Have you considered some half-decent google translates of the game files to languages you cannot properly translate to yet, with a disclaimer message about them being a machine translation and you looking into a human translation redo, just as a temporary option to expand your reach?
I really liked it a lot! The art style is excellent, the sound effects are on point, and the music is good. The menu is beautiful! Overall, everything is executed wonderfully. The only issue (which might be just on my end) is that aiming gets locked in the direction of the mouse pointer. It would be great if you could implement an accessibility option to switch between mouse-direction aiming and aiming based on the sprite's orientation. But overall, I really enjoyed what I played. I’ll definitely keep an eye on this project—it's very interesting. Wishing you lots of success!
Hello, I've been a fan of your works for a while now and I've been hyped about this game as soon as I've seen some teasers on twitter. I've gave the demo a shot and attempted at achieving a S+ rank on all levels, and I have to say this game rocks. I love the gorgeous environment art and the fluidity of the combat system. The moment to moment gameplay is spot on with satisfyingly tense combat. But I think the combat system demo still has some rough edges to iron out. When the combat works, it's a really awesome feeling of rapidly combo moves to dispatch enemies as fast as you can. However there are time where the combat does not work as well and it can easily ended up as a frustrating experience. Here some points I would like to point out that really killed my mood for the game.
1. Lack of Parry Indicators
Parrying is the core mechanic of this game and I think it is very important to communicate essential information to the player regarding that move, especially when its direction matter a lot. Currently it isn't clear how long does the parry last, how large it's its hitbox and how long does it last. This has contributed to a lot of frustrating "WTF I've right clicked on that!!!" moments in my play sessions. Sometimes I might miss a parry because my aim direction wasn't aligned with the attack but how much angle of deviation is considered misaligned? I really think this game could benefit from having a visual that indicates the hitbox of the parry. I don't know if the actual hitbox needs to be tweaked or not becase I can't judge it accurately, but communicating the hitbox to the player can at least let players to be able to judge clearly if a missed parry was their fault and how much they've missed it.
2. Multihits This point is more of a problem when it comes to bosses. There are a good number of attacks where you can just get hit multiple times in a rapid succession with barely any way to evade them. This feels more frustrating than fair because you feel like you have no control over the consecutive hits. What this means is that you effective have next to no mistakes you can make during boss battles otherwise you can get pummelled in an instant. I've seen this is contributed by 2 things. One being that bosses attack too rapidly, some attacks are prone to this multihit issues (especially the stage 3 crab miniboss 3 hit combo and the boss's 3 bullets attack) and also the main boss needs to chill after each attack. And another is that any time you get hit you are stunned locked and only have a fraction of a second of iframes given after that which gives you very little room to evade an attack that is already coming when you are stunned lock. If I were to fix this issue, I would look into these first. I am personally not a huge fan of difficulty by limiting the amount of mistakes you can make.
3. Damage numbers So you have 5 hearts and almost every attack hits for 2. That just means you have 3 hits before you are gone in most cases. I would not point out damage numbers as an issue on video games unless it's a problem, but in this case it is a problem when paired with the multihit issue earlier. While solving the multihit issue can alleviate the problem of taking too much damage and dying too quickly. I am not sure if you want the base enemies to deal 1.5 - 2 damage on average, especially on the base difficulty. Perhaps I can suggest that most damage sources would deal 1 damage as a base but make hearts only heal half a heart and maybe put the current damage values under hard mode. I am not entirely sure if the damage numbers is really a problem but I think it may be a good idea to have the average player experience to be challenging but manageable for most players, but leave the harder challenge for those who seek it.
Those are my main issues, some other issues I've encountered are: - player's sword throw ability glicthes when the player's path is blocked
- game does not tell the player whether the dodge roll has iframe or not
- player, hearts and enemies can get lost in the foilage in certain foilage dense combat rooms
- I think it's beneficial to have a perfect run mode where the player has to restart the entire level when they die, this is mainly for players going for the S+ rank
These are all I have to say. I do apologies that this comment can sound negative. Aside from what I've mentioned here, what's the in the game is already perfect as they are and your works are still as fun and beautiful as they come. While I have my frustrations I did enjoy my playthrough for the game and I still hope to see through the development of this game. I've been wanting to play something like Hyper Light Drifter for a while now and perhaps this game can finally scratch that itch of mine.
