[Alpha 0.135] First Impressions

[Misery]

Quick question. Is there an enemy that teleports you to another room when you kill him?
So far I really like the game. It reminds me a lot of Isaac but with more complex rooms and without the nastyness of being trapped in a too small room with too many enemies.
I still coudln't defeat a single boss though but I stay determined!

....wait, what?  I dont think there are any enemies that should be doing that.... I've never experienced that one.  Was it the final enemy in the room?  If that's the case, and if you were standing too close to a door, you mighta just gotten sucked through it when that last enemy went down.  Door hitboxes are a little too big right now.

But if that wasnt the case, that might be something to put onto Mantis.

[ptarth]

• The camera centering on the player is too quick, it needs to be slowed down.
• I'm getting occasional screen tearing, it might be due to integrated laptop graphics card.
• Rooms that require missiles to clear make me sad, because I sometimes have already run out of missiles. (Can't kill the destructible items blocking in the enemies.)
• The boss with the blue up & down flipping arc shot pattern has shots that sometimes glitch through the walls. The shots also sometimes shift strangely (up or down a little), instead of just moving across the screen.
• Teleporters reactivate on releasing the analog stick, that's very weird.
• Analog controls are really strange feeling, but everyone already knows this.
• printing the room identifier to the log would help identifying rooms for evaluation.
• Shots that block player projectiles should be related in visual appearance, I would suggest color.
• The palette for enemies should be different than the ones for objects. I occasionally think an enemy is an object.
• Destructible objects should have a different palette than missile destructible objects.
• Those fat enemies that mrhanman hates, I also hate.
• I really like the Spiders and the Fire Oil Slick guys. Relatedly, the T-Polyomino shots chains might look better if they were more laser shot like .

Chris's Questions

• Speed is hard to evaluate with the current input lag and weird analog controls. I have a really hard time with the laser gates, but that is also related to the hitbox.
• The basic blue ship shots seem functionally fine, but they feel mass-less and look like they need more animation frames, they seem to jump/skip through space.
• The salvo shots are hard to evaluate with the analog controls.
• The rooms that require missiles to destruct terrain are frustrating because you can run out of missiles and have to suicide. I'd probably also like it if the rooms with laser walls disabled the lasers after the room was cleared.
• For my level of skill right now, I  find very easy to okay in relation to my ships health.
• Invincibility seems fine.
• Nothing jumps out at me yet about anything else.

[tombik]

It really is in alpha, and it shows in many ways. I played it with Brawler, with archer and with Dark Knight. I know it will be tweaked, but they did not feel that much different to me, except that I died too early with Brawler.

1) Yeah, shots do not have any weight. They are just sprites not to touch. When I get hurt, I dont have any feedback except the noise. I should at least shake a bit. The enemies are also like that, for me, meeting with the enemies that is invincible until you get near was really offputting, since I just thought they are enemies with high HP, and kept shooting until remembering someone talked about them here.

2) Both background sprites and tiles are randomly generated, I think. Sometimes it produces too weird color combinations, which hurts my eyes. Of course my eyes are okay, but as someone else already said it, it feels cheap and without effort even though they are not. Most of polishing is needed here.

3) Right now, it does not include any external humour by developers, and I find it professional.

Chris' questions:

1. It really is bad when it comes to flying. I had a hard time understanding whether I am a hovering mecha, or a flying ship, or a robot with roller skate. The obvious reason is that, moving exactly follows BoI, and Isaac is not a spaceship. Going in the same direction should increase the speed, and any maneuvre should be negatively related with current speed to satisfy momentum feel. I know, then all the bullet hell setup will be affected by it, but this is how is it. There was a reason why all bullet hell space thingies were sidescrollers, not top down shooters, and if you think you just found a shortcut by implementing humanlike movement to the player, I should point out that it is not working.

2. I liked shot speed. But, I think this game needs a bit weight to the shots, be it screenshake, or more flashy "pew pew"s, or whatever. And my biggest gripe is the following: When you aim for a near target, your own bullets will pass through you. It looks weird.

3. Shooting enemies exactly feels like VWV. And that is a problem. You can either kill them too easily, or too hard, and the only relevant variable is health. Mostly, accuracy problems feel too artificial. Enemy movements are waaaaay too predictable, and feel shallow, as if they dont care where are you on the screen mostly. So, you kill them in 2 shots, or 20 shots, but I did not spend any time at all to calculate where they will be in seconds.

4. Yes. It was okay. But as a spaceship game, I assumed you would find a better solution about including rooms in game, I was not expecting finding rooms in a literal sense. So is this a hangar? If it is a hangar, why there are other ships flying in it? If we are attacking a hangar, would not it make sense if some soldiers or other ground troops were defending it? If it is not a hangar, what it is? Why are the enemies are that kind for us to allow us finish them room by room? Most of the time you develop a fitting story after you completed design of the mechanisms. I think it wont be okay here. In roguelik/tes, there is no story, there is only a background world, if it does not make sense, whole thing will feel out of place.

