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[Aloft]

Just Crossed 500 subscribers!

Thanks for the support everyone!

[Aloft]

Changelog for current build (out soon):


Done 5.27

-Pause
   -Added a new pause menu. Pressing esc or start will pause the game. The player has the option to resume play, save game, or quit game.
   -Extended pause to affect sound effects too.

-Title
   -Changed select sounds.
   -The submit input (set to same as attack button) now works for start also.
   -Added a second menu after pressing start. Shows a black screen with "New Game" and "Continue" (if the player has a save file).

-Save
   -The player can now save the game.
   -Load save at the title after passing the start screen,
   -Added Save Game to Continue Menu (after death) and pause menu ("Press escape).
   -Added save file encryption.

-Player
        -Added movement while spinning
        -Corrected issue where moving while spinning through a door confused the room transit script (doh)

-Boss
   - Nodes turn off when hp reaches 0 and stay off. May fix electrical beam issue?
   - Ajusted death animation trigger. Should play as soon as hp reaches 0, non shock.
   - Fixed an issue where the first lightning node would turn on for a few frames at the start of the jump.

-MiniBoss
   - Changed phase2 charged animation to flash instead of being shocked. Hitting the shell now closes the shell (show its not hittable anymore)
   - Shells now bounce off the player.


-Lasers:
   - Changed damage of all lasers to 1/2 heart.

- Ajusted flying enemy grid correction. Recovers faster. Might require more ajustment.
- Added 8 way movement toggle on player controller.
- Added sound events with half secret jingle to 4 buttons in big room.

[Aloft]

The Public Demo is Out And Directly Available from Landing Page!


You can hop on our landing page now, and subscribers will get the link for the latest updated build for each platform! These will always be up to date, so when a new one is out, you can get it from the same place!

https://www.aloftstudio.com/hazelnutbastille


You can preview the demo through a couple feature letsplays:

---------------------------

Also, You can checkout Billy D's article posted to OneAngryGamer:

http://www.oneangrygamer.net/2017/06/hazelnut-bastille-legend-of-zelda-inspired-adventure-game-gets-free-demo/31996/

[Pixelologist]

What if I don't feel like sharing my email with you and I want to play the demo? Am I just out of luck?

[Aloft]

What if I don't feel like sharing my email with you and I want to play the demo? Am I just out of luck?

The emails are used for a milestone newsletter (and you can opt out and unsubscribe when you receive the link or any message); we don't use them for any other purpose.

If you don't wanna do that, I can send you the link, lol.

[Brayzen]

 

Really looking forward to playing this soon!

[Aloft]

A lot of folks said 4 bats is too many for this room... but then why can I fight 50, lol? The crowd-control attacks are more effective than you might think they are!

[qMopey]

Well, are you making a fighting game, or a Zelda-Like? 

Also, it can be cool to have a lot of enemies on one room, but I would be wary of doing it in many different rooms. It's gimmicky, and to ask the hard question: if we stare at your last gif of fighting bats, we ask, "but is this fun for the player?".

One problem I see is the bats are dropping items in the liquid, and the player has trouble reaching them. The player also has hardly any room to move around on the floor and express themselves. You as the creator might have a lot of fun, merely because playing your own creation is expressing yourself, but other players do not have the same experience you do. Other players might get frustrated at things like:

• Sword is hard to swing and hit stuff
• No diagonal walking even though the game looks like ALTTP
• Bats dropping tons of items on the green liquid, hard to reach them
• Bats fly around freely while player is confined to narrow passages

Just some thoughts.

[Aloft]

Lol. Keep in mind this gif was a joke, mainly.

We for sure do not intend to have a room with 50 bats in it, lol. Mainly the gif is meant to illustrate that the crowd control techniques the player has available to them are quite up to the absurd task.

I disagree with the premise that 8-way movement is needed. In fact, it hampers the design intentions we have. The current enemy design assumes certain abilities and weaknesses in the character controller. The world is designed in such a way that 4way compliments the way the environment is built. The inability of the player to move toward an enemy they are aligned with except in a straight line toward them is one of the cornerstones of how they interact with the enemies currently.