(also just a fyi for fun, I've completed Tarn, twwwr, rusted moss, Ecila, Eli. and was the creator of Ballet and Steel)
Hello, thank you so much for the thorough feedback, I really appreciate the detail and thoughtfulness in your reply.
All the points you brought up are valid and we are already looking into ways of addressing them.
1: For the the parry-hitbox visibility, it's something we've wanted to do but haven't quite been able to find a visual effect that looks good and reflects the position accurately. And yeah the parry box is a disjointed hitbox, so i totally get how it can be awkward/inconsistent when you don't quite see how it works visually. And yeah being able to tell when the angle was off of timing is off can be really hard to.
2: For the lack of I-frames, this is in due part because of the very volatile hp-values of you and enemies, so giving the player access to longer iframe-windows would make it very easy to just steam-roll most encounters with firames/rapid healing. That being said there might be a more elegant solution ( ie you get 1 second of iframes but loose them once you attack. ), we'll experiment more with it.
3: IIrc, as far as enemies are concerned, only the final boss's saw attack and mortar explosions do 2 damage. Most everything else is either 1 or 1.5 damage. ( biter lunge = 1.5, spitter projectile = 1, crab enemy attacks= 1 or 1.5 ). So If most attacks did 2 damage, I'm very sorry you might have been playing a bugged build.
As for the damage values being high, it mostly stems from wanting to focus on having easier attacks you have to dodge consistently instead of harder attacks you're allowed to get hit more often by. At least during our testing we found that 5 hp + enemies dealing 1 dmg quickly turned into mashing with how many hits you could tank. ( making hearts heal 0.5 hp isn't a bad solution, but might be a little late since we'd have to rebalance the game around it ops... )
Also an perfect run mode option is actually a really great QOL idea, gonna try to get that implemented into the demo soon, thanks for the suggestion.
Sorry if this reply is a little short/rambley, It's late but wanted to leave a reply since I really appreciated the thoughtful feedback. It's also fun getting it from someone with so much experience with my previous work.
Oh and also, hope your own game-dev work is going well, Ballet of Steel was super fun.
That's all I have to reply with for now, hope you have a good day
Hello, sorry for the late response. But thank you very much for listening to my feedback. I do have some responses to your points.
1. Yeah I can see designing a suitable visual indicator is no easy task, but maybe I can suggest also using a slashing smear effect but i a different visual?
2. Sadly I don't think I can come up of any reasonable way to fully prevent this outside of giving the players more iframes. Perhaps having some input buffer for player's action so that they can be executed immediately once the player is out of the stagger state helps? I do appriciate the effort on the team to experimenting a solution for this. But I can suggest at least address sections of the game where this problem is more prominent and causes more annoyance than it should to the player's experience. So far I can tell this issue comes from bosses that can spam heavy hitting attacks at a specific angle that is likely going to hit the player as soon as their iframes ends. From the demo these sections are the crab boss's 3 hit sword attack and the boss's 3 saw blade projectile attack. Perhaps tone down on the spam attacks in either their attack rate or attack damage. Or maybe make the crab attack end it's combo if it had landed a hit on the player.
3. About the damage number thing I did check my game and you were right about how the damage numbers are set and my game is not bugged. I guess I was too tired at the time to noticed it and I guess the fighting the boss constantly and dying to it in consecutive hits and had conditioned me to think every attack is lethal (which in my defense, 1.5 damage is still lethal). This point was the one where I was the least sure about anyway so I trust your judgement more on this one.
On yeah, one thing about the perfect run mode is that it's best to only show this mode on levels that the player have already beaten and indicate what is it fore (to help players attempt to get an s rank without needing to restart the level from the menu manually). We definately don't want new players mistaken that this mode is how the game should be played.
Anyways this is all I have. Again I am still very hype for this game and I will still get it once it is out so wishing you all the best in your efforts to complete this game.
i wrote my feedback in the form a day or two ago but i wanted to say that i really really like this game and i shared it with a few of my friends. definitely looking forward to full release and also wishlisted!
