[@Derity]

Oh man, thanks everyone for taking the time to write such thought-out responses. First off I guess I should've put a disclaimer that this demo represents about 6 weeks of dev time so LOTS of polish is missing. We're getting back into dev mode as soon as the Kickstarter ends so so this feedback is super helpful.

@Derity
The power ups currently have a Latin phrase that doesn't tell you much about what the power up does. We intend on changing that to names that convey more information. We want to keep it mysterious, but show more stuff visually for the more subtle changes (like changing bullet colors, changing sounds). Like the orange gives you piercing shots, what kind of visual effect might convey that better, would changing the bullets to orange so you know the bullets were effected be enough?

Also the pet guy blocks shots, we plan on maybe it starting off as an egg, but the longer you can keep him from taking damage he'll evolve and become more useful.

Your game looks fucking awesome btw.

@quisseh

Sweet man, thanks for breaking up your comments into sections like that, it really helps.

"I really would like to be able to fire infinitely by holding down the shoot button. I also would like a charge shot power up (hold down shoot button for a blast shot)."

Both of those options are in the game as power ups. I actually totally understand why just holding down the button to shoot would be way more convenient, but one of the core conceits for the game is to keep the player from spamming their shooting ability and precisely aiming. It's not reinforced enough yet in the demo build, and it's more of concept that we're playing with so I'll definitely keep this in mind moving forward. It'd be a more pleasant experience being able to hold the button down so I'll have to figure out a compromise.

"A scoring/combo system would give me more incentive to keep playing."

This is another thing we're avoiding for now. I want the core gameplay to be satisfying without reinforcement, at least for now. If anything i'll have a better understanding for implementing rewards systems once the gameplay is completely worked out.

"The pacing seems to be a bit random, which doesn't always work well for this type of game. I want there to be an intended progression, a build up. There have been times where I start the game and immediately face an enemy that, in a previous play session, thought was a mini boss."

Man this has been one of the hardest things to figure out. The game is somewhat procedural, so what I do is grade the enemy events in terms of difficulty and sort them along the level based on that. The difficulty curve on this demo is really high, since it's relatively short to what we intend on doing, but yeah it's something I really need to figure out. I think maybe I just need more enemies to work with and a better system for determining the difficulty of the events.

"Power up sequences should be a bit shorter. Feels like they interrupt the flow of play."

This will be completely skippable, similar to how the death sequence is skippable.

"Edges on sprites/text is inconsistent. Some have clean/smooth edges while others look a bit dirty/jagged. Should be fairly simple to clean this up, and would go a long way in improving polish."

There's something funky going on with the way we compress textures that's causing all sorts of errors with our images.

@Vallar

The healing touch is actually our in game function for selecting "Hard Mode" and will come with more benefits than just the heart. When the pool of power ups is complete there will be more ways of regenerating health than there are now.

Known Bugs:

- When you have the strawberry and are holding down shoot and get hit, the red tint never goes away, we'll fix that right away.

- The gaps in the background sprites has something to do with the compression of our assets, we've been working on this but it hasn't been an easy fix.

- There are a lot of bugs related to minimizing, or changing from full-screen to windowed mode, we'll keep working on that.

- Regardless of the control method I choose in the options menu, when I play the game I can use all three control options at the same time. (Bug or Feature?)

- Changes to the key mappings don't actually reflect in-game.

- After pausing and resuming, the background music occasionally stops playing.

- Character can go offscreen at the top of the screen but not at the bottom. (I think what I'll do if make it so his wand can reach the top and bottom so you have a full shooting range)

Posted a demo for Dandy in the playtesting subforum, check it out here:
http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=42985.0

Dandy demo is online:
http://dandy.wefiends.com/demo.html

Check it out, i'd love some feedback. 13 days left on our Kickstarter, you can find more info there.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wefiends/dandy

I haven't been posting on here for about a month because we were stopped development to give Kickstarter a good shot! But the day has come and we've launched the kickstarter. We're off to an awesome start with a Staff Pick! Thanks to all the people that have shown us their support on this forum, I hope you find something interesting here.

CHECK OUT THE KICKSTARTER HERE





And of course some gifs to tempt you!

Removed some gifs so the page doesn't take forever to load, they're on the first page anyway.

Also going to be doing some twitch streaming over here. I'll update the thread when we go live.

Ha that actually made me crack up.

Wow, it's been too long since I've done screenshot saturday.

There's something really charming about your animations, looking forward to seeing more

Sadly just mock-ups this weekend, now to export these assets -_-

@Atmos the look you have going there is really awesome.

Getting to work on some menu art and close to done with the title screen logo.

Got a new enemy working this week. We also added rotation on the up and down movement as per suggestion of SolarLune.

Got some new enemies working that i'm pretty happy with. We also added rotation to the player character on up and down movement.

Click either image for a higher quality video.

Got power-ups working with costume change and everything :D Made more tangible progress in the last 3 weeks than in the 6 months since we started. The milk jug is hard to see, so I'll definitely be changing that.

Finally got power-ups implemented, really excited to play with these. Here's a simple one that gives you two shots. The font and name is temporary.

Wanted to post another enemy. None of these will be stand alone and each encounter will be designed. One on one is just the easiest way to test and show the new enemies.

This is looking fantastic, I love the way that hat is implemented.

Taking a break from enemies to get some power ups in the game.

An offering from a friendly man.

@rikfuzz
Thanks!

@solarlune
You're right that it's missing something. I'll try the tilting. The lack of teeth is a style choice that I'm sticking with for now, but the animation is definitely missing some anticipation and punch. I think I'll just go ahead and redo it. Thanks.

the splatter animation when the slime dies is p good, but the playable char is too static

Man, I was really worried about that. The character assets (hair, hat, wand, facial expression) switch and stack depending on power-ups you collect, so I couldn't come up with a efficient solution to do frame by frame while having lots of assets to switch into. I think I'll try rotating him on his up and down movement. Thanks for the feedback.

When he dies he loses his power-ups and I was able to animate him more.

Doesn't work great as a screenshot, but we got death working today so here's a link to a video.