In terms of whether we intend to make a zelda-like, lttp-like, etc:

I'd say while those are labels that are useful in allowing players to classify the work, we are not using them as rubrics. We very much do not intend to recreate LTTP. While it is a strong game, with many good techniques, probably the biggest influence lttp had for this title is the dungeon tileset, since LTTP's system is so versatile; so while attempting to gain these same advantages, I think the tileset might look a bit too close. We will probably change the tileset a bit more to cancel that association in people's minds.

I think it is fine for the bats to have more freedom of motion than the player in this room. Getting the player dealing with constraints is a major pillar of level design.

We have allowed players to preview a build of the game with 8way motion in the past, and so far they have actually rejected it (the same people who have demanded it in some cases even). In a way, when people argue this idea, I think they are really arguing we should be making a different game than we actually are, because it is really that much of a change. I can't say we won't possibly shift to 8way in the future, but it would be a radical redesign of everything.

[xix]

Re: 50 bat room
Fuck yeah please do this.

Also, re: 8 direction movement
I get why you're designing the game around 4dir movement. In my game I actually went the opposite direction and wanted to do 4dir design and have enemies have dead angles where a lot of the tension occurred. It was kinda neat, but I also wanted to utilize analog control sticks, so I had to redesign everything.

So! I say, if you're into the 4dir control keep at it. Just make it *even better*.

I think you're already addressing other people's issues with 8 dir movement by adding crowd control techniques, but I also think that you might want to make more of a stark difference between being lined up vs. not being lined up. Make the sword stab 2x as fast or let the player quick sidestep/backstep afterwards would be a cool way to reward the player for following the 4 dir. The idea of making getting around the corners a consumable resource is *kind of* annoying. If it was free but had more of a startup/cooldown you'd probably see people happier to use it but also be able to punish them for using it incorrectly. Essentially amping up the risk/reward for both being lined up vs. not lined up and also picking the right tool vs. picking the wrong tool will help a lot.

Anyways, just some thoughts I had after playing the demo. The game is super gorgeous! Keep up the good work


Edit:

Just to elaborate why the current stab/slash dichotomy isn't exactly my cup of tea:

Whenever you design an action game you're essentially trading time resources for space resources. Sometimes a lot of games will throw in third resources like SUPER METER or AMMO which is fine, but they're not as tangible, so you always have to be careful from adding resources. In your game you can break it down into time, X, Y, and a bunch of hitboxes as your resources. When you added the swing the attack it only felt like it changed your hitbox (from the skinny stab to the wide arc) but then added a new resource out of nowhere. Of course, this resource is affected by time, but it's really slow to recharge, and because players need to deal w/ things immediately, they'll usually ignore it.

If you really want to keep with this mana/energy/stamina thing you could probably determine the rate at which you want the player to really engage with it and set that to the recovery rate. Specifically what is the amount of time you want the player to go from minimum combat abilities (0 energy) to maximum combat abilities (max energy)? And then how many times do you want the player to be able to do each skill before they are back to being minimally efficient (1, 2, 10, 100?) is how you set up the energy costs.

I hope this was helpful! Anyways, yeah, game is dope, excited to see more

[Aloft]

Just to elaborate why the current stab/slash dichotomy isn't exactly my cup of tea:

Whenever you design an action game you're essentially trading time resources for space resources. Sometimes a lot of games will throw in third resources like SUPER METER or AMMO which is fine, but they're not as tangible, so you always have to be careful from adding resources. In your game you can break it down into time, X, Y, and a bunch of hitboxes as your resources. When you added the swing the attack it only felt like it changed your hitbox (from the skinny stab to the wide arc) but then added a new resource out of nowhere. Of course, this resource is affected by time, but it's really slow to recharge, and because players need to deal w/ things immediately, they'll usually ignore it.

If you really want to keep with this mana/energy/stamina thing you could probably determine the rate at which you want the player to really engage with it and set that to the recovery rate. Specifically what is the amount of time you want the player to go from minimum combat abilities (0 energy) to maximum combat abilities (max energy)? And then how many times do you want the player to be able to do each skill before they are back to being minimally efficient (1, 2, 10, 100?) is how you set up the energy costs.

