Kick is a bit OP right now - you can use it exclusively and beat the first 2 character. Kunai - Attack - Kick is my go-to combo (which failed me at the third character)
Overall I really do like what you have here - it's fun, it's very snappy, it feels great to play. Keep it up!
I love Sekiro! I'm very surprised by the quality of the bosses. Keep working on it and you'll end up with a great product.
I did find that the bosses got some tracking issues. Some of their attacks are not great as you can just effortlessly move out of the way.
The players kick also seems very strong and was very noticeable even during the initial tutorial. I decided to play honest for most of the game but at the very end I started to spam kick more and it made the game trivial.
To an extent, this is somewhat intended, since I wanted to have some element of positioning in there for avoiding hitboxes, but I think it ends up happening too unintentionally. The _fix version has some improved tracking on certain moves, but there are still a lot of moves that can be dodged in this way. Kick is definitely going to see some changes, since it seems like everyone just cheesed by spamming it...
I like anime, I like Sekiro, I like this game, keep polishing the game and adding more bosses and it will be more fun.
Something I wanna note about the gameplay is that I think you have to tweak the kick's power, I beat this bosses by kicks not katana. Kicks are very spawnable and most of time interrupt the boss attacks, just for you to know
I'm bad at playing and only got up to the third boss in 20 minutes. I'll come back for more.
Game's great, I find the parrying mechanic interesting, I'll have to spend more time labbing that but I've been using the iai rising slash to get parries off since the wind up is practically instant. Feels good.
I think the problem I have with this game is how easy it is to cheese bosses into doing certain patterns. You can spam M1-Kick to wear down the bosses that I've fought so far, since M1 triggers a "counterattack" but E is fast enough to interrupt it, non-committal enough that you can dodge out of the way, and powerful enough that it ironically gives more reward in the form of posture damage than if you were to deflect normally. The third boss has a long attack string that's basically uninterruptable normally unless you parry it which is a step in the right direction, but Louise (the second boss) is easily cheesed with the aforementioned M1-Kick, if you can get behind her back you can even spam it and get a free win.
You're probably aware of this and already fixed it in some way for the later bosses. Great game, with the amount of content that you have right now I'm keeping this in my PC until I finish it
Yeah, a lot of moves might need to see some nerfs in future, and not just in terms of damage numbers. Iai is supposed to have a long recovery to compensate for the instant attack, but with the jump it's also supposed to combo into air moves, so it ends up losing the one weakness it should have.
Evangelion ahh ending.
Overall very fun demo. Felt good to play, sound design and art direction are nice.
Ran into a bug after the second boss where she started making a "fizzing" sound that stayed there until the game exited to menu. Jumping is OP during fights because if you just keep jumping they can't hit you.
The fizzing sound was probably due to the projetiles not being cleaned up properly, so that'll be yet another bug to fix. Jumping is pretty OP, but I see it as being the same as just dodging or running away; it doesn't progress the fight much. I do plan on having some anti-air moves in future, though, so it'll only be OP for these first couple of fights before it becomes something that gets punished.
Haven't played Sekiro ever or any game of that kind a long time, but it felt very easy to get into. However, the tutorial was too text heavy for my taste. Also, I wouldn't always lock on to the dummy? Not sure if I missed something (would've to check the vid), but I expected the slide tackle to hit the dummy (it later worked when trying it on Jin).
Fighting Jin was fun and intense, as I expected him to be "dead" when down the first time (I didn't pay any attention to the bars - what's the orange bar for?). I also thought I could down attack him somehow?
Learning to parry projectiles while fighting him was interesting. However, reading the info text while fighting is sucky. It took me out of the fight. Just took a glimpse of "projectile, parry, RB", only later trying to read the whole text to make sure I didn't miss any information while dodging his attacks. At the very least I'd highlight the keywords red (if not shorten the text altogether).
The combat severly lacks feedback over the amount of damage I took or how much HP I have left. During my first fight I thought I had him in the back easily, but was surprised how low my HP was. The healthbar isn't really eyecatching enough for me. I'd prefer to have some sort of indicator, where I don't have to look away from the fight.
During the fight I didn't like to heal. Somehow felt wrong. Winning the fight without healing was much more satisfying.
Mid fight, I tried to kick, but forgot I had to switch to that ability. Somehow thought that kicking was a base ability. Or maybe I misremember.
