I'm sorry for taking so long to respond to this message!
You could always make the boomerangs be created where they are right now but then make them move extra distance immediately (with collision checks). But it's not a huge deal.
noted! I'll see what I can do about it
A simple solution would be to recolor the end-of-level arrow to blue or something so that the player is aware that it's the end. Other options might include making some sort of logo to symbolize it, maybe skull-themed.
mm, I would be against the blue colored idea, since it would go against the design choice of making all of the big text and icons red/yellow ("LET'S GO" text when you start a stage, etc) but I've been thinking of making a little icon for it, yeah, maybe a little "exit sign" stick figure, or something skull-themed like you said.
A lot of vertical ascension levels. Levels by name: Broken Seal, Power Surge, Ascension, and several segments of mountain levels and parts of First Tree. Most of my beef comes from the seal tower levels, and while visual detail could help, I feel like maybe some other means of vertical ascension like springs or elevators could come in handy too.
thanks for the tips! To be fair, I've been planning on littering the tower stages with statues, they're just not put in yet. I've been adding things to liven up possibly visual boring parts of stages recently*
In general, any power that sacrifices some aspect of its original components is worse off for it. Also, it looks like the damage each power deals is unbalanced, making some powers automatic choices over others. I didn't have a chance to get a good look at every power, and I understand that powers like Laser are supposed to be much better than others, but when it comes to general powers they should probably be a little more balanced.
Strong Powers:
Gun+Smoke: Does ridiculous damage at the gun's normal range. I'm not sure if Gun+Bomb is more powerful, but if so then they're both good.
Cutter+Smoke: I took down Samuel in three waves with this power, by throwing a boomerang out and then spamming the down slash. This power does about as much damage as Gun+Smoke but probably deserves to since it's shorter range, but either way I'd like to see both of them made a little weaker (or others made more powerful)
Weak Powers:
Shield+Smoke: Okay, this one is basically unusable as it is. The standard attack has the longest cooldown ever and a tiny, tiny range. If the standard attack traveled forward slowly and had about half the cooldown (I think it waits for the smoke particles to decay before you can attack again, but I'd recommend doing it some other way) then it would be better, and if the up and down attacks sent the same large smoke formation traveling slowly upward or downward, it would be pretty usable.
Gun+Cutter: Two great powers on their own... equals one of the worst powers in the game. I like the bouncing projectiles, but Bomb+Smoke also bounces and does a ton more damage and has more range, etc. Maybe if the shots were made quite a bit bigger and did a lot more damage than they do right now on-hit, I could see it.
Speed+Shield: This power is bad because it conserves Jack's normal attack, which is not only weak but super short-range. I can't think of ideas to make it better, except maybe if Jack threw a shield projectile or something instead with this one.
Bomb+Shield: This is like Speed+Shield in that it's just one power plus another. I mean, it's alright, but you can always do better with a different combo power, making me never pick ones like this.
I understand what you mean here, thank you for the details.
gun+smoke- hm, maybe I could decrease the range on the bullets if you have this combo or something. maybe even make the bullets travel in a weird arc or something.
cutter+smoke- sure I can make this a bit weaker.
Shield+smoke- I agree, this combo is terrible and I've been planning on changing it. I have a few ideas of things I can do for this, so I'll be testing some of them out.
Gun+Cutter- making the shots bigger and stronger sounds really appealing to me actually (I immediately thought of the fireball special attacks in Mario RPG where the fireballs are bigger than the characters)
speed+Shield - honestly, I still haven't been able to think of a decent power to go with this combo, it's technically still a placeholder ability for now. Some ideas are shield projectile like you said, or possibly whenever Jack dashes with this, he creates some sort of damaging aura in front of where he steps.
Bomb+Shield- the thing about this combo though, is that it makes you immune to your bombs' explosions (hence the kevlar Jacket and blast shield Jack wears). Is that an alright perk, or does it need more? Actually, maybe I should make it so that no explosions hurt Jack with this combo equipped...