Yeah the idea there... is you want to figure out what core of attacks are meant to define your character controller (you do these more than 50 % of the time). Once you know what kind of attacks your CC is meant to favor, you can design your enemies around the expectation that the player will use those more often than not, and how they will have to approach the enemies based on that. For us, that core is first the thrust attack, and to a lesser extent the arc swipe, then everything else at 40% of the time or less. The swipe, all things being equal, is the tactically stronger move in most situations, so it should be balanced with the thrust with other features that lead to the player considering it a resource to be used at the right moment, rather than all moments. The two balancing features we have so far are the fact that it has a short pause while it "charges", and that it consumes the stamina / mana-like resource. A few folks have said they want it to do more damage too, but I don't think these folks are realizing how many powerful advantages it has at once: it attacks around both corners at once; it allows the player to attack things they don't have to be aligned with; it attacks in a very wide area, doing potential damage to many possible enemies.

I feel like the current cost to use the move is justified, based on these advantages. Perhaps the attack art can be spruced up a bit to indicate it is a special "fancy" move to a greater extent, that is not expected to be used at all times. More playtesting with future content will be required to balance everything though.

[beetleking22]

Okay I played demo. You guys have pretty great start.

Goods

-  The graphic and special effect. Great atmosphere. I love color palette.
- Music is very good. You guys found a great composer.
- Animation are great too.
- Very simple and fast menu.

Things that should be fixed or my personal opinion.

- I think this is pretty obvious. Spreading bomb particles hits player.
- I really dont like idea of generating mana from walking. Its should generate mana automatically like in Link between world.
- The hit detection needs fix. My attack sometimes does not work when I hit monster.
- This is just personal. Why does Upgrade items exit? Would it be better if your bow improved instead gaining Upgrade items that  Takes a lot of space from a  menu? Or does Bow have many variable upgrades that you need use each one in certain  situation or for build?? If that so then its pretty fine.
- I dont like that there is  2 different special attack button for two different attacks that takes mana. If you want some kind of special attack.  It would work better if you gain it by killing certain amount monster.
. Maybe add some meter for special attacks? Or somekinda of animation that let player know that you have activated special attack mode.

[oddcat]

Great work on the game so far! I just finished the demo, and wanted to add my two-cents as a long time Zelda fan.
To begin, I enjoyed the difficulty level. It fixes one of my main gripes about Zelda games, in that they're to easy sometimes. The art is spectacular, the sounds and music were a perfect fit, and the controls were smooth.

Aside from praising the game though, there were a few issues I noticed.
-On the slash vs stab debate: At first I didn't see much use for the stab, due to the advantages of the slash. This seemed a little off balance as such, and I thought the stab damage should be slightly increased to offset the advantages of the slash. After getting the glove item though(sorry, the name slipped my mind), it seemed more balanced as I had to start managing the (stamina?) resource to use other equipment. I assume as one obtains more items, stamina management becomes more apparent, and as such, it seems balanced to me. It could be something to keep in mind if the balance seems off in the future though.

-The mini-boss of the dungeon was a welcome challenge, unlike most bosses. Figuring out how to beat it was enjoyable, but when it got to the second stage(shells bouncing around), I ran into a problem of spending to much time dodging the shells, and died at a few times before giving up and just tanking it. I did want to beat the boss correctly, but the shells were always to close. Basically, the difficulty seemed just a little to high for me to not take the cheap path. A solution to this would be to make the floor area of the mini-boss one or two tiles taller, so that the shells aren't always so close. This breathing room might make it to easy, so the mini-bosses health could be slightly increased to compensate. Additionally this would help prevent players from tanking the boss.

-Upon receiving the glove thing, I noticed a slight glitch. When the menu opened to show the item, it remained on the map screen where I had it, and didn't pop-up the item description until I manually switched to the equip screen. I assume that it is meant to open the menu, and go to the equip screen when a piece of equipment is received.