I love this game, but there are honestly too many controls. Even after rebinding, it becomes difficult to play with more and more keys required to complete levels. Maybe it's because I'm using a trackpad, which isn't ideal, but there are still too many controls to keybind into a comfortable configuration. Just want to emphasize, though, that it has massive potential and I look forward to future updates.
Playtested on a trackpad, noticed that mine doesn't have nearly enough sensitivity to allow to target and parry conveniently. I think that it's doable with the amount of buttons given if you rebind jump to E and parry to Space, and maybe use left Shift instead of right click (I assume it's the part that makes it hard for you?), but I myself really can't aim and press appropriate click nearly fast enough for what the game demands. Regarding too many controls, alas, the game's kinda meant for shuffling between a lot of buttons - it's in the genre of these hack-n-slashes. Do you think something like double inputs or multi-button inputs would make it easier (i.e. pressing double direction to roll, or holding down attack to block) to play in your conditions? Could you tell a bit more about how exactly you play? I'm very curios what issue you ran into!
I didn't think of that configuration, that could work. The last config I tried involved trying to use my thumb on the trackpad and turning sensitivity way up. I had up arrow for jump and right shift for grapple, trying to have a more even distribution of work between hands. Double inputs would help with the configuring greatly, but honestly, I just need to get a mouse.
Beklager tekstveggen med tilbakemeldinger under, men jeg er for språknørd til at jeg klarte å la være 😅
Og så er jo dette en tidlig demo, så jeg regner med at teksten vil endres en del uansett.
Første og andre dialog med [hvitt hår blå kjole] er fortsatt på engelsk, og det er flere grammatikkfeil av typen en vs to konsonanter, ellers har jeg en del forslag til (forhåpentligvis) bedre oversettelser (som for meg virker mer naturlige):
et knapp for å starte -> trykk en knapp for å starte // hvilken som helst knapp for å starte
(...) i dypet (...) sitte der ventende på deg -> venter på deg i dypet (...)
reflektere -> parere
direksjon -> retning
sigil found er bare på engelsk (det er forresten ikke mulig å equippe sigils?)
stick -> stikke eller spak (men stick går helt fint da)
det er ikke noe av din business -> det raker deg ikke
om du liker det eller ikke -> enten du liker det eller ikke // uansett om du liker det eller ikke
Jeg forstår, Da har jeg ikke noe valg -> Skjønner, da har jeg ikke noe valg. // sløyfe "Jeg forstår" helt eventuelt?
Dette vil bare ta et sekund -> Dette vil bare ta et øyeblikk
utakksomme lille pest -> Utakknemmlige lille [kryp?]
Her ofrer jeg deg en smertefri død -> Her tilbyr jeg deg en smertefri død
En død så grusom -> En så grusom død (men hvis [hvitt hår blå kjole] skal snakke litt eldre så funker originalen bedre)
Så vennligst oppsøk den nermeste klippen og (..) -> Så vennligst finn nærmeste klippe og kast deg utfor den (denne dialogen føltes litt unaturlig, mulig noen av tilbakemeldingene her er litt off the point)
og så åpnet jeg rusted moss for å se om det var en norsk oversettelse der, men det fant jeg ikke (┬┬﹏┬┬)
After (maybe?) seeing everything the demo has to offer, I'm really happy with how this is coming along to far.
Visually, the game is a far step forward, even compared to Rusted Moss. The environments are visually striking, and the character designs are fun and interesting.
As a long-time fan of your work, the gameplay is very familiar and comfortable. This game feels like a successor to, and evolution of TWWWR and Ecila/Alice. As someone who really loves TWWWR, it was nice to see ideas from that game carry over into this one.
I did run into a few bugs, most weren't too bad, but there was an instakill bug in the third level when backtracking in a specific way.
TL;DR, The demo is really good. Im extremely excited to see what comes of this game in the future.
Sorry for the late reply, I'm really glad to hear you're enjoying it. I was kinda worried it wouldn't stack up compared to my older games in terms of visuals/gameplay, but I'm glad to hear that people who have played those also like this one.
Just saw this in my feed and wanted to say absolutely love the long drawn cast shadows over the environment and character. Adds some nice visual interest and a distinctive look.
Edit: played the first two levels of the demo. I tend to prefer keyboard only controls and noticed that while K is mapped by default to attack and parry can be custom bound to a key the parry direction only follows where the cursor is rather than character facing position, so I’m assuming keyboard only control isn’t feasible.