Tried to dodge his grabs, don't think I ever got it.
Jumping onto the lantern was neat.
During the fight I thought I was very much in control of what I'm doing, even though I can't say that I knew what I was doing.
Played with gamepad, but no option to rebind? And obviously needs more gamepad-UI integration.
Also, just noticed looking back at the video, there's an orange bar, too, for myself... Also, didn't see the "Healing" info text at all.
Game kinda crashed after the fight. The next scene would load eventually, but then crashed completely.
That's my first impression. Any specific feedback or critizism you're looking for?
Yeah, the tutorial's pretty wordy, but it's kind of between that and doing more of those pop-ups (which I personally find to be annoying), so it's a tough balance to do. I think parrying could be separated into it's own tutorial stage, but I'm also unsure if new players can handle being forced to parry to continue. As for the target lock, it gets removed during death, it can be manually toggled, but I think I forgot to write it into the tutorials so it's not really clear.
Orange bar was explained in the tutorials, so I'm not sure how you missed it. As for the side text during the fight, it was something I did to avoid having to rely too much on the pop-ups, but I guess anything more than just button prompts is too complex to convey with just that. On the other hand, it's definitely too late to respond if you were to read a popup tutorial when the attack that triggers it starts, so most likely I'll just need to fit it into the first tutorial level.
I've never seen a crash happen there, so I'd appreciate if you could send me the logs for the game. By "crash completely", do you mean that the game refused to load the next level, or did the program actually close itself? Does this happen consistently, or just this once?
How "big" will be the intro to the final game? Do you want the player to jump right into the action? With this type of game I could see a tutorial like Metal Gear:Solid's VR Training work well, set in a hidden village or whatever. So, rather than funneling the player through a tutorial, you give them the choice to "level up" their skills by fighting/practicing with teachers. Basically what you have now, just more focused on individual lessons. "All abilities are unlocked from the start, and it's up to you to master how to use them." can be tough to get most players into the game. Personally I like it, but I find it difficult to design well.
With the orange bar, there's a lot going on at once for a newb.
Not sure if there was an actual error message, but after the second enemy appeard (girl sitting in field) it just blacked out and nothing. Where are the error logs located? I'll see if it happens again.
Ok, this time had the crash when transitioning from the tutorial level. But on second try it worked and could fight Saber Louise. But damn, I hardly deal any damage :o Girl's too thicc
Update: finally beat it. Took me more than 50 minutes. 20 Minutes to reach the Fox. Trying to parry seemed like a death sentence as so many attacks would hail down on me, eventually I'd get hit. Stayed mid range, as this would work well against her attacks.
In the first few attempts, getting her down to the sequence she would lose her jacket. In later tries she kept the jacket?
Didn't manage to parry a single projectile the entire time :(
What's a normal time to beat those bosses? I feel I'm doing something extremely wrong.
Thanks for the follow-up. The logs should be in "AppData\LocalLow\kemomic\Illusive Domain" that you can get to from running %APPDATA%.
Ideally, I'd like the player to be able to just jump straight into the action, similarly to how Furi starts off with a boss. In practice, there's too many mechanics that trying to cram it into a tutorial boss in previous builds just made for a boring boss and a bad tutorial, so the current tutorial is an attempt at shortening it as much as possible.
The jacket is removed during the cutscene, and it should be reset if the fight restarts.
I think ~1h is a pretty good time, especially if you haven't played similar games. I'm at around 6-7min myself, but my other friends took 30min and 1h respectively to clear it.
This is really an interesting design issue. Reminds me of Bushido Blade, getting thrown in right away. What about some sort of branching prologue?
> You throw the player into a boss fight right away
>> If the player gets stomped, the player goes into a tutorial section
>>> After the tutorial section, the player has to either redo the first boss, or go on with the second boss (with the first boss reappearing later)
>> If the player already has the skills, the tutorial section is skipped (optional)
Or maybe unlocking pratice sessions. After a loss, the player unlocks an optional training session. Maybe based on the performance, like: never parried => how to parry.
Having a tutorial helped a lot, though I have immediately went for the controller, and the tutorial windows can only be closed by a click. During the first actual fight, when I stance broke the guy and did a finisher, we were at the end of the bridge, with me on it, and him being on the shore. When I did the finisher, my character sank into the ground for the duration of the animation.