-On the equip screen, it shows "press X for info"(in not so many words). However to view an items info, I had to press the A button.

-For the main boss, I just want to say I very much enjoyed the fight. A small thing I noticed though was that the boss dealt collision damage to me after I had killed it. This might just be a minor thing, or even intentional, but it's a difficult enough boss that if someone died after killing it due to this, they might think it's an unfair enough death that they won't even go back to see if the boss is dead before quitting the game.

-I like the equipment so far. I like the potential it shows, so I look forward to seeing rest of it, and the crafting system.

Overall, this game looks fantastic, and I very much look forward to seeing more of it. Keep up the great work!
As an aside, I think these articles would be beneficial to you.


-Discusses the hidden movement systems in Zelda 1, and how it made the 4-way movement feel better.
http://troygilbert.com/deconstructing-zelda/movement-mechanics/
 

-A 3-part study into the overworld of ALttP, and how it's item gating worked.
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/BenjaminMarshalkowski/20160419/270717/Overworld_Overload_An_Analysis_of_Link_to_the_Pasts_Light_World_Part_1.php

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/BenjaminMarshalkowski/20160425/270947/Overworld_Overload_An_Analysis_of_Link_to_the_Pasts_Light_World_Part_2.php

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/BenjaminMarshalkowski/20160513/272682/Overworld_Overload_An_Analysis_of_Link_to_the_Pasts_Light_World_Part_3.php
 

[Aloft]

- I think this is pretty obvious. Spreading bomb particles hits player.

We may potentially reduce this to 4 diagonal projectiles in the future; may be a better balance for the utility vs / risk equation there.

- I really dont like idea of generating mana from walking. Its should generate mana automatically like in Link between world.

This is something we have considered having time-based instead too. Could also be changed.

- The hit detection needs fix. My attack sometimes does not work when I hit monster.

The main reason this happens is the invincibility frames they have; their actual hitboxes (and the hitzone for the sword) actually go past the art. I could see reducing these frames such that two consecutive stabs both hit, for instance.

- I dont like that there is  2 different special attack button for two different attacks that takes mana. If you want some kind of special attack.  It would work better if you gain it by killing certain amount monster.

I think we like the idea though of how this balances combat. Most special moves will deplete the meter, so the player will have to balance their utility with needing to ration their use. The thing I really didn't like about LTTP's mana system was several fold:

1) stuff used way too much mana
2) you really needed to save the mana in case a necessary mechanic that required it came along
3) you had to find collectibles to regenerate it, which, combined with the first two, meant you would rarely use your mana weapons, in favor of hoarding mana, where it sat there being useful as a game mechanic.

. Maybe add some meter for special attacks? Or somekinda of animation that let player know that you have activated special attack mode.

We could definitely make them a tiny bit flashier.

Thanks for the feedback, and the time taken out to give the work a try! A lot of these were things we actually mean to fix next build, but will add it to the feedback on discord!

[Aloft]

Aside from praising the game though, there were a few issues I noticed.
-On the slash vs stab debate: At first I didn't see much use for the stab, due to the advantages of the slash. This seemed a little off balance as such, and I thought the stab damage should be slightly increased to offset the advantages of the slash. After getting the glove item though(sorry, the name slipped my mind), it seemed more balanced as I had to start managing the (stamina?) resource to use other equipment. I assume as one obtains more items, stamina management becomes more apparent, and as such, it seems balanced to me. It could be something to keep in mind if the balance seems off in the future though.

Yeah part of this stems from the fact that although the demo is meant to represent a late-gamish level, we for sure can't expect the player to be acquainted with combat and the mechanics to the degree they would actually be at that point, and also, we can't just pile 20 tiles and modifiers on their back which they had no way of appreciating out of the gate. For this reason, we mostly gave the player the most basic and straightforward tools, and these mainly don't use mana. You are right in thinking that mana-management will become ever more important as the player gets more tools that use it, and there may even be a gradual shift from mainly melee to mainly ranged, as happened in the course of LoZ.

