"OK, huge disclaimer: I am not bashing your game, I am not trying to be rude I am sincerely trying to be honest here and tell you the exact honest thing you should hear. I won't be rude and I won't step on your toes, but this disclaimer is there just in case you treat your game as your baby (which isn't wrong and you should do to some extent
)"
Please, another disclaimer to, probably, everybody doing feedback for a game: Be as bash, direct as you can. And to everybody receiving the feedback: Read exactly what the play testers say, and don't assume that they absolutely despise the game because they noticed some bugs that annoyed them a lot.
"3- What I found confusing is the weapons themselves. The number 2 (water bursting?) was really weird. I could see it puts off the fire, but beyond that, it felt useless."
The Bomb actually destroys any enemy projectiles. I'll think of a better tutorial.
"4- The other ball bouncy thing looked nice as well and played nice, except its bounce directions are sometimes unpredictable that I ended up just discarding it all together."
The Gumball has a little gravity to it, like, 5-10 pixels a second. I'll think of a better tutorial. (2)
"6- There is one major thing this game lacks and that is consistency, everything is all over the place that it takes me a long time to learn something because of the contradictions. For example, the alien like creature that jumps can shoot through walls but everything can't. Everything is shooting projectile as it would look like random speed. Some turrets are literally spamming projectiles while others take their time.
Don't get me wrong, that is how difficulty and diversity is achieved but it feels too odd and too random. I don't mind a turret firing every 0.5 seconds a projectile. But I mind it firing every 0.05 seconds and I have to compete with its projectiles breaking my Z key to get behind it."
I'll think about it, I think I'm going to do a list of all the enemies through the game and their consistency.
"7- Some enemies don't really look like enemies. The hand for example, that doesn't look like an enemy."
The hand? What hand? Can you present some screenshots?
"8- Which brings the walls, the background graphics and the walls some time melt together so I don't know if this is a background or a foreground element. To tell you the truth in one of the levels I kept walking forward and didn't move at all. 30 seconds like this thinking I was stuck, turned out it was a wall."
To fix this, I think I'll look for some new, simpler, non-Metroid placeholder art.
"10- That brings the level layout. The levels are made randomly, it shows because sometimes you can run through an entire corridor that is empty with nothing in it. Another thing is the dead ends. While they aren't many strict dead ends (where you have to track back from) when you create a loop in a level and at the "corner" of that loop you have nothing there, it feels like a dead end. You just had me waste X amount of time doing practically nothing.
That said, the level layout makes you feel contained within an area (for example imagine a 4-side box) you keep going within the area until you see an opening (imagine that 1 side is now missing so there are 3 sides only) then you suddenly jump off and you are trailing in an empty space. At that point I thought I was outside the level (can you imagine the feeling with the example?) then suddenly I am still in the level in a whole new area. The feeling I get is: am I supposed to be here? Is this part of the level? Is this accounted for? Little is present within the area sometimes that tells me so or makes me feel as such."
I'm not sure what areas you're talking about :S There is a thing with this game, though, that, when you fall of the bottom of the layout, you die, and restart the level. But you mention a whole new area, so..
"11- You mentioned you can't do any legs animation. That is fine, you can check out
(the link is for a tutorial) it is a skeletal animation program. You can cut down the graphics for the player (head alone, 2x legs, 2x arms and torso for example) and animate it using that tool. It is extremely powerful and easy (I am no animator and I could get a good looking result within 30 minutes)."
Ok, I'll check it out.
"12- The graphics for the player. I know this is place holder art most likely. However, in all honesty the dead sprite looks WAY cooler than the living version. Why the change in quality? I'd say use the same quality as the dead sprite. It looks really good
."
Heheheheh. This game is really a huge reference to Cheetahmen, which I assume you barely heard off. Basically, the head of AG( short for Action Gamemaster, both the name of the game and the protagonist) is a rip out of Cheetahmen's cutscene art, while I drew the rest of the body. The "Death" sprite is a full rip of another cutscene sprite in there. So yeah, basically, AG is a Frankenstein.
"14- Checkpoints. Every time I die I end up at the beginning of the level. I'd say add some checkpoints, it would really help out. Specially with the current state of the game."
I really intend the game to drop the whole "respawn" system and make AG die as soon as he runs out of hp, and make save points, like Metroid. But since the game's really small, I decreased the maximum hp and made these level respawns.
"15- Icons. At some points I see "HP" or "health" kind of letters written on square and sometimes I pick something up and it increases my health. Why not use 1 consistent item (and not with letters on it. There are a ton of free RPG icons at opengameart.org) Some of the icons even don't indicate what they mean and there is nothing telling me whether I picked that item or it just disappeared as a bug. The obvious example is the double jump boots. Green bots with little wings. I thought that either made me fly or it made me go faster. The LAST thing came to my mind was double jump and discovered it on accident. I didn't know the game had that."
Actually, that's intended. The pit was designed to be unescapable without DoubleJump, and when the player realizes he got the
upgrade from that room, he just mashes the jump button, double jumps, and literally teaches himself how to use double jump without "MEGAMAN, MEGAMAN, YOU GOT THE WHATEVUR UPGRAED"- yougettheidea.
"17- Enemy HP. That one was a huge confusion for me. Sometimes the number is 0 sometimes it is 1 sometimes it is 670. Sometimes it increases and sometimes it decreases. I am not sure what it indicates. I thought that probably relates to the enemy I am looking at, at the moment. Turns out not the case (or at least in my experience). I wasn't looking any direction of an enemy (cleared the level) and it displayed 789."
That text displays the hp of the enemy that last got hurt by you, aka the one you're probably attacking, or left because it was too hard to beat/holyshit9242hplolwhy.
"18- Level design. There are people that talk about level design flow and how it should lead the player through it. Now I am not talking about placing arrows in the level (although you can do that). But for example... look at Braid. Once you enter the screen you know perfectly well where you start and where you should end the level. There is a flow.
Another less obvious example is Limbo. You don't know where you'll end the level but you know that the level ALWAYS starts on the left and ALWAYS have you walking to the right side (there might be other ways and you might spiral through the level but it ends always at the right side).
Shovel Knight for example. Same as Limbo you start from the left side and you'll always end up in the right end of the level (even if you go up and down and backtrack sometimes). Another that follows this strictly is Castle Crashers.
That flow allows the player to understand the level. Even if it is an exploration type of game. There has to be such flow to give the player that "hint" as to where he should go next.
Either that or you can take out the flow entirely but have the level structured and follow a pattern for example the Plus sign level. In the middle a hub for the player to start from and branch in X amount of directions which when the player finishes/clears a direction he gets back to that middle location again to orient himself."
I'll have better branching in the hub level, as in, more linear if looked at separately.
"19- The text in the tutorial/story scrolls too fast I couldn't read most of it."
I'll have it to be scrolled by pressing the Z button in the next update.
"Extra Credits: No particular link to this one because the entire channel is just worthy of watching. While some people criticize that the views in it are rather personal and not based on actual facts/scientific proofs. I'd say most of what is said is important and applies to design. It doesn't have to be proven with citations but it does make sense. If not you can always ignore it. I am a fan so I recommend it all. I learned A LOT from them.
"
Now now, don't even THINK about SUGGESTING an idea of somehow ignoring Extra Credits to someone, for they are awesome
"3- I am extremely sorry and I do apologize deeply for the long boring post and that I caused you any eye bleeds by now from the wall of text. Thank you for reading
"
Ha, wall of texts are no adversary to me when the contents are so helpful. Thank you