If the game has/will have controller support though it’d be great. Wishlisted!
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Have you considered some half-decent google translates of the game files to languages you cannot properly translate to yet, with a disclaimer message about them being a machine translation and you looking into a human translation redo, just as a temporary option to expand your reach?
hello I am a chinese and I can't know so many English word can the 作者 use the chinese to speak,thanks
and,I think this game is very good but I don't know what can I do
Sorry we can't do that as of right now.
ok,thanks.
I really liked it a lot! The art style is excellent, the sound effects are on point, and the music is good. The menu is beautiful! Overall, everything is executed wonderfully. The only issue (which might be just on my end) is that aiming gets locked in the direction of the mouse pointer. It would be great if you could implement an accessibility option to switch between mouse-direction aiming and aiming based on the sprite's orientation. But overall, I really enjoyed what I played. I’ll definitely keep an eye on this project—it's very interesting. Wishing you lots of success!
Peak game, can't wait for the official release!!
Thank you ^^
This game is gorgeous! It's honestly kind of challenging, too. Though I'm not typically good at this type of game
Thank you so much. There is an option to enable flexible mode, which will let you make the game easier if that's something you want.
Hello, I've been a fan of your works for a while now and I've been hyped about this game as soon as I've seen some teasers on twitter. I've gave the demo a shot and attempted at achieving a S+ rank on all levels, and I have to say this game rocks. I love the gorgeous environment art and the fluidity of the combat system. The moment to moment gameplay is spot on with satisfyingly tense combat. But I think the combat system demo still has some rough edges to iron out. When the combat works, it's a really awesome feeling of rapidly combo moves to dispatch enemies as fast as you can. However there are time where the combat does not work as well and it can easily ended up as a frustrating experience. Here some points I would like to point out that really killed my mood for the game.
1. Lack of Parry Indicators
Parrying is the core mechanic of this game and I think it is very important to communicate essential information to the player regarding that move, especially when its direction matter a lot. Currently it isn't clear how long does the parry last, how large it's its hitbox and how long does it last. This has contributed to a lot of frustrating "WTF I've right clicked on that!!!" moments in my play sessions. Sometimes I might miss a parry because my aim direction wasn't aligned with the attack but how much angle of deviation is considered misaligned? I really think this game could benefit from having a visual that indicates the hitbox of the parry. I don't know if the actual hitbox needs to be tweaked or not becase I can't judge it accurately, but communicating the hitbox to the player can at least let players to be able to judge clearly if a missed parry was their fault and how much they've missed it.
2. Multihits
This point is more of a problem when it comes to bosses. There are a good number of attacks where you can just get hit multiple times in a rapid succession with barely any way to evade them. This feels more frustrating than fair because you feel like you have no control over the consecutive hits. What this means is that you effective have next to no mistakes you can make during boss battles otherwise you can get pummelled in an instant. I've seen this is contributed by 2 things. One being that bosses attack too rapidly, some attacks are prone to this multihit issues (especially the stage 3 crab miniboss 3 hit combo and the boss's 3 bullets attack) and also the main boss needs to chill after each attack. And another is that any time you get hit you are stunned locked and only have a fraction of a second of iframes given after that which gives you very little room to evade an attack that is already coming when you are stunned lock. If I were to fix this issue, I would look into these first. I am personally not a huge fan of difficulty by limiting the amount of mistakes you can make.
3. Damage numbers
So you have 5 hearts and almost every attack hits for 2. That just means you have 3 hits before you are gone in most cases. I would not point out damage numbers as an issue on video games unless it's a problem, but in this case it is a problem when paired with the multihit issue earlier. While solving the multihit issue can alleviate the problem of taking too much damage and dying too quickly. I am not sure if you want the base enemies to deal 1.5 - 2 damage on average, especially on the base difficulty. Perhaps I can suggest that most damage sources would deal 1 damage as a base but make hearts only heal half a heart and maybe put the current damage values under hard mode. I am not entirely sure if the damage numbers is really a problem but I think it may be a good idea to have the average player experience to be challenging but manageable for most players, but leave the harder challenge for those who seek it.
