I like the combat style, but I still don't get the stagger mechanic, maybe it needs more explanation somehow Sometimes when I hit the boss just hyper armor and ignore, sometimes the boss gets staggered.
When the boss uses the spear, her moves are a bit hard to read, maybe need to telegraph a bit more?
The timing when the boss block -> attack is a bit tight, but this might just be the attack is not telegraphed enough.
The move telegraph could just simply more exaggeration in the poses of the startup frames, not necessary the timing of it.
The tracking when the boss uses any thrust ability is crazy, kinda unfair, might need to tone it down a bit.
Personally, I think the first boss is a bit too rough, I prefer the learning curve to smooth out a bit, to learn a bit more about the mechanic before getting my doses of curb stomp.
The block feels bad sometimes, due to after I attack and want to block, the animation lock for the attack is a bit high, but this is a very personal opinion.
The game feels a bit floaty, one of the thing could help is "push forward" when attack could be faster, and don't have lingering movement after the attack. The floaty feeling of the boss is complicated tho, but if can be addressed it would feel better.
Music
Great.
SFX
Needs improvement, but not sure how.
VFX
Lots of rooms and possibilities to make it amazing, like the greatsword slam move, could add more screen shake or something to increase the weight of the ability.
I've had comments about the stagger since the first demo, and I'm still not really sure how to address this. Part of this is that the first boss has a armoured form and a base form, and her poise values are higher when in armour. Maybe changing the hit sound during this could help to make it more clear that attacks are having a different effect?
I'll probably be redoing the existing bosses soon, since I've received quite a bit of feedback about this. I would agree that the spear moveset is the weakest of the 3, since I didn't really add much more than a few thrusts to that.
In terms of difficulty curve, I don't really have the luxury of having more content to pad it out, but I could try to split Louise up into more phases so that there's some difficulty progression there. Initially, her concept was to have 2 concurrent phases that she would switch between, but as of the current build there isn't much difference beyond the armour, attributes, and one big attack. I'm considering switching this into a phase 1A/1B/2A/2B where phase 2 is the latter half of the fight, while the armour mechanics are still retained in A/B modes.
"Floaty" is quite a vague term, so I'd appreciate if you could elaborate on this. Do you mean:
It feels floaty even when not engaging with enemies -> movement is floaty? Falling speed is too slow?
A lack of weight to hits -> needs more hit effects/more exaggerated hit animations? More hitstop?
Actions have low commitment -> but on the other hand, you also say that animation lock for attacks is high, so maybe not this?
Slidey movement during attacks?
Unresponsive controls/actions -> if so, which actions specifically?
Here’s are my SUBJECTIVE opinion on the game and how I think it could be better:
1. Stagger
I didn’t realize the stagger is based on poise until you mentioned it, it just feels random and inconsistent, hard to plan a strategy for it.
I’m not even sure if blocks also contribute to the poise damage.
I think this is more of a core mechanic of your game, personally I think it’s not good enough.
To clarify the issue, I’ll go through my terminologies for the action of the boss:
-When the boss uses its ability, it will have 3 phases:
Startup: Bringing up the sword.
Release: Slam down the sword.
Recover: Recover the sword back and move to an idle pose.
I’ll go through this in the format of I want to do something, and the problem with what I want to do something.
As a player I want to abuse the stagger mechanic, but since there’s no indication when the boss will get staggered, I will need to do a hit test to see if the boss will stagger to do follow up.
The problem is some of the startup is too fast, when this is the case, when I try to attack the boss to test if it will stagger, due to fast boss startup and long animation lock of player attack, I will 100% get punished if the boss uses an ability that has startup that is faster than player animation lock.
As a player I want to have follow-ups when the boss gets staggered, since I noticed that sometimes, when the boss staggered, my follow-ups ALSO stagger the boss, but I’m not sure why.
The problem is since I don’t know why the boss staggered, sometimes my follow-ups simply do not stagger the boss, and I get punished for it.
What I think could be better:
Better poise indication
If we are to use poise as a value to inflict staggers, some kind of indication is needed for players to plan around it, either bar or sound or whatever, and it would be better to communicate this information clearly to players somehow.
For a bad example (only to get my point across):
-Poise has a bar indication, when the bar is maxed, the boss will get vulnerable state, when the state gets applied, the boss will stagger once, and any subsequent attack will also stagger the boss.
-When the bar is maxed, it will gradually drop in like 1-2 secs or something, after the bar reaches 0, the vulnerable state is removed, and the boss cannot be staggered anymore until the bar is maxed again.
This will remove any feeling of randomness, and players can play and plan around the Poise bar.
Boss startup should not be faster than player animation lock
This is more of a guideline when designing, but generally boss startup should not be faster, if it is faster, then it should not be too punishing.
2. Floaty
Lots of things contribute to this:
-Player movement:
I think it’s better to remove acceleration, when I move, I want it to be at full speed immediately or reduce acceleration to full speed to minimal.
The movement should start the moment I press the button, right in the case when I want to move to a direction that the player is not facing, it will rotate first, the move.
When the player stops the movement, it should stop immediately, should not slide, I can’t even tell if it actually slides after movement stopped, I just feel like it is sliding.
-Dash/Dodge:
Remove the slide-ness of the dodge OR have an animation to indicate the brake after dodge.
-Jump:
When jumping toward a direction, after landing, there it should not slide, an animation to indicate landing would be good.
-Attack:
In the first attack of the combo, there’s a subtle movement (I’m not sure if it is character or camera) that moves back when the character steps back, it might be realistic but, it just feels floaty. Or just make the camera not move back at all.
The movements of attack slides way too much after the attack is released, it needs to feel “tight”, the movement should only exist in the release animation, keep the movement after release minimal or not at all.
-Boss:
Same, less slide-y, avoid movements in recovery animation.
Thank you for the detailed response, and congratulations on clearing Louise. Since there's a lot to look at and process here, I can't really give good solutions to everything yet, so I'll just try to communicate my thoughts on the issues and what I can try to improve in future updates.
Stagger:
Not being able to see stagger values makes it hard to know when a stagger will occur, thus combos need to start with some kind of hit confirm before following up. No easy answers for this one, considering it's partly based on Elden Ring's poise system and that too was somewhat unintuitive.
It feels unfair if the startup of a boss attack is shorter than the player's recovery after their initial attack attempt, because they can punish the player at no frame cost to themselves. At the same time, I don't want all boss attacks to be so slow and heavy, so I guess I can try to speed up everything and reduce frame disadvantages?
