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[jg.camarasa]

Hello guys!

I'm starting to distribute early prototypes of my game to make sure it works on most computers and to check what people think about the game feel. Right now this is a basic combat demo, with almost no progression, but I'm still interested on hearing what you think of it.

Download link: https://jgcamarasa.itch.io/wng-project?secret=6V4dH5s18pcmsbExgM5xb2IiQ

A gif of the game in action:


Controls:
Keyboard: A,S,D,W for Movement, Mouse for shooting, Space for dashing
Gamepad: Left Stick for movement, Right Stick for aiming, RB for shooting and LT for dashing.

What would I want to know about your experience?

• Does the game work in your computer?
• Are you playing with keyboard or with a gamepad?
• Is the shooting fun?
• Is the game too hard?
• Are the mechanics clear to understand?

Also, the game records a replay file. If you are feeling extra-generous, I'll appreciate if you send me the replay.bin file created after you play. This way I can observe your gameplay and try to improve the design based on that. Even more, if you drag the replay.bin to the executable, you can watch your own replay

Thanks for your time guys, really appreciate it.

[freank]

I don't like so much (texture of) the background..

[-Ross]

It works, it's alright. It looks more exciting in your gifs, hehe, but I know it's in early stages. I played with keyboard and mouse. Everything seems clear and intuitive, though it's possible there's something I missed.

- Biggest smallest peeve: your character, whatever you are, doesn't face directly toward the mouse cursor, it's always at an angle.

The controls are good, they're just what I expect. The gameplay is solid, but doesn't hold a lot of interest for me. Mainly because of the simplistic enemy AI. It's in that category with a bunch of other top-down shooters where you're constantly backing away from a crowd of enemies hoping your movement speed and weapon DPS allow you to kill them before they get to you. It's kind of fun to try and blow up the enemies with the explosive "barrels", but the small size of the barrels and your bullets, and the inaccuracy of your weapon make it hard to do reliably. Plus with all the glowy stuff it's hard to tell exactly how big the explosion is so it's easy to blow yourself up. 

Now that I think about it, a lot of what I don't like about the enemies is because of their high health. Shooting them feels more like whittling down enemies in a tower defense game than blowing away enemies with a satisfying gunshot. I'd rather annihilate 50 enemies with 2 HP each than grind away at 1 enemy with 100 HP.

The corridors between rooms seem unnecessarily long. If they don't have any interesting purpose, why do they exist? You could just go through a door from one room to the next.

I'm a big fan of on-character HUDs, but the concentric rings are not the clearest thing in the world. It would be better to split the ring - have the left half be health and the right half be dash, or something like that.

Instead of randomly shaking the camera when you fire I would make it recoil in the opposite direction of your shot. It'll be more satisfying and less jarring that way.

Here are my replays:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/vmavnaez5rj44to/Ross_replay_1.bin?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/etn0do1zih4un15/Ross_replay_2.bin?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/j3v79n52uzssg0z/Ross_replay_3.bin?dl=0

[jg.camarasa]

Hey Ross, thank you so much for your feedback!

100% agree on almost everything, good catches definitely. I sincerely hope that most of your concerns are fixed with the new content I'm adding, like smaller and weaker enemies and a bullet-hell-y boss to add variety (so it's not only a kiting game). Also agree on the corridor thing. Maybe longer corridors will make more sense once I add more things to do in levels, but for now I'm definitely shortening them.

Also, hella good advice about the recoil camera shake, I have to try that. Same with the HUD, although that will be more work and I want to think hard about it before acting

All in all thanks for the wonderful advice.

[RogerBidon]

Trying to run the 32 bits version on Wine 2.8, it failed to load the D3DCompiler_47.dll

The DLL is in PE32+ format, if I understand it well it means that is is 64 bits. EUTS.exe is in PE32 (not plus) format which should be 32 bits. I am not sure that it is the issue but seems strange enough to be noted.