Those are my main issues, some other issues I've encountered are:
- player's sword throw ability glicthes when the player's path is blocked
- game does not tell the player whether the dodge roll has iframe or not
- player, hearts and enemies can get lost in the foilage in certain foilage dense combat rooms
- I think it's beneficial to have a perfect run mode where the player has to restart the entire level when they die, this is mainly for players going for the S+ rank
These are all I have to say. I do apologies that this comment can sound negative. Aside from what I've mentioned here, what's the in the game is already perfect as they are and your works are still as fun and beautiful as they come. While I have my frustrations I did enjoy my playthrough for the game and I still hope to see through the development of this game. I've been wanting to play something like Hyper Light Drifter for a while now and perhaps this game can finally scratch that itch of mine.
(also just a fyi for fun, I've completed Tarn, twwwr, rusted moss, Ecila, Eli. and was the creator of Ballet and Steel)
Hello, thank you so much for the thorough feedback, I really appreciate the detail and thoughtfulness in your reply.
All the points you brought up are valid and we are already looking into ways of addressing them.
1: For the the parry-hitbox visibility, it's something we've wanted to do but haven't quite been able to find a visual effect that looks good and reflects the position accurately. And yeah the parry box is a disjointed hitbox, so i totally get how it can be awkward/inconsistent when you don't quite see how it works visually. And yeah being able to tell when the angle was off of timing is off can be really hard to.
2: For the lack of I-frames, this is in due part because of the very volatile hp-values of you and enemies, so giving the player access to longer iframe-windows would make it very easy to just steam-roll most encounters with firames/rapid healing. That being said there might be a more elegant solution ( ie you get 1 second of iframes but loose them once you attack. ), we'll experiment more with it.
3: IIrc, as far as enemies are concerned, only the final boss's saw attack and mortar explosions do 2 damage. Most everything else is either 1 or 1.5 damage. ( biter lunge = 1.5, spitter projectile = 1, crab enemy attacks= 1 or 1.5 ). So If most attacks did 2 damage, I'm very sorry you might have been playing a bugged build.
As for the damage values being high, it mostly stems from wanting to focus on having easier attacks you have to dodge consistently instead of harder attacks you're allowed to get hit more often by. At least during our testing we found that 5 hp + enemies dealing 1 dmg quickly turned into mashing with how many hits you could tank. ( making hearts heal 0.5 hp isn't a bad solution, but might be a little late since we'd have to rebalance the game around it ops... )
Also an perfect run mode option is actually a really great QOL idea, gonna try to get that implemented into the demo soon, thanks for the suggestion.
Sorry if this reply is a little short/rambley, It's late but wanted to leave a reply since I really appreciated the thoughtful feedback. It's also fun getting it from someone with so much experience with my previous work.
Oh and also, hope your own game-dev work is going well, Ballet of Steel was super fun.
That's all I have to reply with for now, hope you have a good day
-Emlise
Hello, sorry for the late response. But thank you very much for listening to my feedback. I do have some responses to your points.
1. Yeah I can see designing a suitable visual indicator is no easy task, but maybe I can suggest also using a slashing smear effect but i a different visual?
2. Sadly I don't think I can come up of any reasonable way to fully prevent this outside of giving the players more iframes. Perhaps having some input buffer for player's action so that they can be executed immediately once the player is out of the stagger state helps? I do appriciate the effort on the team to experimenting a solution for this. But I can suggest at least address sections of the game where this problem is more prominent and causes more annoyance than it should to the player's experience. So far I can tell this issue comes from bosses that can spam heavy hitting attacks at a specific angle that is likely going to hit the player as soon as their iframes ends. From the demo these sections are the crab boss's 3 hit sword attack and the boss's 3 saw blade projectile attack. Perhaps tone down on the spam attacks in either their attack rate or attack damage. Or maybe make the crab attack end it's combo if it had landed a hit on the player.
3. About the damage number thing I did check my game and you were right about how the damage numbers are set and my game is not bugged. I guess I was too tired at the time to noticed it and I guess the fighting the boss constantly and dying to it in consecutive hits and had conditioned me to think every attack is lethal (which in my defense, 1.5 damage is still lethal). This point was the one where I was the least sure about anyway so I trust your judgement more on this one.
On yeah, one thing about the perfect run mode is that it's best to only show this mode on levels that the player have already beaten and indicate what is it fore (to help players attempt to get an s rank without needing to restart the level from the menu manually). We definately don't want new players mistaken that this mode is how the game should be played.
Anyways this is all I have. Again I am still very hype for this game and I will still get it once it is out so wishing you all the best in your efforts to complete this game.
i wrote my feedback in the form a day or two ago but i wanted to say that i really really like this game and i shared it with a few of my friends. definitely looking forward to full release and also wishlisted!
I love this game, but there are honestly too many controls. Even after rebinding, it becomes difficult to play with more and more keys required to complete levels. Maybe it's because I'm using a trackpad, which isn't ideal, but there are still too many controls to keybind into a comfortable configuration. Just want to emphasize, though, that it has massive potential and I look forward to future updates.
Playtested on a trackpad, noticed that mine doesn't have nearly enough sensitivity to allow to target and parry conveniently. I think that it's doable with the amount of buttons given if you rebind jump to E and parry to Space, and maybe use left Shift instead of right click (I assume it's the part that makes it hard for you?), but I myself really can't aim and press appropriate click nearly fast enough for what the game demands. Regarding too many controls, alas, the game's kinda meant for shuffling between a lot of buttons - it's in the genre of these hack-n-slashes.
Do you think something like double inputs or multi-button inputs would make it easier (i.e. pressing double direction to roll, or holding down attack to block) to play in your conditions? Could you tell a bit more about how exactly you play? I'm very curios what issue you ran into!
I didn't think of that configuration, that could work. The last config I tried involved trying to use my thumb on the trackpad and turning sensitivity way up. I had up arrow for jump and right shift for grapple, trying to have a more even distribution of work between hands. Double inputs would help with the configuring greatly, but honestly, I just need to get a mouse.
Den norske oversettelsen virker litt mangelfull 😅
Iallfall var det ikke mye lesbar tekst i tutorialen
Å sorry, kan hende at noe gikk galt med tekst-importerings koden. Skal få sett på det.
Spilte gjennom demoen og
men angående spillet ellers så er gameplayet fantastisk og grafikken nydelig!
(eneste er at sverdgrapplingen virker bedre egnet for mus+tastatur, kunne trengt noe autoaim for gamepad)
Der ble det mer norsk ja!
Beklager tekstveggen med tilbakemeldinger under, men jeg er for språknørd til at jeg klarte å la være 😅
Og så er jo dette en tidlig demo, så jeg regner med at teksten vil endres en del uansett.
Første og andre dialog med [hvitt hår blå kjole] er fortsatt på engelsk, og det er flere grammatikkfeil av typen en vs to konsonanter, ellers har jeg en del forslag til (forhåpentligvis) bedre oversettelser (som for meg virker mer naturlige):
og så åpnet jeg rusted moss for å se om det var en norsk oversettelse der, men det fant jeg ikke (┬┬﹏┬┬)
After (maybe?) seeing everything the demo has to offer, I'm really happy with how this is coming along to far.
Visually, the game is a far step forward, even compared to Rusted Moss. The environments are visually striking, and the character designs are fun and interesting.
As a long-time fan of your work, the gameplay is very familiar and comfortable. This game feels like a successor to, and evolution of TWWWR and Ecila/Alice. As someone who really loves TWWWR, it was nice to see ideas from that game carry over into this one.
I did run into a few bugs, most weren't too bad, but there was an instakill bug in the third level when backtracking in a specific way.
TL;DR, The demo is really good. Im extremely excited to see what comes of this game in the future.
Sorry for the late reply, I'm really glad to hear you're enjoying it. I was kinda worried it wouldn't stack up compared to my older games in terms of visuals/gameplay, but I'm glad to hear that people who have played those also like this one.
Just saw this in my feed and wanted to say absolutely love the long drawn cast shadows over the environment and character. Adds some nice visual interest and a distinctive look.
Edit: played the first two levels of the demo. I tend to prefer keyboard only controls and noticed that while K is mapped by default to attack and parry can be custom bound to a key the parry direction only follows where the cursor is rather than character facing position, so I’m assuming keyboard only control isn’t feasible.
If the game has/will have controller support though it’d be great. Wishlisted!
Thank you so much for the feedback! The game does indeed have controller support!