Poise as yet another bar sounds obnoxious, so I don't think I can do that. But as I said, no solutions yet, so I'll need more time to think about this one.
Floatiness:
Although you say it rotates first, then moves, it's more correct to say that it rotates while blending towards the movement state over a 0.25s transition period. It does feel more snappy when reducing this value, so I'll try playing around with lowering it to maybe around 0.1, although I'll need to compare how it feels with existing games and see if that makes sense. (I think you're the only one to ever point this out, so I need to decide if it is a real problem, a personal preference, or something that actually makes the game feel better)
There was some braking to the dodge animation before, but since it got chopped down from 60f to about 40f to blend into sprinting better, that part is not really visible anymore. Initial tweaking makes me feel like it's worse to try and extend this, but I'll need to play around with this more to really decide for sure.
This part about jumping is a bit more complicated, because there isn't much of a slide here and it's more that holding a direction when landing will cancel straightaway into walking. I think I've also received comments about this in the past that made me add the transition into walking instead of leaving the players stuck in the landing state.
Most of the root motion movements during attacks are just matching up feet positions, but this is not 100% accurate, and there will be some minute but barely visible foot sliding. Some attacks are definitely worse at this than others, though. It's also possible you might be referring to what happens when the player is right in front of the enemy and there's no more space to move forward, but there's not too much I can do about that. For now, I can just try and review the attacks to reduce the worst offenders.
Are the charged normal attacks tight-enough for you? If comparing NA to CA, then I can feel that difference, so if CAs are good enough then that gives me a solid target to refer to.
Apart from the stagger issues, I think a lot of the floatiness comments have been unique to your perspective. While I can see how these are problematic, it's unclear how big of a problem they are and whether or not I need to or am adequately able to fix it. There's a lot of tweaking and iteration that'll have to be done to figure that out, but I really appreciate being able to get such detailed feedback from you.
Yeah, no problem, the solutions I provided are just a way to communicate my problems, overall, I think the game could have lots of potential. Good luck dude!
Firstly, here are some of the things that stood out to me that could use improving:
1. The camera stutters and jilts back and forth in odd ways when using the unlocked camera. Especially when moving from left to right while trying to rotate the camera around the character.
2. The parrying mechanic feels very hit or miss. On several times in the fight with Jin I pressed parry, had the animation up, and then quickly fell to the floor. It felt like I needed to train myself to parry much earlier than I am used to with other games to get a proper parry off. The parries with Louise went a lot smoother than with Jin with none of the previous issue I mentioned happening.
3. I'm not sure if there's a point to sprinting. It felt like mashing shift got me around the opponent at near equal speed without repercussion.
4. If I attack out of holding guard, yet continue to hold guard afterwards, my character does not go back to guarding. This does not feel very intuitive and caught me off guard as I kept getting dealt damage while I thought I would have been defending. It was only later did I realize the guard animation hadn't been coming back up and I had to hold guard, click attack, click and hold guard again if I wanted to do go back to guarding.
The combat you're cooking up for Illusive Domain has a lot of potential. From what I can tell it looks like it'll be a boss-centric game with very punishing combat. Having the game purely be about one-on-one combat with unique enemies in unique arenas is a nice way to keep the game fresh from one fight to the next. Excited to see your progress going forward with this game! がんばって
This has just been fixed with today's update, although as a result the camera follow is a bit simpler now.
Do you remember which attack this was? If you're talking about the guard, there was a mechanic where certain attacks would do extra damage and break your guard regardless of deflect. I removed the tutorial for that as no other boss was using that yet, but didn't remove the attack from the tutorial boss.
There isn't really a point per se, but it's more of to avoid having to spam shift if you just want to run after something, and also because it's something that I believe people would expect in a game like this.
I actually had some code for this, but I tried this out earlier and it wasn't working properly, so that must have been why I disabled it. Gonna bump it up the list of fixes I need to do.
On one hand, I tried dashing away from her using E but at times, E made me kick into her instead (Only later I saw the move list).
On another, there were the invisible walls tha I almost couldn't notice (Because in this level, the grass has some bright area but it doesn't highlight where the invisible walls start).
Also I set my display window to 1280 x 800 but then I pause the game and click "settings" again, the window gets big again.
Also the first area has this lower but thin area where both me and Jin got stuck.
But other than that, the visuals and presentation is nice.
I didn't think of having some kind of highlight for the invisible walls, maybe I could use the effect Elden Ring has when denoting the areas where you can't bring a horse in? I've seen some issues with the display settings before, guess it's time I went and fixed it. The map for the tutorial has caused me a lot of problems so far, so I'll probably be remaking it soon.
It looks beautiful, it feels really good, reminds me of sekiro in all the good ways
The designs are really top notch too, you got yourself something that I can imagine people on indie games youtube will be making videos about, especially since it's quite hard!
My only gripe is the parry mechanic and telegraphs, maybe try and make it more obvious when an attack animation is starting on attacks, so that the player can get some feedback as to whether they are starting their attack to parry in the right moment?
I think it's hard to signal exactly when in the attack you should start your attack, since you can potentially parry using any melee attack, and each of them could have different frame timings. So there's no way to say "in this attack, if you start at 10f, you'll parry it at 30f" because you might just be using an attack that has 30f windup, 10f windup, or any other timing. Part of the game's design is getting a feel for each attack's timing to be able to make your own choices for which attack to use at any given point of time.
(Although in practice, the 1st normal attack ends up being the easiest to parry with for everything at the cost of not being able to win most parry interactions. )
I wanted to complain, asking whether this game expects me to play Sekiro first or something, because I didn't really get what was going on with the bars, and the enemy has no gaps in his pattern, and my attacks seem to do no damage, and he can just knock down my block and knocking this guy down and using F does nothing and yadda yadda.
Well I didn't realize that it was a tutorial boss that you are not meant to beat by exhausting its health bar, but by using a finisher, and my finisher bugged out. Maybe because I did a normal swing at him first before doing the prompt. It did the animation and everything, hence my confusion.
So everything else makes a lot more sense now, and the movment is nice. It seemed like finding the moment of parry is not enough like in most games, but instead you need to find a spot a few seconds before that. I feel like the enemies have this dickish trick to start their attack just a second after you started yours, and either their damage is four times bigger, or their healthbar is four times longer, likely some mix of the two.