I wanna be salty and say Loiuse's tackle has a way too big hitbox, but frankly, I am just bat at dodging them. Though it feels like I am doomed if I try to escape, and sometimes I am saved if I remain too close. Still one-shotting is a little unfair. (Salt) Not sure if it is a bug or a feature that I get to freely wail on her if I catch her in the back. She seems way too helpless compared to everything else. I am not detecting any of the collision issues I've reported last time.
Sorry I've listed all the shortcomings I've come across, I think you have improved a lot on your already solid gameplay.
Thanks for playing! It's good to hear that the tutorial is working (well, aside from the controller issues). I've noticed the finisher behaving quite weirdly on different terrains, but I've yet to figure out a reproducible case for it, unfortunately.
It's a feature (bug). Well, it's not too out of character for her, although it isn't really intended behaviour either. I think it's fine as a reward for choosing to go on the aggressive when she's trying to run away, so let's just say it's a feature. As for her grab, I find it's almost impossible to dodge by just going backward, but just about any other direction (including jumping) makes it quite easy to avoid. It usually does about 50%, but with the armour damage buff it ends up doing ~85% of your health. It's one of the few differences between each forms, so I'm not too willing to change that beyond making it less likely to one-shot through other means like a one-time 1hp guts effect or some other similar protection, plus I also think grabs ought to be big dangerous moves that are easy to dodge but devastating if they hit.
Played for a while. Movement feels weird, like for some reason it's stilted to start sometimes. The fact that so many attacks enemies do can miss just cause you're close enough is odd. The third fight was pissing me off with the deflect timing. She'd do those sets of double swings with the fans, and even though I swore I had the timing exactly the same on my deflects, it just would not work if it started off wrong.
By "stilted to start", are you referring to the time it takes to get up to full speed from standing still?
For the hitboxes, most attacks generally use the weapon colliders, which are set to follow the bounds of the weapon quite closely. This is meant to allow for some attacks to be avoided by spacing or using other moves to move your body hitboxes, but in practice it's possibly too tight that a lot of attacks tend to miss.
For the double swings, are you talking about the repeated ones where she spins, or the teleport attack?
Wow, thanks for the in-depth video comments. There's a lot of issues that I didn't notice before which I solved because of it.
I've seen the kick bug before, but thought it was just my controller being old (and probably a bootleg), turns out it was some outdated code that wasn't updated properly which only affected this one skill. As for the movement, I've snapped the direction to the 8 directions to avoid having it go into weird blends, but there was also an animation issue where the root motion of the diagonals wasn't updated to match the new magnitude of the other directions. There's still some jerkiness to changing directions, but it should feel a lot smoother with the new fix build.
The stance regen delay was too high before (15s!), so the new build has lowered them down significantly. Some hitboxes have been enlarged, but I'll still need to do another pass at retiming hitboxes later on. Tracking on some moves has also been improved.
As for the deflect timings, delaying phase transitions to finish executions, and jumping up the rocks, these will probably take a lot more thought to solve, so it'll probably have to wait for the next big update.
Here's the notes I took down while playing. I had some frustrating moments with the fox lady boss but I still had fun. The run where I finally beat her was really satisfying and felt like I knew what I was doing. I relied a lot on the kick, since it mixes into your attacks so well and does so much posture damage.
- In the tutorial pop ups, pressing A on the gamepad doesn't close it
- Oh, it was a delay, the difference between an inactive button and pressable button wasn't very clear
- It's hard to tell if you took damage when blocking because it sounds the same as a hit?
- The constant rumble when holding down block is kind of annoying
- I don't remember seeing the arts/skills last time I did the tutorial, but this time it makes sense
- Control popups on the left showing what the "combos" are for the techniques is good
- Glomp attack
- Not sure how I triggered, but some combination of kick and block I think got the controller stuck in a rumbling state, fixed it by pressing block
- Kick is really strong
- Doing the thing where it switches prompts based on gamepad or keyboard is very good
- Still extremely unclear on how recovering posture works, does guard speed it up? Does sprint slow it down? When does it start recovering?
- Not sure at all what the deflect windows are for the fox lady fan attacks, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't and I'm not sure what I'm doing differently
- After doing the first execution attack on the fox lady I fell below the level somehow
- If I get the first deflect in, I can deflect the rest, but if I don't, it seems like none of the deflects can happen after? It's basically all or nothing.