5. I dont have favourites yet. For me they felt waaaay too similar, be it their sprites or their movements. Some differentiation is a must, I cant see an efficient way to do it. I should mention that, in Isaac, just seeing enemies gives you a minimal idea about their attack patterns. Here, they are all ships, and they look mostly identical. I think more effort should be spent on this.

6. Health was okay I think.

7. Maybe I missed it but does it have a graphical representation for invincibility, if so, I cant remember. So I cant comment on this.

8. No, they felt too irrelevant. So maybe too small even.

9. None yet. I should understand about the mechanics better first.

I know I really sound negative, but yes, I am negative right now. I dont want this to be Isaac in Sapce in a spaceship, so I was a bit harsh. Sorry if I made anyone sad.

[Bluddy]

About the bit about shots having no weight:  It works in Isaac, and even moreso in Nuclear Throne, because of how simplistic they are in terms of their attack patterns.  NT most of all; half of the game isnt enemies that SHOOT, but instead, enemies that just run at you (one of the reasons why I recently just lost interest altogether, actually, is the boring attack patterns).  And when enemies DO fire, the attacks are very, very simple, and rarely involve all that many bullets. 

In most actual shmups.... as in, I cant think of one (well, a good one anyway) where this isnt the case.... there is no weight to shots whatsoever.  It distorts things if it is added, and can actually create further undodgeable situations.  A big no-no.

Misery, but here's the problem... this isn't really a shmup. It has elements of shmups, but the closest parts to a shmup are where you are in a huge room with the boss. Notice that pattern: the huge room makes it shmup-like. Because shmups are about open spaces, dodging, and shooting endlessly. And not really interacting with much environment-wise. Once you add in enclosed spaces and obstacles to hide behind and real objects that you can interact with it's no longer a shmup -- it's now a different subgenre, the one occupied by BOI and NT. That's why creatures charge at you in those games -- they're taking advantage of the fact that you have little space to run to, and you need to manage your minimal space/surroundings efficiently. I didn't realize this before I thought about it just now, but shmups and room-based shooters are different, if similar, genres. And in the room-based-shooter genre, shots have weight to them, because they exist in a real room with gravity and objects and explosions setting off other explosions and such, unlike shmups, which usually take place in a layer in the air with landscape in the background, but almost no interaction with said landscape.

I can sorta agree on the "uncanny valley" bit too.  In all honesty, while I've liked the art in Arcen's games a whole, they do admittedly have this aspect to them at least a bit; I suspect this is one of the reasons why some people just really dont like how they look.  Even when it's quality art overall.    Hm, really is hard to explain.  Even still though I do really like the overall aesthetic alot here.

I loved much of the art of AVWW1 (not so much AVWW2, surprisingly). And I think they did a fine job on Skyward Collapse, and a decent job on Bionic Dues etc. This game just demands attention to slightly different things. The main issue I'm having is that I have no idea what it's trying to portray. What is this maze in space? It feels like an open editor on some game designer's desktop, or one of those arkanoid clones that had pretty pictures in the background. There's no sense of place because I don't even know what the place is supposed to be.

[Bluddy]

tombik's comments are harsh, but many of them echo what I'm saying. I think this game makes a not-so-great first impression, but gets better over time.

I want to second one of his points: the fact that everything's a robot/ship. Personally, I'm not partial to games where everything's a robot or ship. In fact, I advised Steven Peeler to add pictures of the races to Drox Operative, because I thought it was too bland as just ships and lacked personality. To this day, I can't really tell apart the 'monsters' in that game, since they're just variations of ships.

A monster or creature or human makes an impression on us right away. It's easy to appeal to stereotypes and give the player an immediate idea of what that thing does. It's much harder to do so with a bunch of ships/robots. It takes a long time before the player learns to associate that particular enemy with a particular threat. The only exception I can think of is bosses, where their sheer size impresses the heck out of us.

I totally understand that this is trying to be a semi-shmup, and shmups are usually about ships. But shmups also are constantly side-scrolling (as tombik said) and so they throw patterns at you. The little ships don't really have any purpose other than being an excuse to challenge you with different patterns. Here, you enter a room and get an impression from the ships you see. Each room is a problem to solve. But that impression is usually muddled, at least until you're many hours into the game.

I'm not saying this is a huge problem, but it is something to consider: how to make the different ships stand out in a way that appeals to players. What if there was a bar at the top/bottom showing some communication from the occupant of the ship, or at least identifying the type of ship? Or maybe all you need is for them to have a very distinct audio signature/musical entrance.

[TheVampire100]

I want to say that the Archer is currently a terrible design choice, gameplay wise. What you except is a high damaging ship with high risks. Somethign like a sniper, you can deal a lot of damage from far away but you are really squishy once you get caught.
That does not work here. I played him twice and in both scenarios I died int he first room with enemies in it.

It really needs a buff, for once, the high range does not do any good because you cannot see so far. The other point is, no shields on top of already too few HP? Really bad choice, the thing get's wrecked too easily.
He reminds me  alot of the Archer fom Coin Crypt. Only 1 Hp with a lot of damage. Hardcore character for the extra challenge but 1 HP meant that he dies to the first enemy he met. To coutner this? Shields, shields and more shields.
See where I get from here? If you want to make the same decision of a hardcore ship type, give it shields instead of health. That way you have somehting that recharges but you still have to be very carefully inside a room or you die. Maybe replace one health bar (2 points) with one shield bar.

Also an idea that you might want to add later: Don't give us all the ships fright from the start. Let us unlock some ships with either achievments, credits, playthroughs or anything like that. It would be really cool if you get the Archer after clearing Misery difficulty like to say "Oh, you beat that? Well, now try with this ship if you think you are so cool."

[Misery]

About the bit about shots having no weight:  It works in Isaac, and even moreso in Nuclear Throne, because of how simplistic they are in terms of their attack patterns.  NT most of all; half of the game isnt enemies that SHOOT, but instead, enemies that just run at you (one of the reasons why I recently just lost interest altogether, actually, is the boring attack patterns).  And when enemies DO fire, the attacks are very, very simple, and rarely involve all that many bullets. 

In most actual shmups.... as in, I cant think of one (well, a good one anyway) where this isnt the case.... there is no weight to shots whatsoever.  It distorts things if it is added, and can actually create further undodgeable situations.  A big no-no.

Misery, but here's the problem... this isn't really a shmup. It has elements of shmups, but the closest parts to a shmup are where you are in a huge room with the boss. Notice that pattern: the huge room makes it shmup-like. Because shmups are about open spaces, dodging, and shooting endlessly. And not really interacting with much environment-wise. Once you add in enclosed spaces and obstacles to hide behind and real objects that you can interact with it's no longer a shmup -- it's now a different subgenre, the one occupied by BOI and NT. That's why creatures charge at you in those games -- they're taking advantage of the fact that you have little space to run to, and you need to manage your minimal space/surroundings efficiently. I didn't realize this before I thought about it just now, but shmups and room-based shooters are different, if similar, genres. And in the room-based-shooter genre, shots have weight to them, because they exist in a real room with gravity and objects and explosions setting off other explosions and such, unlike shmups, which usually take place in a layer in the air with landscape in the background, but almost no interaction with said landscape.

I can sorta agree on the "uncanny valley" bit too.  In all honesty, while I've liked the art in Arcen's games a whole, they do admittedly have this aspect to them at least a bit; I suspect this is one of the reasons why some people just really dont like how they look.  Even when it's quality art overall.    Hm, really is hard to explain.  Even still though I do really like the overall aesthetic alot here.

I loved much of the art of AVWW1 (not so much AVWW2, surprisingly). And I think they did a fine job on Skyward Collapse, and a decent job on Bionic Dues etc. This game just demands attention to slightly different things. The main issue I'm having is that I have no idea what it's trying to portray. What is this maze in space? It feels like an open editor on some game designer's desktop, or one of those arkanoid clones that had pretty pictures in the background. There's no sense of place because I don't even know what the place is supposed to be.

Actually, I can think of *alot* of shmups, as in, full ones, that have obstacles to hide behind, and all of that.  No, seriously.  The list is long.   My own personal design style normally takes from the sorts that dont, but I'm familiar with many styles (and I do mean scrolling shmups here, not overhead ones like this); in this case, I've been asked to apply that style to the sort of room layout this game has.  As for the weight... hell, even in Nuclear Throne: it occurs to me that only YOUR shots actually throw anything around.  When enemy shots hit you, or whatever, your character just makes an "oof" noise and takes a hit.... and that's it.  Unless you die of course. And even then, the "impact" of your shots on enemies can be iffy and weird (and it doesnt happen to all enemies).  But I know what you mean though.

Note mostly, that when I say impact shouldnt be there, I actually mean mostly on the player's character/sprite/whatever.  For example, nothing like some of NT's weapons that kinda throw you around as you use them (I could see that working OCCAISIONALLY for special activated items in here, but not normal weapons). That'd be a mess.  But if you're talking more about having your shots knock ENEMIES around.... yes, that can work if it's not gone totally bonkers.  And of course if Chris thinks it's viable (from a code & design standpoint).  I'd only object if stuff was throwing the player around.  I suppose I should have specified that.

But yeah, that might be one to bring up with Chris in it's own topic, or maybe even in a Mantis note, and see what he thinks about it.


I've other replies to make here, alot of interesting stuff here, but I've got something annoying I need to do out of the house first, so I'll just drop at least this bit and reply to the rest in a couple of hours.

[tombik]

Note mostly, that when I say impact shouldnt be there, I actually mean mostly on the player's character/sprite/whatever.  For example, nothing like some of NT's weapons that kinda throw you around as you use them.

AFAIK, in NT, shots have knockback. It is a tiny effect, but it is still there.

I coded something similar just for fun, and 1/3-1/5 of normal walking speed as a knockback worked for machineguns. For shotguns, I increased to 1/2, since you cant spam that one.

[Misery]

Note mostly, that when I say impact shouldnt be there, I actually mean mostly on the player's character/sprite/whatever.  For example, nothing like some of NT's weapons that kinda throw you around as you use them.

AFAIK, in NT, shots have knockback. It is a tiny effect, but it is still there.

I coded something similar just for fun, and 1/3-1/5 of normal walking speed as a knockback worked for machineguns. For shotguns, I increased to 1/2, since you cant spam that one.

Yes, I know NTs weapons push you around a bit when you fire them.   Drove me crazy;  always loathed it about the game.  Tended to just utterly avoid absolutely any weapon that threatened to do this too much, or that threatened to shake the screen too much (minigun).

Though, honestly, at this point, the less said about that game by me, the better.  I'd been positive as heck about it early on, but at this point that shifted to total hate, and I've uninstalled it and am trying to just forget it exists.  I very much doubt I'll ever go back to it again.  Probably not buying into Vlambeer's next games at all either, not after that.

[tombik]

Note mostly, that when I say impact shouldnt be there, I actually mean mostly on the player's character/sprite/whatever.  For example, nothing like some of NT's weapons that kinda throw you around as you use them.

AFAIK, in NT, shots have knockback. It is a tiny effect, but it is still there.

I coded something similar just for fun, and 1/3-1/5 of normal walking speed as a knockback worked for machineguns. For shotguns, I increased to 1/2, since you cant spam that one.

Yes, I know NTs weapons push you around a bit when you fire them.   Drove me crazy;  always loathed it about the game.  Tended to just utterly avoid absolutely any weapon that threatened to do this too much, or that threatened to shake the screen too much (minigun).

Though, honestly, at this point, the less said about that game by me, the better.  I'd been positive as heck about it early on, but at this point that shifted to total hate, and I've uninstalled it and am trying to just forget it exists.  I very much doubt I'll ever go back to it again.  Probably not buying into Vlambeer's next games at all either, not after that.

It was a design choice by them to make shots feel powerful, and full. You may hate screenshake (I dont) but still, it does not change the fact that this game is in need of something similar, or something newly invented to satisfy the feeling.

I have played it for around 25 hours, and I still like it. Maybe it happens after >100 hours?? If so, I can not say it is a bad thing.

[Misery]

Note mostly, that when I say impact shouldnt be there, I actually mean mostly on the player's character/sprite/whatever.  For example, nothing like some of NT's weapons that kinda throw you around as you use them.

AFAIK, in NT, shots have knockback. It is a tiny effect, but it is still there.

I coded something similar just for fun, and 1/3-1/5 of normal walking speed as a knockback worked for machineguns. For shotguns, I increased to 1/2, since you cant spam that one.

Yes, I know NTs weapons push you around a bit when you fire them.   Drove me crazy;  always loathed it about the game.  Tended to just utterly avoid absolutely any weapon that threatened to do this too much, or that threatened to shake the screen too much (minigun).

Though, honestly, at this point, the less said about that game by me, the better.  I'd been positive as heck about it early on, but at this point that shifted to total hate, and I've uninstalled it and am trying to just forget it exists.  I very much doubt I'll ever go back to it again.  Probably not buying into Vlambeer's next games at all either, not after that.

It was a design choice by them to make shots feel powerful, and full. You may hate screenshake (I dont) but still, it does not change the fact that this game is in need of something similar, or something newly invented to satisfy the feeling.

I have played it for around 25 hours, and I still like it. Maybe it happens after >100 hours?? If so, I can not say it is a bad thing.

Eh, I didn't fully hate the screenshake... what I hated was when they went overboard with it.  The mild shaking caused by most "normal" weapons was fine.  The "I cant see what's going on" bit wasnt.

That wasnt why I dropped the game though, really.  It'd take too long to explain and would be even more of a derailment here, heh.  I ended up posting a review about it on Steam.  Not really a particularly pleasant one. Granted I'm kinda negative to start with, but still.