I feel like somee of their attacks also completely miss me, like Louise's second greatsword or sword&shield swings, or the very least they don't connect with my block. Which throws me really off-guard. Is it intentional? Are they feinting?
Either way it seems like being better than them is not enough to win. You need to be absolutely superior to them, so you can four circles around them before they die, and after the first few fights, making the mistake in this marathon what does you in.
Yeah, I kind of expected that most people who'll play this game when it releases would have played Sekiro/similar titles before or have at least seen gameplay of those games, so I didn't even think to explain those... Actually, he can still be beaten normally, just that the finisher will only kill him after you finish the tutorial section. This part is really badly implemented, since you can do the finisher before that so it's probably really confusing.
For blocking/deflecting, the block starts the instant you press it, but parrying requires you to time your attacks with the enemy's, so there's an inherent delay in when that comes out. I guess I could try to avoid that issue of starting attacks after the player by increasing the startup for combo-starting attacks? Currently, players and bosses are animated at pretty close frame numbers, with the player being slightly faster in most cases, so that's probably why it feels that way.
Since the attack hitboxes are tied quite closely to the weapon itself, it's possible that you just managed to get out of the way while blocking?
I see, it didn't connect for me how blocking is instantaneous, because after pressing the button, it takes a second (a lot of time when the game is this fast-paced) for the character to bring her sword to bare.
I know I've said that they have that annoying habit, but I was a little butt-blasted too at the time. I also find it cool that they operate using similar frame numbers, evening the field. It just seems that the health I am losing by letting them do that is far more considerable than what they lose.
I went back, and indeed, when I am not blocking the attacks (Specifically the greatsword 2nd hit) connect. However if I am holding the block, the blade slides away with no resistance, not like when I block the other attacks. Maybe the hitbox changes when you are blocking and now it is just small enough to slide under?
This is excellent, really enjoyed it, and I'm not even all that much of an anime guy. Played with both KB&M and controller, but mostly controller - Xbox One.
At first I thought breaking posture wasn't worth it because of the low damage, but it makes sense if it's a boss rush game. And you can get some cheeky free hits in so its fine.
Hitting deflects feel really whimpy and made me not won't to use it that much. Some effects sound like a fucking cannon going off but deflecting is just a little tink. Flashier FX too, Sekiro being the benchmark of course.
Hits could use a little more oomph too, both on the enemies and you. Often I'd not notice I got hit. The hit sound sounds more like a glancing hit than a proper good one, could be meatier.
Sometimes the charge attack doesn't hit but I swear the sword is inside her fucking body, please...
Great performance, except for the 2nd phase of 2nd boss where it drops a lot. Mostly when inside the room, probably something to do with the smoke. Using a 3080 Mobile, with a weird display locked at 102 FPS.
My OS is in Swedish so some button prompts are fucked up, Shift and Space for example. If you're using the new input system you should be able to get non system specific button names I think. Needs rebinding too.
Some animations can use some improvements, the running ones are pretty stilted. But all the fighting ones are great, no negatives there. There's something odd about the sprinting animation, like her body keeps jutting back and forth, mostly visible with a locked on camera:
No victory message for the first fight, she just kinda lies there staring at the sky.
Something is wrong when using a controller moving at certain angles (I've checked too and as far as I can tell mine is working properly), gets jittery and slow:
But I still prefered it to KB&M, tried to avoid moving in those directions. Works perfectly with keyboard though.
The camera can be annoying in the 2nd fight, like its both too slow at keeping up at times and at other times its swinging around way too much. But FROM can't even get it right so uh good luck!
Not all objects get transparent when occluding the view, hard to see sometimes 2nd fight.
I completely missed that there were another set of abilities and played only with the first one, whoops.
The moveset is really fun and intuitive to use. Nothing bad to say about it at all.
Wall jumping can get very silly and you can endlessly roll around the walls in the 2nd fight. You can almost cheese the fight too if you get her outside in a corner and just spam jump. But most of the time she can get out.
Bosses are hard, especially 2nd one. First one didn't take that long. 2nd felt like she had some bullshit attacks at first but when you learn the fight it's fair I think. Really good job on the bosses, and they require a bit different strategies.
Now I just want more to fight. Great work.
Accidentally closed the browser once but I think I got everything...
Thanks for playing! Congratulations on beating Nia, I wasn't expecting many people to be able to beat her.
SFX is certainly a weak point, really need to take some time to do up the sound design again. I still haven't decided on a direction I want to take the hit effects, since I feel like going full on blood and gore wouldn't really fit, and that circle impact vfx would look too similar to the deflect/parry effects.
Maybe the charge attack's hitbox ends a bit too early?
Yeah, I was pretty surprised with the poor performance in phase 2 too. It's not much different compared to phase 1, except that it's lower down where the volumetric fog asset I'm using is. Unfortunately I didn't have the time to optimize it properly before DD.
Never thought that those were displayed differently in other languages. (And there was another anon who had a dvorak layout which wasn't displayed properly since my "keyboard_comma" sprite wasn't named "keyboard_,"...). Really good to know, thanks for pointing it out. It'll probably take me a bit more time to fix it, since I need to go and check and update my sprite names from InputControl.displayName to InputControl.name.
There's a lot of issues with the walk/run/sprint animations, since it was my first attempt at animating those. It's among the top priorities to remake once I get a little more animation experience. I think the jitter is a weird blending issue, or maybe something about starting off on the wrong foot.
Cameras are so cursed sometimes, whatever we have now has already gone through lots of tweaking and I have no clue how to make it work any better when bosses are going to be flying around the level like this. I think most objects have the transparency shader applied, but I haven't really gone in to tweak their distance values that much. I tried to keep it as subtle as I could without sacrificing visibility too much, although in a way it's also part of the level design since you have to learn to read moves even if you can't see everything.
I'm glad to hear that the moveset is intuitive to use, makes it worth the effort in designing it to be that way.
I probably need to add some kind of hit list to prevent wall jumping from being repeated on the same things, but another idea I was considering but didn't have the time to implement was more anti-air moves that would catch you if you tried to stay up for too long.
To be honest, I can't even clear the 2nd boss that consistently myself, so yeah, it's actually really hard. Also, my next bosses will probably be even harder, since they canonically are ordered in terms of strength, except for the tutorial boss who's not really part of that ranking in the story.
Once again, thank you for playing, and thanks for the great feedback. Really happy to see someone finish the demo.
For some reason you can't select the dialogue choices when using a controller. The camera is janky when performing actions (jump, attack, dodge, sprint. etc.) and traversing certain areas. I feel like the first character you fight can be a little unfair as it does way more damage and you do to it and also has some moves that almost defeat you instantly. It took me a little while to notice you have another set of special moves. I don't have much problems with the actual combat and the character models are nice as well. Some animations are a little jank though. I like it, just needs some balancing and polish in certain aspects.
Controller UI has had a lot of problems, and I haven't managed to fix them yet. There's definitely some more polish to be done on animations, although I think I'll be prioritizing new animations first before I go back and fix the older ones.
I think it's less of a balance issue but rather a tutorial issue. Since it's a boss rush, I don't have goons to throw to teach the player how to play, so it's really hard to convey the kind of play style that's being asked for. I think insta-kill moves can be fair if they're easy to spot and deal with, and in Louise's case, all you really have to do is run up and around her in about 5 seconds, and then it's free hits during the charging time. It's meant as a distance check to teach the player to stay close and find opportunities to attack, since it's a very obvious window for attacking.
Although, there was also a plan to add a revive like in Sekiro, so with that missing it might be a bit unfair. Apart from that, there's a lot of balancing that needs to be done on flinch timings and damage values in general.
The music bug has been fixed as of the newest update. Dialogue getting stuck might be due to where you're clicking, but I'll have to check that again. Try clicking on the text box area at the bottom and see if that fixes it.
I recorded a run of my own for you to see. I've skimmed through bits of your video, and the core issue is that you're just not playing aggressively enough.
Forgot to mention, but 1-4 or D-Pad will change abilities. The mist teleport from mid-air and it's follow up attack has some of the highest damage values, which is why I use it after performing the finisher.
When she's going from armoured -> unarmoured state, that's your chance to hit her. Interrupt the transformation enough times, and she'll stance-break herself.
Dodge/Sprint -> Kick is another very useful move. Actually, all of the kicks are very useful.
Attacking/Kicking after deflecting will do a faster counter attack. Generally, most of Louise's attacks can be counter-attacked safely.
Against her Excalibur move, all you really need to do is dodge to the side when she turns to face you. Or you can jump over her, or you can mist form through her, or simply walk to the side, and even possible to parry it if you dare to.
- Advancement of the tutorial fight against Jin is a little unclear. I found myself pressing the prompted buttons, parrying when it told me etc. and it would not advance to the next prompt. I'm not sure how I ended up defeating him. I was spamming jumps and then he suddenly got knocked down and I could finish him off.
- Speaking of spamming jumps, if you spam dodge roll + jump along a wall you can sometimes do a really weird long jump. In Nia's boss room you can basically float along the ceiling if you spam jumps.
- After I died against Jin I respawned behind the invisible wall so I couldn't reach him. Had to quit to title and start a new game to re-fight him.
- In the mountain region leading up the Jin fight you can run up the side of the mountain to get around said invisible wall.
- If the fps displayed in the top right corner is accurate, the game doesn't seem to obey the fps set in the settings unless Vsync is explicitly turned off. I tried setting it to 60 and 30 but it would only use the full 144hz unless I turned vsync off.
- After dying to Louise once her battle music stopped playing.
- I was able to cheese Louise by essentially spamming kick with E to stunlock her. When her poise bar is set to max I would just jump away and the jump hurtbox will knock her down, giving you a free finishing move. Definitely felt like cheating but I'll take it because I know my scrub ass is not beating her legit. The good news is this strat does not work on Nia at all lol.
- Might want to increase the height of that small japanese-style house in the hub world. It's easy for the camera to clip through the roof. Or just make the roof turn transparent when the camera is over it.
Overall thoughts on the gameplay:
Maybe I'm just playing it wrong but this game feels a little too punishing. The bosses do a fuckton of damage while it feels like every attack the player does barely scratches their hp bar. I also don't like how bosses never really give much breathing room. They will throw out an attack and then throw out another a few seconds later regardless of where the player is. It would be nice if they would also move around the arena bit or run up to the player before throwing out their next attack. My only reference for similar arpgs is the Kingdom Hearts series and I appreciated how those games will always let you get at least one full combo in if you strike an enemy during an opening. In those games an enemy's retaliation timing is determined by a "revenge value". Here it seems like I can get in at most 2 hits in consistently before the enemy starts striking back, despite Kimiko's basic combo being apparently 4 hits total.
Parrying, blocking, and dodging feel a lot better than I remember. I also like how recovering from a downed position feels a lot snappier than the last time I played.
It came to me in a dream (no, really, I was lying down and suddenly a design for the dialogue UI hit me and I just had to get up and immediately start working on it)
It's really unclear, but the tutorial works on a timer and a counter. I figured some people would get stuck on certain parts, and I didn't want to softlock them too hard. Basically, it's something like attack 4 times or auto-progress after 30s. It's been a real struggle designing a tutorial for this game. Jumping is really strong and versatile, and I haven't made any anti-air moves yet.
Not sure about the long jump, but I do need to limit how the jump works. In the hub level, it's possible to just jump straight up a vertical wall by spamming.
There's a lot of set up in that level that needs to be redone, so most likely I'll rework the entire level at some point.
^, it's really problematic lol
Unity's settings only allow for VSync or target frame rate, not both together. I've considered merging them into the same drop-down, but I think that would just be more confusing. Maybe disabling the FPS dropdown could be a better way to communicate this?
Known issue, will fix in next patch
Louise has always been weak to feet (unintentionally). It might get fixed when I do another pass at her AI later, but I think it'll stay in some form as a weakness for players to exploit. She is only the first boss, after all, and the other bosses won't be as kind.
Good point, but it's somewhat placeholder at the moment so I'll change that when I replace it.
Yeah, it's a bit too much. I can't consistently beat the game in one continuous try myself, so it's going to need more balance changes. Some of these problems are a result of having a very simple behaviour tree that just throws out attacks, so that behaviour of running up is something that I'll fix by changing the AI paradigm. However, my successful runs on each boss are usually around 3-4min, so I don't see much issue with the current HP amounts. (Sometimes, I even feel like they're too low...). Damage from the bosses is high, but it's not enough to outright kill you in one shot (maybe unless you get caught in Nia's Fan Dance), so I might just increase the heal charges instead. 5 was an arbitrary number to begin with, and there were also plans to be able to fill it up mid-fight which I never got around to doing.
At most, I might have to implement an easy mode, which I'm not keen on doing in the full game, but it might be necessary for demos.
I've never played KH, but I've heard Revenge Values mentioned to me about this game before. I've seen a bit about it, but I'll need to spend some more time thinking about how to design and implement it. The 4th hit of the normal attack combo is also something I rarely use, but other abilities are planned to allow that to be used more often. Just like how you can do a Dodge -> Dodge Attack -> N2, I'm planning to have other abilities that chain into later normal attacks as well.
Personally, I don't want this to be a game where you just wait for one single attack, deal with it, then unload the exact same actions every time. Especially since the bosses are all similarly human-sized with flinchable poise instead of giants that can't be staggered by regular hits. My biggest criticism of Sekiro was that there's very little need to use the full moveset beyond the basic actions, so I'm aiming for a game that almost requires you to understand and use everything available to you.
Ideally, this would be attacking, getting deflected, knowing that the attack combo isn't going to work and immediately switching to another move, but the current animation lockout giving a frame disadvantage of ~0.5s really kills that flow. AI learning rates might also be too high that deflects happen too often, so I might just cap it at 90% chance to block and test that out.
Proton really doesn’t like this game, I really wanted to try it last demo day too but I’m going to need a Linux build.
I can get it to launch but I have to remove the space from the executable and the data folder, and once I’m in I can’t see the UI. I can hear buttons activating and stuff but all I see is the katana in the water.
I don't think I can do a Linux build, unfortunately. I've been able to play it on Steam deck by setting Proton to 9.0 through Steam, so maybe you can try that?
That did work, I try to launch using a script so I don’t have add everything as a non-steam game but proton’s more and more tied to steam and so it’s getting less reliable.
I always want to like these sorts of games but my brain can’t get used to parry timings and I just get mad, so I’m afraid I’m no help mechanically.
I didn’t spend much time in dialog, but is there a way to fight the bridge dude again for practice?
What’s the difference between tapping LMB or RMB when parrying? I didn’t catch what was supposed to make them distinct.
Art is already looking pretty good, other than replacing placeholders I wouldn’t recommend any more details as. As long as you keep what you have consistent it should be very manageable scope-wise.
The loading transitions in particular feel like a AAA game which can be good or bad
Whatever you’re using for the camera freaks out when moving forward and backward without camera lock. It’s got some collider that’s very noticeably dragging against the ground, while strafing left or right is completely frictionless.
When you die the music dies with you and doesn’t come back
Not at the moment. There's a lot of issues with that level in particular, so I'll probably add a separate training section for this another time.
RMB is Sekiro-style block/deflect that just deals some small stance damage, LMB (or any other melee attack) is a parry from hitting attacks at the same time as enemies. Parries do a lot more damage and can interrupt attacks.
Nice, because honestly I can't really add much more detail than this because skill issue lol
Bad as in...?
Not sure if it's the ground, but yeah I see that now.
Yeah, that was a very recent change to support the multiple phases having different songs in Nia's fight, but it ended up breaking Louise's. Gonna upload a fix for that soon.
There is controller support, but there's some issues with UI. Apart from that, everything else should work.
This update brings the 2nd boss Mozilla Firefox Nia to the game. You'll have to beat Louise first, though. I recommend you start from a new game to see the updates to the tutorial as well.
Also, the AI will learn to block your attacks if you use the same things too much, so explore the move list and try out everything. Don't play this like it's Dark Souls and only wait for openings after attacks, there is a lot you can get away with using your mobility.
Comments
Nice game and the combat system is cool. Never thought I could parry with Saber herself.
Thanks for playing!
I rq on first boss when it almost die lmao.
Mechanic
I like the combat style, but I still don't get the stagger mechanic, maybe it needs more explanation somehow Sometimes when I hit the boss just hyper armor and ignore, sometimes the boss gets staggered.
When the boss uses the spear, her moves are a bit hard to read, maybe need to telegraph a bit more?
The timing when the boss block -> attack is a bit tight, but this might just be the attack is not telegraphed enough.
The move telegraph could just simply more exaggeration in the poses of the startup frames, not necessary the timing of it.
The tracking when the boss uses any thrust ability is crazy, kinda unfair, might need to tone it down a bit.
Personally, I think the first boss is a bit too rough, I prefer the learning curve to smooth out a bit, to learn a bit more about the mechanic before getting my doses of curb stomp.
The block feels bad sometimes, due to after I attack and want to block, the animation lock for the attack is a bit high, but this is a very personal opinion.
The game feels a bit floaty, one of the thing could help is "push forward" when attack could be faster, and don't have lingering movement after the attack. The floaty feeling of the boss is complicated tho, but if can be addressed it would feel better.
Music
Great.
SFX
Needs improvement, but not sure how.
VFX
Lots of rooms and possibilities to make it amazing, like the greatsword slam move, could add more screen shake or something to increase the weight of the ability.
Thanks for playing!
I've had comments about the stagger since the first demo, and I'm still not really sure how to address this. Part of this is that the first boss has a armoured form and a base form, and her poise values are higher when in armour. Maybe changing the hit sound during this could help to make it more clear that attacks are having a different effect?
I'll probably be redoing the existing bosses soon, since I've received quite a bit of feedback about this. I would agree that the spear moveset is the weakest of the 3, since I didn't really add much more than a few thrusts to that.
In terms of difficulty curve, I don't really have the luxury of having more content to pad it out, but I could try to split Louise up into more phases so that there's some difficulty progression there. Initially, her concept was to have 2 concurrent phases that she would switch between, but as of the current build there isn't much difference beyond the armour, attributes, and one big attack. I'm considering switching this into a phase 1A/1B/2A/2B where phase 2 is the latter half of the fight, while the armour mechanics are still retained in A/B modes.
"Floaty" is quite a vague term, so I'd appreciate if you could elaborate on this. Do you mean:
I give it another shot and kill the first boss.
Here’s are my SUBJECTIVE opinion on the game and how I think it could be better:
1. Stagger
I didn’t realize the stagger is based on poise until you mentioned it, it just feels random and inconsistent, hard to plan a strategy for it.
I’m not even sure if blocks also contribute to the poise damage.
I think this is more of a core mechanic of your game, personally I think it’s not good enough.
To clarify the issue, I’ll go through my terminologies for the action of the boss:
I’ll go through this in the format of I want to do something, and the problem with what I want to do something.
As a player I want to abuse the stagger mechanic, but since there’s no indication when the boss will get staggered, I will need to do a hit test to see if the boss will stagger to do follow up.
The problem is some of the startup is too fast, when this is the case, when I try to attack the boss to test if it will stagger, due to fast boss startup and long animation lock of player attack, I will 100% get punished if the boss uses an ability that has startup that is faster than player animation lock.
As a player I want to have follow-ups when the boss gets staggered, since I noticed that sometimes, when the boss staggered, my follow-ups ALSO stagger the boss, but I’m not sure why.
The problem is since I don’t know why the boss staggered, sometimes my follow-ups simply do not stagger the boss, and I get punished for it.
What I think could be better:
Better poise indication
If we are to use poise as a value to inflict staggers, some kind of indication is needed for players to plan around it, either bar or sound or whatever, and it would be better to communicate this information clearly to players somehow.
For a bad example (only to get my point across):
This will remove any feeling of randomness, and players can play and plan around the Poise bar.
Boss startup should not be faster than player animation lock
This is more of a guideline when designing, but generally boss startup should not be faster, if it is faster, then it should not be too punishing.
2. Floaty
Lots of things contribute to this:
Thank you for the detailed response, and congratulations on clearing Louise. Since there's a lot to look at and process here, I can't really give good solutions to everything yet, so I'll just try to communicate my thoughts on the issues and what I can try to improve in future updates.
Stagger:
Floatiness:
Apart from the stagger issues, I think a lot of the floatiness comments have been unique to your perspective. While I can see how these are problematic, it's unclear how big of a problem they are and whether or not I need to or am adequately able to fix it. There's a lot of tweaking and iteration that'll have to be done to figure that out, but I really appreciate being able to get such detailed feedback from you.
Yeah, no problem, the solutions I provided are just a way to communicate my problems, overall, I think the game could have lots of potential. Good luck dude!
Hey Kemomic!
Firstly, here are some of the things that stood out to me that could use improving:
1. The camera stutters and jilts back and forth in odd ways when using the unlocked camera. Especially when moving from left to right while trying to rotate the camera around the character.
2. The parrying mechanic feels very hit or miss. On several times in the fight with Jin I pressed parry, had the animation up, and then quickly fell to the floor. It felt like I needed to train myself to parry much earlier than I am used to with other games to get a proper parry off. The parries with Louise went a lot smoother than with Jin with none of the previous issue I mentioned happening.
3. I'm not sure if there's a point to sprinting. It felt like mashing shift got me around the opponent at near equal speed without repercussion.
4. If I attack out of holding guard, yet continue to hold guard afterwards, my character does not go back to guarding. This does not feel very intuitive and caught me off guard as I kept getting dealt damage while I thought I would have been defending. It was only later did I realize the guard animation hadn't been coming back up and I had to hold guard, click attack, click and hold guard again if I wanted to do go back to guarding.
The combat you're cooking up for Illusive Domain has a lot of potential. From what I can tell it looks like it'll be a boss-centric game with very punishing combat. Having the game purely be about one-on-one combat with unique enemies in unique arenas is a nice way to keep the game fresh from one fight to the next. Excited to see your progress going forward with this game! がんばって
Thanks for playing!
ありがとうございます。
The Louise fight was difficult for me.
On one hand, I tried dashing away from her using E but at times, E made me kick into her instead (Only later I saw the move list).
On another, there were the invisible walls tha I almost couldn't notice (Because in this level, the grass has some bright area but it doesn't highlight where the invisible walls start).
Also I set my display window to 1280 x 800 but then I pause the game and click "settings" again, the window gets big again.
Also the first area has this lower but thin area where both me and Jin got stuck.
But other than that, the visuals and presentation is nice.
Thanks for playing!
I didn't think of having some kind of highlight for the invisible walls, maybe I could use the effect Elden Ring has when denoting the areas where you can't bring a horse in? I've seen some issues with the display settings before, guess it's time I went and fixed it. The map for the tutorial has caused me a lot of problems so far, so I'll probably be remaking it soon.
It looks beautiful, it feels really good, reminds me of sekiro in all the good ways
The designs are really top notch too, you got yourself something that I can imagine people on indie games youtube will be making videos about, especially since it's quite hard!
My only gripe is the parry mechanic and telegraphs, maybe try and make it more obvious when an attack animation is starting on attacks, so that the player can get some feedback as to whether they are starting their attack to parry in the right moment?
Thanks for playing!
I think it's hard to signal exactly when in the attack you should start your attack, since you can potentially parry using any melee attack, and each of them could have different frame timings. So there's no way to say "in this attack, if you start at 10f, you'll parry it at 30f" because you might just be using an attack that has 30f windup, 10f windup, or any other timing. Part of the game's design is getting a feel for each attack's timing to be able to make your own choices for which attack to use at any given point of time.
(Although in practice, the 1st normal attack ends up being the easiest to parry with for everything at the cost of not being able to win most parry interactions. )
2025/05/05 update: fixed dialogue UI controller input and updated input prompts. Hopefully it works for non-English OS and non-QWERTY users now.
I wanted to complain, asking whether this game expects me to play Sekiro first or something, because I didn't really get what was going on with the bars, and the enemy has no gaps in his pattern, and my attacks seem to do no damage, and he can just knock down my block and knocking this guy down and using F does nothing and yadda yadda.
Well I didn't realize that it was a tutorial boss that you are not meant to beat by exhausting its health bar, but by using a finisher, and my finisher bugged out. Maybe because I did a normal swing at him first before doing the prompt. It did the animation and everything, hence my confusion.
So everything else makes a lot more sense now, and the movment is nice. It seemed like finding the moment of parry is not enough like in most games, but instead you need to find a spot a few seconds before that.
I feel like the enemies have this dickish trick to start their attack just a second after you started yours, and either their damage is four times bigger, or their healthbar is four times longer, likely some mix of the two.
I feel like somee of their attacks also completely miss me, like Louise's second greatsword or sword&shield swings, or the very least they don't connect with my block. Which throws me really off-guard. Is it intentional? Are they feinting?
Either way it seems like being better than them is not enough to win. You need to be absolutely superior to them, so you can four circles around them before they die, and after the first few fights, making the mistake in this marathon what does you in.
Still, really impressive action.
Thanks for playing!
Yeah, I kind of expected that most people who'll play this game when it releases would have played Sekiro/similar titles before or have at least seen gameplay of those games, so I didn't even think to explain those... Actually, he can still be beaten normally, just that the finisher will only kill him after you finish the tutorial section. This part is really badly implemented, since you can do the finisher before that so it's probably really confusing.
For blocking/deflecting, the block starts the instant you press it, but parrying requires you to time your attacks with the enemy's, so there's an inherent delay in when that comes out. I guess I could try to avoid that issue of starting attacks after the player by increasing the startup for combo-starting attacks? Currently, players and bosses are animated at pretty close frame numbers, with the player being slightly faster in most cases, so that's probably why it feels that way.
Since the attack hitboxes are tied quite closely to the weapon itself, it's possible that you just managed to get out of the way while blocking?
I see, it didn't connect for me how blocking is instantaneous, because after pressing the button, it takes a second (a lot of time when the game is this fast-paced) for the character to bring her sword to bare.
I know I've said that they have that annoying habit, but I was a little butt-blasted too at the time. I also find it cool that they operate using similar frame numbers, evening the field. It just seems that the health I am losing by letting them do that is far more considerable than what they lose.
I went back, and indeed, when I am not blocking the attacks (Specifically the greatsword 2nd hit) connect. However if I am holding the block, the blade slides away with no resistance, not like when I block the other attacks. Maybe the hitbox changes when you are blocking and now it is just small enough to slide under?
Anyways, pretty exciting game.
This is excellent, really enjoyed it, and I'm not even all that much of an anime guy. Played with both KB&M and controller, but mostly controller - Xbox One.
Footage of one fight:
https://streamable.com/dqkbj7
At first I thought breaking posture wasn't worth it because of the low damage, but it makes sense if it's a boss rush game. And you can get some cheeky free hits in so its fine.
Hitting deflects feel really whimpy and made me not won't to use it that much. Some effects sound like a fucking cannon going off but deflecting is just a little tink. Flashier FX too, Sekiro being the benchmark of course.
Hits could use a little more oomph too, both on the enemies and you. Often I'd not notice I got hit. The hit sound sounds more like a glancing hit than a proper good one, could be meatier.
Sometimes the charge attack doesn't hit but I swear the sword is inside her fucking body, please...
Great performance, except for the 2nd phase of 2nd boss where it drops a lot. Mostly when inside the room, probably something to do with the smoke. Using a 3080 Mobile, with a weird display locked at 102 FPS.
My OS is in Swedish so some button prompts are fucked up, Shift and Space for example. If you're using the new input system you should be able to get non system specific button names I think. Needs rebinding too.
Some animations can use some improvements, the running ones are pretty stilted. But all the fighting ones are great, no negatives there. There's something odd about the sprinting animation, like her body keeps jutting back and forth, mostly visible with a locked on camera:
https://streamable.com/j5906a
No victory message for the first fight, she just kinda lies there staring at the sky.
Something is wrong when using a controller moving at certain angles (I've checked too and as far as I can tell mine is working properly), gets jittery and slow:
https://streamable.com/jj4e0y
But I still prefered it to KB&M, tried to avoid moving in those directions. Works perfectly with keyboard though.
The camera can be annoying in the 2nd fight, like its both too slow at keeping up at times and at other times its swinging around way too much. But FROM can't even get it right so uh good luck!
Not all objects get transparent when occluding the view, hard to see sometimes 2nd fight.
I completely missed that there were another set of abilities and played only with the first one, whoops.
The moveset is really fun and intuitive to use. Nothing bad to say about it at all.
Wall jumping can get very silly and you can endlessly roll around the walls in the 2nd fight. You can almost cheese the fight too if you get her outside in a corner and just spam jump. But most of the time she can get out.
Bosses are hard, especially 2nd one. First one didn't take that long. 2nd felt like she had some bullshit attacks at first but when you learn the fight it's fair I think. Really good job on the bosses, and they require a bit different strategies.
Now I just want more to fight. Great work.
Accidentally closed the browser once but I think I got everything...
Thanks for playing! Congratulations on beating Nia, I wasn't expecting many people to be able to beat her.
SFX is certainly a weak point, really need to take some time to do up the sound design again. I still haven't decided on a direction I want to take the hit effects, since I feel like going full on blood and gore wouldn't really fit, and that circle impact vfx would look too similar to the deflect/parry effects.
Maybe the charge attack's hitbox ends a bit too early?
Yeah, I was pretty surprised with the poor performance in phase 2 too. It's not much different compared to phase 1, except that it's lower down where the volumetric fog asset I'm using is. Unfortunately I didn't have the time to optimize it properly before DD.
Never thought that those were displayed differently in other languages. (And there was another anon who had a dvorak layout which wasn't displayed properly since my "keyboard_comma" sprite wasn't named "keyboard_,"...). Really good to know, thanks for pointing it out. It'll probably take me a bit more time to fix it, since I need to go and check and update my sprite names from InputControl.displayName to InputControl.name.
There's a lot of issues with the walk/run/sprint animations, since it was my first attempt at animating those. It's among the top priorities to remake once I get a little more animation experience. I think the jitter is a weird blending issue, or maybe something about starting off on the wrong foot.
Cameras are so cursed sometimes, whatever we have now has already gone through lots of tweaking and I have no clue how to make it work any better when bosses are going to be flying around the level like this. I think most objects have the transparency shader applied, but I haven't really gone in to tweak their distance values that much. I tried to keep it as subtle as I could without sacrificing visibility too much, although in a way it's also part of the level design since you have to learn to read moves even if you can't see everything.
I'm glad to hear that the moveset is intuitive to use, makes it worth the effort in designing it to be that way.
I probably need to add some kind of hit list to prevent wall jumping from being repeated on the same things, but another idea I was considering but didn't have the time to implement was more anti-air moves that would catch you if you tried to stay up for too long.
To be honest, I can't even clear the 2nd boss that consistently myself, so yeah, it's actually really hard. Also, my next bosses will probably be even harder, since they canonically are ordered in terms of strength, except for the tutorial boss who's not really part of that ranking in the story.
Once again, thank you for playing, and thanks for the great feedback. Really happy to see someone finish the demo.
For some reason you can't select the dialogue choices when using a controller. The camera is janky when performing actions (jump, attack, dodge, sprint. etc.) and traversing certain areas. I feel like the first character you fight can be a little unfair as it does way more damage and you do to it and also has some moves that almost defeat you instantly. It took me a little while to notice you have another set of special moves. I don't have much problems with the actual combat and the character models are nice as well. Some animations are a little jank though. I like it, just needs some balancing and polish in certain aspects.
Thanks for playing!
Controller UI has had a lot of problems, and I haven't managed to fix them yet. There's definitely some more polish to be done on animations, although I think I'll be prioritizing new animations first before I go back and fix the older ones.
I think it's less of a balance issue but rather a tutorial issue. Since it's a boss rush, I don't have goons to throw to teach the player how to play, so it's really hard to convey the kind of play style that's being asked for. I think insta-kill moves can be fair if they're easy to spot and deal with, and in Louise's case, all you really have to do is run up and around her in about 5 seconds, and then it's free hits during the charging time. It's meant as a distance check to teach the player to stay close and find opportunities to attack, since it's a very obvious window for attacking.
Although, there was also a plan to add a revive like in Sekiro, so with that missing it might be a bit unfair. Apart from that, there's a lot of balancing that needs to be done on flinch timings and damage values in general.
also the dialog would get stuck on some random parts. no mouse or keyboard input would advance it.
Thanks for playing and recording!
The music bug has been fixed as of the newest update. Dialogue getting stuck might be due to where you're clicking, but I'll have to check that again. Try clicking on the text box area at the bottom and see if that fixes it.
I recorded a run of my own for you to see. I've skimmed through bits of your video, and the core issue is that you're just not playing aggressively enough.One-off notes as I was playing:
- Updated ui elements + loading screen aesthetics look really nice.
- Advancement of the tutorial fight against Jin is a little unclear. I found myself pressing the prompted buttons, parrying when it told me etc. and it would not advance to the next prompt. I'm not sure how I ended up defeating him. I was spamming jumps and then he suddenly got knocked down and I could finish him off.
- Speaking of spamming jumps, if you spam dodge roll + jump along a wall you can sometimes do a really weird long jump. In Nia's boss room you can basically float along the ceiling if you spam jumps.
- After I died against Jin I respawned behind the invisible wall so I couldn't reach him. Had to quit to title and start a new game to re-fight him.
- In the mountain region leading up the Jin fight you can run up the side of the mountain to get around said invisible wall.
- If the fps displayed in the top right corner is accurate, the game doesn't seem to obey the fps set in the settings unless Vsync is explicitly turned off. I tried setting it to 60 and 30 but it would only use the full 144hz unless I turned vsync off.
- After dying to Louise once her battle music stopped playing.
- I was able to cheese Louise by essentially spamming kick with E to stunlock her. When her poise bar is set to max I would just jump away and the jump hurtbox will knock her down, giving you a free finishing move. Definitely felt like cheating but I'll take it because I know my scrub ass is not beating her legit. The good news is this strat does not work on Nia at all lol.
- Might want to increase the height of that small japanese-style house in the hub world. It's easy for the camera to clip through the roof. Or just make the roof turn transparent when the camera is over it.
Overall thoughts on the gameplay:
Maybe I'm just playing it wrong but this game feels a little too punishing. The bosses do a fuckton of damage while it feels like every attack the player does barely scratches their hp bar. I also don't like how bosses never really give much breathing room. They will throw out an attack and then throw out another a few seconds later regardless of where the player is. It would be nice if they would also move around the arena bit or run up to the player before throwing out their next attack. My only reference for similar arpgs is the Kingdom Hearts series and I appreciated how those games will always let you get at least one full combo in if you strike an enemy during an opening. In those games an enemy's retaliation timing is determined by a "revenge value". Here it seems like I can get in at most 2 hits in consistently before the enemy starts striking back, despite Kimiko's basic combo being apparently 4 hits total.
Parrying, blocking, and dodging feel a lot better than I remember. I also like how recovering from a downed position feels a lot snappier than the last time I played.
Thanks for playing!
Yeah, it's a bit too much. I can't consistently beat the game in one continuous try myself, so it's going to need more balance changes. Some of these problems are a result of having a very simple behaviour tree that just throws out attacks, so that behaviour of running up is something that I'll fix by changing the AI paradigm. However, my successful runs on each boss are usually around 3-4min, so I don't see much issue with the current HP amounts. (Sometimes, I even feel like they're too low...). Damage from the bosses is high, but it's not enough to outright kill you in one shot (maybe unless you get caught in Nia's Fan Dance), so I might just increase the heal charges instead. 5 was an arbitrary number to begin with, and there were also plans to be able to fill it up mid-fight which I never got around to doing.
At most, I might have to implement an easy mode, which I'm not keen on doing in the full game, but it might be necessary for demos.
I've never played KH, but I've heard Revenge Values mentioned to me about this game before. I've seen a bit about it, but I'll need to spend some more time thinking about how to design and implement it. The 4th hit of the normal attack combo is also something I rarely use, but other abilities are planned to allow that to be used more often. Just like how you can do a Dodge -> Dodge Attack -> N2, I'm planning to have other abilities that chain into later normal attacks as well.
Personally, I don't want this to be a game where you just wait for one single attack, deal with it, then unload the exact same actions every time. Especially since the bosses are all similarly human-sized with flinchable poise instead of giants that can't be staggered by regular hits. My biggest criticism of Sekiro was that there's very little need to use the full moveset beyond the basic actions, so I'm aiming for a game that almost requires you to understand and use everything available to you.
Ideally, this would be attacking, getting deflected, knowing that the attack combo isn't going to work and immediately switching to another move, but the current animation lockout giving a frame disadvantage of ~0.5s really kills that flow. AI learning rates might also be too high that deflects happen too often, so I might just cap it at 90% chance to block and test that out.
Proton really doesn’t like this game, I really wanted to try it last demo day too but I’m going to need a Linux build.
I can get it to launch but I have to remove the space from the executable and the data folder, and once I’m in I can’t see the UI. I can hear buttons activating and stuff but all I see is the katana in the water.
I don't think I can do a Linux build, unfortunately. I've been able to play it on Steam deck by setting Proton to 9.0 through Steam, so maybe you can try that?
That did work, I try to launch using a script so I don’t have add everything as a non-steam game but proton’s more and more tied to steam and so it’s getting less reliable.
I always want to like these sorts of games but my brain can’t get used to parry timings and I just get mad, so I’m afraid I’m no help mechanically.
Thanks for playing!
This update brings the 2nd boss
Mozilla FirefoxNia to the game. You'll have to beat Louise first, though. I recommend you start from a new game to see the updates to the tutorial as well.Also, the AI will learn to block your attacks if you use the same things too much, so explore the move list and try out everything. Don't play this like it's Dark Souls and only wait for openings after attacks, there is a lot you can get away with using your mobility.