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[jackyokboy]

Hello,

We are a group of 5 of college students who collaborate together to create this game in 3 months as a learning experience.

Abyssal Blade is an action packed and simple hack and slash takes place under a sci-fi theme in which you destroy waves and waves of evil robots with intensive hacking and shooting, featuring a survival mode and a variety of power-ups.

http://www.kongregate.com/games/jackyokboy/abyssal-blade

We really appreciate any feedback you can provide to our game, both in terms of programming, aesthetics, or game play.

Thank You and Enjoy! : D

[RUG]

I played the game for a few minutes. Aesthetically it looks fantastic and the animations are diverse enough for the combat to stay interesting.

I felt as though the controls were difficult to read in the loading screen and the UI was cluttered and confusing with the inclusion of the Playstation buttons. but that's just me.
Overall the game left a good first impression.

[onirium-games]

Hey,

I'll try to be as constructive as possible. My main impression after playing your game is that you are good artists, but not (yet) good game designers. I think animations in Abyssal Blade are nice and well done, although some of them are still rough sketches. The character/monster/environment designs could be nice too, but overall they are lacking detail.

I believe what you'd need is a more global approach of the game visual design: what visual style are we aiming for, what color palette do we want for which elements, what information must be conveyed to the player. Currently, the game feels like someone pretty much patched up several assets together in Unity.

In my opinion, the first thing you should ask yourselves is: what visual style are we aiming for? Do we want a sleek, detailed style made of shapes and solid colors ala Guacamelee? a highly pixelated, crisp and 'aligned' style ala Crawl? Simple animations made with moving shapes or smooth 'traditional' animations with many frames? A lot of VFX, particles gushing everywhere and post processing or a plainer style, just a few particles for footsteps and sword hit? Block environment made of large tiles, or organic shapes (rocks, cliffs, forests, water...) drawn by hand?

This issue is extremely important, and not only for artists but also game programmers and designers.

After that, your game needs a lot of polish on the gameplay side. It is a hack&slash, which means that smooth and responsive gameplay is critical. There are thousands of games in that genre so maybe you could start by picking a few as sources inspiration? Then, study these games in detail, analyze every frame especially during combat, write down where and which VFX  and sound FX are used. I strongly advise you to do that: many would-be game creators (and that's including me) ofter overlook the details in games inner workings because they think having played them and a bit of common sense is enough to do better.

Finally, some important bits:
- scaled up and blurred sprites will ruin any attempt at trying to make your game look professionnal
- same thing for visible seams between tiles, unless it's part of your aesthetics
- everything I've written here is of course not restricted to Abyssal Blade

There are many more things to say about your game or game creation in general, but I can't go on forever Anyway, I wish the 5 of you good luck and to keep trying and make better and better games. Keep in mind that game creation needs time and commitment. Having done that in 3 months is pretty impressive in my opinion, so there's absolutely no reason to stop now!

Olivier

PS: the 'water stream' VFX rocks, I love it!

[Quicksand-S]

I think onirium-games covered the everything I would've said about the graphics. The only other thing is that there are green lines beside the buttons on the main menu as if they've got improper transparency or something.

I don't have much to add about the gameplay. I think it's important for attacks to have feedback. I need more than just a health bar shrinking. I want to feel like even my basic attack has some sort of weight behind it.

One other thing is that maybe the AI could be adjusted to better suit the gameplay. The player's aiming is in four directions but the enemies come from all directions. They don't necessarily need to stick to a grid, but maybe they should choose which of the four basic directions they want to come at you from and then try to get into a position to do that.

Collisions with the trees seem unnecessary. Maybe add long grass or bushes to block the player with straight lines. As things are now, it's very easy to get caught on a tree while moving.

I understand that the beginning is a tutorial, but I don't really like that weapons come into existence as you enter areas. When I first started, I thought the keys weren't working (because I didn't yet know that the weapons would show up at the bottom with their corresponding keys). It would be nice if maybe they showed from the beginning but were faded out. It's also nice to be able to try attacks outside of combat to get a feel for them before the pressure's on.

[gunswordfist]

i will check this out.