- Gamepad rumble got stuck again after beating the fox lady
- Ometedou
- Have you ever tried some kind of unshaded or cel shaded shading style for the characters? The lighting, and especially shadows, can sometimes look a bit awkward on them, and I wonder if maybe a different shading style could help. Maybe not receiving shadows? Hard to explain.
oh shit, I forgot to remove the vibration because it doesn't work on my controller over wireless so I never even noticed it was still around. Gonna upload a new build later on to just disable it for the time being.
Thanks for playing!
Yeah, the UI for the tutorial is really unpolished. I'll probably fix it after DD when I get around to doing a proper UI design pass. The disabled button used to be hidden, but doing it that way would cause the layout to shift around when I unhid it and I didn't bother trying to fix it properly.
For posture recovery, there's 2 important aspects to this: the recovery delay, and the actual regeneration rate. The delay basically isn't ever changed, but the regeneration rate does change if you're blocking. Aside from the basic recovery, dodging attacks (iframing through them) also recovers a little bit, and there's also a really strong recovery over time effect that gets triggered whenever you parry. Enemies only have the basic recovery rate (for now).
I definitely need to take another look at the deflect systems soon, since it was doing really badly with the fast attacks back when I first added it, so the current version is just functional enough that I'm able to mostly reliably deflect it.
I'd have to see a specific example of what you mean by the awkward lighting, but the shader does support the cel-shading ramp map, it's just that the ramp used has softer blends instead of hard boundaries. I think some of these are just simple gradients, though.
The tutorial helps a lot, still not sure about the kick tho, as in is it better than the normal attack?
The damage of the grab attack of the first boss is kinda.. too strong?
The game clicked for me, good stuff, can't think much of any feedback, timing the deflect and the follow-up attack to parry boss combo feels really good.
The kick is better at dealing Stance (orange) damage, while the normal attack is better at doing Vitality (red) damage. It also does more damage when blocked, which makes it quite strong for this version since enemies don't dodge yet. There are also some attacks which are easier to line up parries with when using the kicks, but that's more of as a general alternative moveset like how other moves can be used to circumvent the enemies learning to block your moves.
By first boss, if you mean Jin, the point is that even if you get grabbed, you can still dodge out of the way so that you learn to dodge. For Louise, well, her concept is supposed to be "someone that has a crazy amount of power but is too dumb to use it properly". So it's fairly easy to dodge, but if you do get caught then it can potentially one-shot you (~85% HP damage when transformed). I might try to add some kind of one-shot protection in future to balance this out, but that's also going to have to come along with more lethal attacks.
Comments
Finally, cat and jugs torture.
Kick is a bit OP right now - you can use it exclusively and beat the first 2 character. Kunai - Attack - Kick is my go-to combo (which failed me at the third character)
Overall I really do like what you have here - it's fun, it's very snappy, it feels great to play. Keep it up!
Thanks for playing! I wasn't able to stay up to catch it live, but I watched the VOD afterwards.
I love Sekiro! I'm very surprised by the quality of the bosses. Keep working on it and you'll end up with a great product.
I did find that the bosses got some tracking issues. Some of their attacks are not great as you can just effortlessly move out of the way.
The players kick also seems very strong and was very noticeable even during the initial tutorial. I decided to play honest for most of the game but at the very end I started to spam kick more and it made the game trivial.
Thanks for playing!
To an extent, this is somewhat intended, since I wanted to have some element of positioning in there for avoiding hitboxes, but I think it ends up happening too unintentionally. The _fix version has some improved tracking on certain moves, but there are still a lot of moves that can be dodged in this way. Kick is definitely going to see some changes, since it seems like everyone just cheesed by spamming it...
I like anime, I like Sekiro, I like this game, keep polishing the game and adding more bosses and it will be more fun.
Something I wanna note about the gameplay is that I think you have to tweak the kick's power, I beat this bosses by kicks not katana. Kicks are very spawnable and most of time interrupt the boss attacks, just for you to know
Keep up the good work.
Thanks for playing! Yeah, kicks are definitely going to need a nerf.
I'm bad at playing and only got up to the third boss in 20 minutes. I'll come back for more.
Game's great, I find the parrying mechanic interesting, I'll have to spend more time labbing that but I've been using the iai rising slash to get parries off since the wind up is practically instant. Feels good.
I think the problem I have with this game is how easy it is to cheese bosses into doing certain patterns. You can spam M1-Kick to wear down the bosses that I've fought so far, since M1 triggers a "counterattack" but E is fast enough to interrupt it, non-committal enough that you can dodge out of the way, and powerful enough that it ironically gives more reward in the form of posture damage than if you were to deflect normally. The third boss has a long attack string that's basically uninterruptable normally unless you parry it which is a step in the right direction, but Louise (the second boss) is easily cheesed with the aforementioned M1-Kick, if you can get behind her back you can even spam it and get a free win.
You're probably aware of this and already fixed it in some way for the later bosses. Great game, with the amount of content that you have right now I'm keeping this in my PC until I finish it
Thanks for playing!
Yeah, a lot of moves might need to see some nerfs in future, and not just in terms of damage numbers. Iai is supposed to have a long recovery to compensate for the instant attack, but with the jump it's also supposed to combo into air moves, so it ends up losing the one weakness it should have.
Evangelion ahh ending. Overall very fun demo. Felt good to play, sound design and art direction are nice. Ran into a bug after the second boss where she started making a "fizzing" sound that stayed there until the game exited to menu. Jumping is OP during fights because if you just keep jumping they can't hit you.
Thanks for playing!
The fizzing sound was probably due to the projetiles not being cleaned up properly, so that'll be yet another bug to fix. Jumping is pretty OP, but I see it as being the same as just dodging or running away; it doesn't progress the fight much. I do plan on having some anti-air moves in future, though, so it'll only be OP for these first couple of fights before it becomes something that gets punished.
Niceu desu.
Haven't played Sekiro ever or any game of that kind a long time, but it felt very easy to get into.
However, the tutorial was too text heavy for my taste. Also, I wouldn't always lock on to the dummy? Not sure if I missed something (would've to check the vid), but I expected the slide tackle to hit the dummy (it later worked when trying it on Jin).
Fighting Jin was fun and intense, as I expected him to be "dead" when down the first time (I didn't pay any attention to the bars - what's the orange bar for?). I also thought I could down attack him somehow?
Learning to parry projectiles while fighting him was interesting. However, reading the info text while fighting is sucky. It took me out of the fight. Just took a glimpse of "projectile, parry, RB", only later trying to read the whole text to make sure I didn't miss any information while dodging his attacks. At the very least I'd highlight the keywords red (if not shorten the text altogether).
The combat severly lacks feedback over the amount of damage I took or how much HP I have left. During my first fight I thought I had him in the back easily, but was surprised how low my HP was. The healthbar isn't really eyecatching enough for me. I'd prefer to have some sort of indicator, where I don't have to look away from the fight.
During the fight I didn't like to heal. Somehow felt wrong. Winning the fight without healing was much more satisfying.
Mid fight, I tried to kick, but forgot I had to switch to that ability. Somehow thought that kicking was a base ability. Or maybe I misremember.
Tried to dodge his grabs, don't think I ever got it.
Jumping onto the lantern was neat.
During the fight I thought I was very much in control of what I'm doing, even though I can't say that I knew what I was doing.
Played with gamepad, but no option to rebind? And obviously needs more gamepad-UI integration.
Also, just noticed looking back at the video, there's an orange bar, too, for myself... Also, didn't see the "Healing" info text at all.
Game kinda crashed after the fight. The next scene would load eventually, but then crashed completely.
That's my first impression. Any specific feedback or critizism you're looking for?
Thanks for playing!
Yeah, the tutorial's pretty wordy, but it's kind of between that and doing more of those pop-ups (which I personally find to be annoying), so it's a tough balance to do. I think parrying could be separated into it's own tutorial stage, but I'm also unsure if new players can handle being forced to parry to continue. As for the target lock, it gets removed during death, it can be manually toggled, but I think I forgot to write it into the tutorials so it's not really clear.
Orange bar was explained in the tutorials, so I'm not sure how you missed it. As for the side text during the fight, it was something I did to avoid having to rely too much on the pop-ups, but I guess anything more than just button prompts is too complex to convey with just that. On the other hand, it's definitely too late to respond if you were to read a popup tutorial when the attack that triggers it starts, so most likely I'll just need to fit it into the first tutorial level.
I've never seen a crash happen there, so I'd appreciate if you could send me the logs for the game. By "crash completely", do you mean that the game refused to load the next level, or did the program actually close itself? Does this happen consistently, or just this once?
How "big" will be the intro to the final game? Do you want the player to jump right into the action? With this type of game I could see a tutorial like Metal Gear:Solid's VR Training work well, set in a hidden village or whatever. So, rather than funneling the player through a tutorial, you give them the choice to "level up" their skills by fighting/practicing with teachers. Basically what you have now, just more focused on individual lessons.
"All abilities are unlocked from the start, and it's up to you to master how to use them." can be tough to get most players into the game. Personally I like it, but I find it difficult to design well.
With the orange bar, there's a lot going on at once for a newb.
Not sure if there was an actual error message, but after the second enemy appeard (girl sitting in field) it just blacked out and nothing. Where are the error logs located? I'll see if it happens again.
Ok, this time had the crash when transitioning from the tutorial level. But on second try it worked and could fight
SaberLouise. But damn, I hardly deal any damage :o Girl's too thiccUpdate: finally beat it. Took me more than 50 minutes. 20 Minutes to reach the Fox. Trying to parry seemed like a death sentence as so many attacks would hail down on me, eventually I'd get hit. Stayed mid range, as this would work well against her attacks.
In the first few attempts, getting her down to the sequence she would lose her jacket. In later tries she kept the jacket?
Didn't manage to parry a single projectile the entire time :(
What's a normal time to beat those bosses? I feel I'm doing something extremely wrong.
Thanks for the follow-up. The logs should be in "AppData\LocalLow\kemomic\Illusive Domain" that you can get to from running %APPDATA%.
Ideally, I'd like the player to be able to just jump straight into the action, similarly to how Furi starts off with a boss. In practice, there's too many mechanics that trying to cram it into a tutorial boss in previous builds just made for a boring boss and a bad tutorial, so the current tutorial is an attempt at shortening it as much as possible.
The jacket is removed during the cutscene, and it should be reset if the fight restarts.
I think ~1h is a pretty good time, especially if you haven't played similar games. I'm at around 6-7min myself, but my other friends took 30min and 1h respectively to clear it.
Player-prev.log https://pastebin.com/ejbKMe2F
Player.log https://pastebin.com/asNxT5xm
This is really an interesting design issue. Reminds me of Bushido Blade, getting thrown in right away. What about some sort of branching prologue?
> You throw the player into a boss fight right away
>> If the player gets stomped, the player goes into a tutorial section
>>> After the tutorial section, the player has to either redo the first boss, or go on with the second boss (with the first boss reappearing later)
>> If the player already has the skills, the tutorial section is skipped (optional)
Or maybe unlocking pratice sessions. After a loss, the player unlocks an optional training session. Maybe based on the performance, like: never parried => how to parry.
Having a tutorial helped a lot, though I have immediately went for the controller, and the tutorial windows can only be closed by a click. During the first actual fight, when I stance broke the guy and did a finisher, we were at the end of the bridge, with me on it, and him being on the shore. When I did the finisher, my character sank into the ground for the duration of the animation.
I wanna be salty and say Loiuse's tackle has a way too big hitbox, but frankly, I am just bat at dodging them. Though it feels like I am doomed if I try to escape, and sometimes I am saved if I remain too close. Still one-shotting is a little unfair. (Salt)
Not sure if it is a bug or a feature that I get to freely wail on her if I catch her in the back. She seems way too helpless compared to everything else.
I am not detecting any of the collision issues I've reported last time.
Sorry I've listed all the shortcomings I've come across, I think you have improved a lot on your already solid gameplay.
Thanks for playing! It's good to hear that the tutorial is working (well, aside from the controller issues). I've noticed the finisher behaving quite weirdly on different terrains, but I've yet to figure out a reproducible case for it, unfortunately.
It's a feature (bug). Well, it's not too out of character for her, although it isn't really intended behaviour either. I think it's fine as a reward for choosing to go on the aggressive when she's trying to run away, so let's just say it's a feature. As for her grab, I find it's almost impossible to dodge by just going backward, but just about any other direction (including jumping) makes it quite easy to avoid. It usually does about 50%, but with the armour damage buff it ends up doing ~85% of your health. It's one of the few differences between each forms, so I'm not too willing to change that beyond making it less likely to one-shot through other means like a one-time 1hp guts effect or some other similar protection, plus I also think grabs ought to be big dangerous moves that are easy to dodge but devastating if they hit.
