, you seem to get stuck in the wall. Not a huge issue, but it might be one later in the game? (Also it's kinda satisfying to just sit here and hold X :) )

Um need to go now but I'll come back later because I haven't addressed how buggy the voi boxes are :/

Edit 2: Ok I might as well finish this stupidly long comment - it's not as if anyone's going to read it anyway...

I genuinely have no idea what these next three bugs relating to the voi boxes are - I'll just let these gifs speak for themselves: (Uh that is what the boxes are called right? Also is putting "voi" before random things' names a naming convention in this game? I think I saw it in the first area's title card (which I didn't even see in my first playthrough due to it being covered with a dialog box at the time (I should stop with these brackets)))

- Box randomly decides to bounce (and stayed there until I left the room iirc)

- Did I crush the box or something? (Also does the lighter colour of box mean it will break after the next use? Can it only be thrown twice before breaking? Or at least that's what it seemed like but it wasn't made too clear...) (Also mysteriously entered the death messages dialog without being in menu)

- I thought beforehand that the cause of the boxes sliding after respawn was velocity they had before player death, but maybe not? (Pay close attention to the bottom right hand corner of the screen)

I think that's all the bugs. Phew. I am done editing this comment for today. Why am I doing this...

Edit 3: Wow, I apparently posted this comment 150 days ago, and I still haven't finished it lmao

Honestly, I pointed out way too many issues in this comment. I suppose this is why I never finished my own attempt at a metroidvania; I focused too much on these small yet still crucial issues and felt awful after fixing them, since I hadn't actually made any more of the game, only slightly patched up what could barely even be considered a game. I then saw your game's devlog, adored it, went to play it and hyperfixated on it for about a month, and I was afraid that the game would be released with the same jank that it had at the time. I suppose I thought that if I couldn't make a perfect game, maybe I could help somebody else with theirs, and maybe they could actually finish. Except I only pointed out the small issues that stopped me from actually finishing my game by doing so, so sorry about that :c (I mean I'm presuming you haven't seen this comment, so it's not like this comment did anything anyway, which is probably for the better.)

Anyway, I hope that you manage to finish this game :3

If you want to, of course.

...although please remove the fixed hitboxes lol

Someone has to shut the windows in this library, it's so windy. Great visuals, I needed a little bit of practice to get the controls mostly right, but after that... and some deaths... 

epic