I gave it a quick go. (Super busy these days.) I was on my own, so I played the single-player adventure mode. I only went through the first vertical beam up place (after the room with the two other robot things in it).
Thanks! :D that's pretty much the tutorial XD
It might be because I'm on a non-beefy laptop, but it was laggy in responding to controls. I found it interesting that the dash control was the same as the throw control. Is that to keep controls simpler or for pure gameplay reasons? In any case, I thought it was interesting.
The adventure is very unoptimized at the moment, each tile is it's own object, so LOTS of drawcalls XD I didn't want to merge and optimize things until I was sure a room was there to stay.
About the controls being shared, it started off as being to keep things simple, at one point in the multiplayer I experimented with allowing players to both dash and throw weapons, but that ended up breaking the balance of it. Right now, the player that has the weapon has both an advantage, for being able to kill, but also a disavantage for not being able to dash, which gives the player that cannot kill at least one advantage and a chance to change the tides. As I'm trying to keep things consistant between the single and the multiplayer, I kept the idea of only being able to dash without holding weapons for it as well.
And it's fun to pick up and throw junk. I didn't get to any actual fists yet, but I suppose they'd be coming.
Yeah, I've been fiddling with those pick up and throw mechanics for a while now, and I feel they are fun indeed, my guess on what is making the singleplayer not fun is the enemies you have to interact with.
Other than the lagginess, I liked it. Got to get back to work, though, so I can't give more formal feedback. And don't take the quick try as negative. This is one of very few games I've downloaded from this forum, and your Rocket Fist is one of my favorites that I've had an eye on here. Just actually little time, really.
Thanks ^^ Really appreciated, you're one of the few that has been actually commenting over here, always happy to see what you have to say :D
So I gave the single-player a whirl tonight. I beat it in about 10-12 minutes, which surprised me a bit. So I did a second playthrough which went a lot smoother than my first run. Overall, I enjoyed it. It does feel like the type of game that would be better enjoyed with a group of friends, but that being said- there are some cool features here for single player.
-Menu & Graphics looked really good. Also, the Boss fight also looked really good as well (but felt a bit slow). Overall the presentation as a whole was really solid. You can tell you've spent a lot of time on this game.
-Landing punches feels good. Simple as that.
-Is there a health meter on the boss and I missed it? Other than the hands coming off, I wasnt sure if my hits were doing anything.
Thanks, I did work quite a bit on that ^^
The boss has 4 letters on each hand, and those are the health meters, each time you land a successful attack one of the letter goes off. I see that's kind of hard to notice, I should probably add some UI with the letters on the screen to call more attention to it.
-I used a mouse and keyboard and did find the controls to take awhile to get used to. Particularly surrounding the keyboard controlling direction Im face and keyboards controlling the movement. After a few minutes (and accidentally walking into a few traps) I got the hang of it but it did catch me off at first. Because of that I often found myself walking and facing in totally different directions.
Indeed, the best way to control it is by using a controller
before the introduction of the mouse to play with just the keyboard was a pain, it's almost impossible to aim with precision without an analog stick or a mouse.
-Additionally, the dash also being tied to the throw did mess me up a few times where I would throw and then accidentally dash into (or close to) the enemy a moment later.
-I found the rooms a bit confusing to navigate just because of the similarities aesthetically. I never found the map much help either as every room looks the same on the map. Granted the demo isn't too large but in a larger setting I think it would get easy to get lost.
Yeah it can get confusing, maybe more art in the future could help on that aspect
-Not sure how much difference there is between the rocket fists and the shards damage wise but there was a lot of times where I would be trying to pickup the rocketfists and would end up picking up the shards instead. Particularly if there were a lot of shards in the area.
The shards can be collected to cause more damage. The more shards you collect while holding one the bigger it gets and the more damage it will deal if hit. The Rocket Fist has the advantage of bouncing around though, and it deals more damage than an unupgraded shard.
Not sure what all your plans are for single player, but you may find it could be really spiced up with more precision based challenges. Complex dashing puzzles, landing the perfect punch on a button across the room etc. Additionally, some additional things to throw could open up a lot of other opportunities. Or perhaps even temporary power-ups to your rocket-fists like freezing effects or homing etc?
Would have to think about that, haven't really thought on how precision throw challenges could work considering you could just move closer to the target. Maybe if it was time based you would have to figure out a way to re-capture the weapon and throw again within a certain time-frame to hit all the targets.
I do have lots of ideas on different throwable objects and powerups. Boomerang fist, bomb fist, mine fist, homing rocket fist, yoyo fist(for some sort of melee attack).
I also wanted, for the singleplayer, to introduce upgrades to the robot, like more speed, longer dash, more bounce, throw farther, maybe even skill upgrades that would add one extra button with an extra effect with a cool down, like maybe pull fists towards you, slows down time, control a thrown fist, stuns nearby enemies, dunno, lots of possibilities.
Hope this is helpful. Overall, I think you guys are doing a great job. I think its pretty common to find you're spending a lot more time on singleplayer vs. multiplayer despite the other feeling more fun (which of course it does, you're playing it with friends vs. artificial intelligence). It's always going to be more fun to punch your friend than a bot...
It was super helpful
it kinda made me happier about the singleplayer, even though I feel I should put it down right now to work more on the multiplayer, you helped to make me see there is some potential in there, and I should pick it back up eventually.
Btw, it's not "you guys", it's just me XD