Played for a while. Movement feels weird, like for some reason it's stilted to start sometimes. The fact that so many attacks enemies do can miss just cause you're close enough is odd. The third fight was pissing me off with the deflect timing. She'd do those sets of double swings with the fans, and even though I swore I had the timing exactly the same on my deflects, it just would not work if it started off wrong.
Thanks for playing!
By "stilted to start", are you referring to the time it takes to get up to full speed from standing still?
For the hitboxes, most attacks generally use the weapon colliders, which are set to follow the bounds of the weapon quite closely. This is meant to allow for some attacks to be avoided by spacing or using other moves to move your body hitboxes, but in practice it's possibly too tight that a lot of attacks tend to miss.
For the double swings, are you talking about the repeated ones where she spins, or the teleport attack?
I made a recording for it.
Wow, thanks for the in-depth video comments. There's a lot of issues that I didn't notice before which I solved because of it.
I've seen the kick bug before, but thought it was just my controller being old (and probably a bootleg), turns out it was some outdated code that wasn't updated properly which only affected this one skill. As for the movement, I've snapped the direction to the 8 directions to avoid having it go into weird blends, but there was also an animation issue where the root motion of the diagonals wasn't updated to match the new magnitude of the other directions. There's still some jerkiness to changing directions, but it should feel a lot smoother with the new fix build.
The stance regen delay was too high before (15s!), so the new build has lowered them down significantly. Some hitboxes have been enlarged, but I'll still need to do another pass at retiming hitboxes later on. Tracking on some moves has also been improved.
As for the deflect timings, delaying phase transitions to finish executions, and jumping up the rocks, these will probably take a lot more thought to solve, so it'll probably have to wait for the next big update.
Here's the notes I took down while playing. I had some frustrating moments with the fox lady boss but I still had fun. The run where I finally beat her was really satisfying and felt like I knew what I was doing. I relied a lot on the kick, since it mixes into your attacks so well and does so much posture damage.
oh shit, I forgot to remove the vibration because it doesn't work on my controller over wireless so I never even noticed it was still around. Gonna upload a new build later on to just disable it for the time being.
Thanks for playing!
Yeah, the UI for the tutorial is really unpolished. I'll probably fix it after DD when I get around to doing a proper UI design pass. The disabled button used to be hidden, but doing it that way would cause the layout to shift around when I unhid it and I didn't bother trying to fix it properly.
For posture recovery, there's 2 important aspects to this: the recovery delay, and the actual regeneration rate. The delay basically isn't ever changed, but the regeneration rate does change if you're blocking. Aside from the basic recovery, dodging attacks (iframing through them) also recovers a little bit, and there's also a really strong recovery over time effect that gets triggered whenever you parry. Enemies only have the basic recovery rate (for now).
I definitely need to take another look at the deflect systems soon, since it was doing really badly with the fast attacks back when I first added it, so the current version is just functional enough that I'm able to mostly reliably deflect it.
I'd have to see a specific example of what you mean by the awkward lighting, but the shader does support the cel-shading ramp map, it's just that the ramp used has softer blends instead of hard boundaries. I think some of these are just simple gradients, though.
Congratulations!
Blocked to this image (the animation) with proton GE. Do a linux build.
The tutorial helps a lot, still not sure about the kick tho, as in is it better than the normal attack?
The damage of the grab attack of the first boss is kinda.. too strong?
The game clicked for me, good stuff, can't think much of any feedback, timing the deflect and the follow-up attack to parry boss combo feels really good.
Thanks for playing!
The kick is better at dealing Stance (orange) damage, while the normal attack is better at doing Vitality (red) damage. It also does more damage when blocked, which makes it quite strong for this version since enemies don't dodge yet. There are also some attacks which are easier to line up parries with when using the kicks, but that's more of as a general alternative moveset like how other moves can be used to circumvent the enemies learning to block your moves.
By first boss, if you mean Jin, the point is that even if you get grabbed, you can still dodge out of the way so that you learn to dodge. For Louise, well, her concept is supposed to be "someone that has a crazy amount of power but is too dumb to use it properly". So it's fairly easy to dodge, but if you do get caught then it can potentially one-shot you (~85% HP damage when transformed). I might try to add some kind of one-shot protection in future to balance this out, but that's also going to have to come along with more lethal attacks.
https://kemomic.itch.io/illusive-domain/devlog/969671/june-2025-update
Most of the updates are in this devlog, but since then there's been: