Long time lurker of the topic, but never got around to play it yet. Until today. I’ll be writing a review of the demo later this week for my website, but here’s some feedback from my playthrough. It’s in chronological order, and some of it is really nitpicky, but it’s stuff I’d like to hear when building a game.
Overall, I think you have a gem of a game in the making. The concept it nice, it plays smoothly, and the art style and sprites are amazing. Of course the content of the demo was short, so I’m curious how much will ship with the real game.
Here’s some things I noticed. If you need further clarification, let me know:
- Menu:
- I couldn’t click “confirm” when typing my username, only enter works
- The game didn’t start in full screen
- Enter doesn’t seem to work in menu’s. Space does.
- If you go to options, then arrow up (so the input field is focussed) there’s no way out except hitting escape. (with keyboard at least, mouse works)
- I’m on ultrawide (3440x1400) and it wasn’t an option (but rarely supported, so to be expected) It does show me more of the game than what I’m supposed to see I believe.
- Up arrow doesn’t work in main menu. at that stage I had to reopen thge game as I couldn’t select start game.
- The menu buttons seem to be changing changing brightness, which feels a bit rough (Flickering effect)
- Menu music is nice
- Menu graphics are nice
- Game
- Intro story is nice, good sounds and enough story to care, without making you want to skip.
- First visual impression is amazing.
- It feels odd I can’t move left in the start area (I later realised this is due to keybinds)
- The first forest dweller text box background was too small (It covered one line, but it had 2 lines of text)
- I got semi stuck talking with the dwellers. I was trying to skip the convo (after I accidentally started it the second time), and then it seemed the input for pressing up was delayed somewhat, so even if I didn’t click, it’d start again.
- apparently I had to use up arrow to move left.
- The game froze if I went esc>then back to hub
- I went to rebind, in the keybind menu, there seems to be a weird grey bar about halfway between the left label and the right label of every key. (So in the middle where on the left the name of the action is and on the right the key used).
- Keybind appeared to be correct according to menu, but after rebinding then worked well. I assume something is amiss there.
- Keybinding to the same key is allowed
- The “hold space to glide” tip seems to complete if you make it half way across the gap with the spike balls. But you can also reach that without gliding.
- A normal jump feels significantly weaker than a wall jump, because a wall jump makes you go about 1.5x as high.
- I found some blue pillars that looked like background detail, but I couldn’t run past them and had to jump over. Is that intentional? I couldn’t break them so it felt weird.
- I sometimes can’t throw kunai, but I’m unsure why. Especially when the tooltip says to throw it.
- I now learned I couldn’t throw due to the energy running out. Perhaps you can make a visual indicator on or near Pin when you try to throw a kunai but don’t have energy. I didn’t realise what energy was for, as I assumed it’d be for running and jumping.
Again, big list, but mostly minor things. I’d say the keybinding is definitely worth looking into.
I’ll make sure to come back to it later, but if you ever need another test run, let me know 