-Samuel's hitbox is... weird. Some powers hit him fine, others pass right through his face. I'm talking about when he's on the ground here, I know that he can't be hurt until he does his charge attack. I'd recommend making it a big bigger so that certain powers aren't completely unusable on him.
oh, whoops! That was a mistake on my part, his hitbox is only half as tall as it should be, it seems! Thanks for pointing that out.
-After loading a saved game from the shop, no music plays until you go back to the map. Not a big deal, but I figured I'd note it.
noted, I'll see about what I can do to make that work.
-On the note of saving, it feels weird that I could either pay 300P to save OR beat a certain save-point level and save for free, in exchange for time. I like making the player want to limit their saves, so maybe consider making levels that save once you beat them only do that once.
wait, do the save stages save more than once? they're only supposed to save once you beat them the first time, and never again. They should only be able to save the game if they're green- once they're grey that shouldnt happen again. I'll have to look into this...
-Also regarding saves, I'd probably go ahead and give the player five lives if they're below five and save. Since they could just jump in a pit a couple times or reload the game and get back to five either way, there's no reason not to just speed the process up for them.
I'm not sure what to think about this one. It doesn't feel right to reward the player with more lives just for that reason.
-The terminals in 'Starship Crash Site' could do with being a bit more visible. Especially when going in to blitzkrieg one of the face-turrets and seeing all your shots hit a previously-unnoticed terminal instead.
noted, I've removed that badly-placed turret, but I'm also making the terminals more visible as well.
-Consider having 'trap parts' like in the first part of 'Wide Open Spaces' be one-way with the help of jump-through ground, so that players can't go down into them and clear them out, only to find that they were supposed to be going the other way all along.
Ah, I understand this, sure thing.
In 'Under Attack', you're given speed power right at the start, but the gimmick of the level doesn't play well with it at all (since you definitely want to go slow unless you're a madman). I'd either recommend making the girl follow you faster if you have the speed powerup or not placing speed enemies at the start of it.
Good idea, it's a stage I havent done much work on and one of the first I made, so it's hindsight that that happened. taking out the speedup enemies and replacing them with something more reasonable.
In 'Doggy Paddle', health from the scarecrows in the water part will often float out of grabbing range (below you, usually). I'd recommend guaranteeing the health items don't float too far in that level.
Oh! good idea, I hadn't thought of that.
In 'Ancient's Playground', the player gets a big scarecrow at the end of one room and then a normal scarecrow greets them in the next room. Since the normal scarecrow is pretty much useless, I'd probably remove it.
oops! another hindsight, removing it now.
Couldn't all the song files in the main directory of the game be moved to a folder? It would be better than having to sift through all those songs, and I'm sure the pxtone dll commands could just search for them in the other folder instead.
I was wondering if anyone would bring this up. Here's the thing about that, since these are just demos, I haven't been focusing on that, but I have already made a plan for the final release and made sure it would work. Gamemaker allows you to hold extra files inside of it, which it spits out when you open the game to play it, and then pulls back in once you close the game, that's what I'm going to do for the music in the final release (if people want the music, I'm also releasing the music seperately- for free as well, of course)
Since I use the pixeltone dll supersound gamemaker whatchamacallit, I'm not sure how to actually make it access files outside of the game folder (and putting the files in a folder in the folder doesn't seem to work either)
Also, putting the files into the game right now messes with certain things, such as needing to edit or replace a song file at a later time, and I've made mistakes with it before, and needed to reset everything because of it.
I'm sorry for that.
Overall it was really fun, and I can't wait until it's all finished. I hope my critiques will help you, and I also hope more people hear about this game
Thank you very much, Glyph! Your critiques do very much help me, due to their honesty and thuroughness, you've helped me realize a lot of things I've overlooked up until now. I hope more people hear about this game as well, thank you.
*as mentioned earlier, the background formations for breaking up large grassy areas or areas without a lot of varying colors:
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