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[Buzzwerd]

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

[Derity]

Man this game is fun but I am getting totally owned rofl

I can get quite far into the "desert" looking area, but those red shark type enemies man... when theres 3 of them at the same time its usually gg for me lol, I got pass them once but then there was literally like a full screen of enemies and I instantly died XD! I really like that the game isn't easy, keeps me playing!  

Oh and I couldn't figure out what some of the power-ups did.

The Orange and the Egg in particular, the Egg gives a little pet dude, but he doesn't seem to do anything, and the orange makes Dandy's lips pucker, but didn't notice it give any effect?

Bugs I noticed:

- One time after getting hit I stayed red forever.
- Noticed a tiny 1-pixel gap between background sprites.
- When minimizing the game, I couldn't maximize or close it, had to CTRL+ALT+DEL to close game and restart the exe.

[quisseh]

Nice game, Buzzwerd! I took a bunch of notes as I was playing... I'll try to organize them into categories.

Gameplay

Your basic mechanics are fun. Shooting is satisfying. I had more fun with the keyboard than with the mouse.

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).

I like how the bullets get smaller as you spam them. It's a nice mechanic that suggests to the player that maybe they should try aiming instead of spamming.

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

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.

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

Like Derity said, some of the power ups (candy) seem to do nothing other than change the main character's facial expression.

Menus

In general, I really like the menus. Clean and simple.

I'm not sure why there is a spinning wheel on your options menu, but I think you should put it on your loading screen to replace the existing loading circle.

The "BACK TO MAIN MENU" option I get when I press ESC during gameplay sends me back to the splash screens that appear before the main menu. I would like to go directly to the main menu (no waiting).

Visuals

Intro stage is very pretty. Looks like an oil painting. Love the parallax.

Death sequence is excellent. Very cool animation.

Changes in facial expression are very funny.

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.

Music

I enjoy the background music, especially the background music that plays in the intro.

I would like different sound effects for shooting depending on which power up I have. (Not sure if I tried every power up, so maybe you already have this and I didn't notice.)

Bugs

Character can go offscreen at the top of the screen but not at the bottom.

Game crashed on two occasions, both very early on in the intro while using the keyboard.

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

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.

The changes I make to the key mappings don't actually reflect in-game. I changed SHOOT from SPACE BAR to Z, but still only SPACE BAR works for shooting.

Hope this helps!

[Vallar]

I checked the game out and I must say that is a PRETTY cool concept and fun mechanic. It is definitely simple and definitely is fun.

However I agree with most of what have been said so I am not going to go for long about these things.

What annoyed me the most is the continuous clicking without that upgrade. I'd say just have auto-shoot on and the upgrade does better damage for example or faster bullets. But my LMB is crying right now from all the clicking.

Some of the buffs as mentioned are ambiguous and not sure what they do.

The heal touch heals only 1 heart. I kind of feel that is a little too hard, I expected either a full heal or half heal at least.

I haven't noticed any bugs in my game play but I noticed something that the enemies shift their "gaze" instantly to my current position. I don't know but I kind of feel it is a little off or fake. Perhaps a delay of 0.2 seconds or something would make it feel more natural.

All in all I enjoyed the game, the art is great and the music is wonderful. Well done indeed and good luck with the Kickstarter campaign

[Buzzwerd]

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)