-The mini-boss of the dungeon was a welcome challenge, unlike most bosses. Figuring out how to beat it was enjoyable, but when it got to the second stage(shells bouncing around), I ran into a problem of spending to much time dodging the shells, and died at a few times before giving up and just tanking it. I did want to beat the boss correctly, but the shells were always to close. Basically, the difficulty seemed just a little to high for me to not take the cheap path. A solution to this would be to make the floor area of the mini-boss one or two tiles taller, so that the shells aren't always so close. This breathing room might make it to easy, so the mini-bosses health could be slightly increased to compensate. Additionally this would help prevent players from tanking the boss.

Yeah this is another of those demo balance things in some sense; in the actual game, circumstances won't allow tanking that enemy to be nearly as viable as it currently is; we had to give the player a lot more health to take the edge off the difficulty, and to simulate the effect of having things like restorative potions or other health mechanics later on. Our style with boss design sort of puts emphasis on constaining the player's space, although there are definitely viable ways to avoid any kind of damage in that fight. Most notably, you could stand at 9 O'clock and do upward swipes at the shells as they come around.

-Upon receiving the glove thing, I noticed a slight glitch. When the menu opened to show the item, it remained on the map screen where I had it, and didn't pop-up the item description until I manually switched to the equip screen. I assume that it is meant to open the menu, and go to the equip screen when a piece of equipment is received.

Yeah... will have to look into that  Part of going to a larger pool of players / testers is that things which either rarely happen, or were not recognized when they happened earlier tend to come up!

-On the equip screen, it shows "press X for info"(in not so many words). However to view an items info, I had to press the A button.

On the list to be fixed too!

-For the main boss, I just want to say I very much enjoyed the fight. A small thing I noticed though was that the boss dealt collision damage to me after I had killed it. This might just be a minor thing, or even intentional, but it's a difficult enough boss that if someone died after killing it due to this, they might think it's an unfair enough death that they won't even go back to see if the boss is dead before quitting the game.

Also on list!

Overall, this game looks fantastic, and I very much look forward to seeing more of it. Keep up the great work!
As an aside, I think these articles would be beneficial to you.


-Discusses the hidden movement systems in Zelda 1, and how it made the 4-way movement feel better.
http://troygilbert.com/deconstructing-zelda/movement-mechanics/

Hadn't seen that one, but it is a good article! We were familiar with the nuances of Zelda 1 movement, and how nifty it is. We actually gave that system a try in our case, since a lot of the combat design is similar to Zelda 1, but visually the up to half tile jumps that can happen when you align to a new axis were a bit jarring with the level of visual fidelity we have; we ended up going with something that was closer to LTTP; you you hit a corner just slightly, the Character controller will move you sideways quickly as you are trying to pass it.
 

-A 3-part study into the overworld of ALttP, and how it's item gating worked.
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/BenjaminMarshalkowski/20160419/270717/Overworld_Overload_An_Analysis_of_Link_to_the_Pasts_Light_World_Part_1.php

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/BenjaminMarshalkowski/20160425/270947/Overworld_Overload_An_Analysis_of_Link_to_the_Pasts_Light_World_Part_2.php

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/BenjaminMarshalkowski/20160513/272682/Overworld_Overload_An_Analysis_of_Link_to_the_Pasts_Light_World_Part_3.php

Yeah, have read this one a few times! It is also a fantastic article. I especially agree with the idea of using the early part of each region as sort of common space for traveling through the map. I think this is one of the major features of the world design that Minish cap seemed to ignore.

Thanks for all of the great feedback!

[Aloft]

Another Letsplay up today!

[Aloft]

A Spanish Language feature:

http://retromaniacmagazine.blogspot.com.es/

[Aloft]

More nifty blighty tiles.

I think this particular configuration might be a bit too organic, since it dissolves the play grid too much, but you get the idea!

[Aloft]

Ok, one more today... the tiles actually add up to a pretty good marsh:

[Aloft]

Touched up the colors a bit, redrew the trees... they were a bit too noisy to me, didn't fit the style as well, felt a bit ungrounded: