itch.io

Linux version runs fine.

Really need some SFX for shooting, it’s no fun to shoot right now, and that’s the most obvious thing that’s missing. It looks like you’re taking some cues from Boltgun, whether you are or not, the eponymous Boltgun is a great reference for juicing up a starting gun.

Also really need enemy firing SFX and damage feedback.

‘E’ to interact? smdh

I like the skybox, I dig the environment in general.

The head-bob feels really off. You want it be subtle but the crunchy pixelation filter makes it feel like it’s just jerking up and down at a slow pace.

After all the fanart you’ve drawn it’s about time you got one back. I think you’ve given me like three by now.

Edit: Made the shading a lot darker and moved up her shoulders so she isn’t a giraffe anymore.

I’m happy to finally play one of your demos, I must have tried Azur like three times with no luck despite being on Linux myself.

This looks highly in-depth, handling the management aspects of the space agency. A bit like playing Crusader Kings it looks like everything has to be explained right up-front which is lot to take in but I hear management games are really big these days so I’m not sure that’s really a problem. Having it split into multiple stages helps but it would help to streamline as much as possible like addictiveToothpaste suggested, avoiding submenus as much as possible to cut down on the number of clicks a player has to make to do something..

The artwork is astounding, the loading screen art in particular is really mysterious and it alone acts like a call to action to get exploring. The style in general kinda comes off like a more seinen version of Stars in Shadow.

The dialog is great, the writing is full of personality without having to resort to memes or references or anything millenial like that. One issue with the dialog boxes is that the border seems too close in, the text should only be on the flat part:

You need a back button for the Mission Control screen, Escape works but the other screens have back buttons.

I don’t know what it is yet but I found it!

Zooming with the scroll wheel is a bit cumbersome, a bit like Blender it should zoom farther each click the further you are away. Right now you have to scroll and scroll in or out to explore the whole system. It would be even better if you could just click on the transfer lines and on system gates or planets to flick straight to or from them. At one point zooming out it also broke:

Not only did everything invert, but scrolling up or down caused me to zoom further and further out.

When I quit the game seemed to crash and the log is full of errors:

This looks really interesting, your systems and world building have always been quite intriguing so I’ll continue to keep an eye on this to see how it progresses.

I read you did everything yourself, including the engine.

I never replied to this, lol. Yes, the engine is made from scratch in (very C-like) C++ and OpenGL.

Most of the 2D and 3D assets are all me, there’s like one texture and a couple of static models done by a friend of mine for a different project ages ago. I was also cold-approached recently by a dude on Twitter that wanted to make some more props but I’m not confident his style matches.

I’ve done one of the music tracks myself but I’ve only been using it as filler when I don’t have a better track to use, and the others are a mix of CC-BY and commissions.

All of the sound effects were either free packs, kickstarters, or CC0 from freesound.

Also the capsule art was a commission from SystemST91 who also did the two commissioned music tracks.

Comfy shooter. Never played this before. I read you did everything yourself, including the engine. I really like the lighting. I also like how fast the game is.

Thank you very much!

I couldn’t find the cyan key!Please tell me where is it!

It’s in the supermarket, in the back.

This has to be my best work yet. I need to make some portraits for dialog in my game and I was thinking I’d outsource them, but I’m starting to think that won’t end up being necessary.

Ratalie a cute. 10/10. No lewd.

I was playing on windows 10.

Did you happen to turn off auto-reload? Or were you diligent in reloading the Gyrobuster before it would run completely dry? Because after a huge wild goose chase it turns out that that was the crash trigger all along.

I’m uploading one more hotfix, I believe I finally found the root cause of all of the crashes. It turns out I couldn’t reproduce it for the simple reason that I always have auto-reload turned off. For those of you who had crashes you can also try turning it off or just downloading the new version and it should allow you to finish.

Edit: I should also note here again that saves from before hotfix5 break object scripts and the gyrobuster’s lock-on feature and don’t save the new mech enemy.

Glad you liked it!

the mech enemies don’t really seem to hit you because of how their guns are positioned

Yeah I know, I did once have their arms yaw inwards as you got closer but it made it impossible to run up to them for melee so instead they just have a large spread. I’m aiming for quantity over quality with the enemies, taking a combined-arms approach for encounter design so I’m not worried about single enemies being relatively easy to take on.

Feels like an old-school shooter in a good way.

Part of the appeal of working on this game is working in a bunch of Quake 3 and UT2004 maps I designed when I was in High School and Uni, so that feel is definitely not a coincidence.

I did try skipping the tutorial via level select but it made me do it anyway?

The first level is also the tutorial, but because all of the tutorials are just message prompts I’ve made it so you can turn them all off in game options as they’re not necessary to play through the level.

Discovered the Awoken easter egg.

Yea boi!

Managed to get the 7th gun (Also Railgun) and meet the homing rocket mech but at some point, the game crashed in that area where the 2 homing rocket mechs were above a building (The one with the cyan key door) while I was using the gyro gun at one of the mechs.

Fixing this is a priority right now, it’s been reported by a half dozen people by this point. It’s a pain because it never crashes for me on Linux, even when playing the Windows version through wine or proton. I haven’t booted up my Windows partition in three years or so at this point but I’ll be doing so tonight to try and get to the bottom of this.

Thanks for checking back in!

Drones in general were my least liked enemies

They are the ugly duckling of the roster right now, but they fill a very useful role in encounter design that would be very difficult to replace.

enemies that are there are nice, hoping for a little more enemy variety in the future

This is unfortunately not in the pipeline, I have boss-fight in mind to close out the game and I would like to add an underwater enemy, but everything else has been cut from scope.

didnt run into any bugs/crashes

That’s a miracle frankly, with how many other people have had issues. Were you playing on Linux by chance?

movement feels a bit slidey which i dont mind but it made using the data spike with any momentum pretty difficult unless you were sprinting directly forward at the enemy and probably getting shot in the process. skill issue perhaps

That sprint up technique is all I do too. I’m sure if somebody dedicated themselves they could circle strafe with momentum damage but I’m not really designing with that in mind.

One of the most polished games ive played in demo day and very fun, one im hoping to come back to. I like this more than several of the more recent wave of boomer shooter games which have taken off in popularity.

That’s pretty high praise, thank you! Thanks for trying it again, I want to release towards the end of the year so polish and fixes are rising in priority over new content. I’m not confident in the game taking off, but it’s a great foundation for other projects. Hell it’s already gotten me a job twice, lol.

It still feels like the data spike’s collision is a bit inconsistent

I redesigned how the hurtbox is handled from it not working on lower framerates, and since then I’ve also noticed it seems just a tiny bit less consistent. It works well enough that tracking this down is a really low priority.

Got stuck on a ceiling light on the second level:

Ew, that’s not supposed to happen. Thanks for the screencap.

I never found the gyrojet weapon

Really!? That one’s not hidden at all, its in the middle of the loading dock where you find the cyan keycard. That said, it has also been causing a lot of crashes this demo day so it’s not necessarily a bad thing that you missed it.

the rocket launcher had to do most of the work.

The rocket launcher is better suited to the mechs, the gyrobuster has unintentionally developed a niche as the best way to take out drones.

Forgot to add: if you pick up ammo for an empty weapon you switch to that weapon, it’s annoying because I was constantly out of SMG ammo and I kept switching to it when stepping over corpses.

You can turn off auto-switch in Game Options, or do you mean you want it on but for it to not switch in this case? I feel that might end up being a matter of taste.

Played a bit more and had some more thoughts:

• The camera tilts slightly when you’re strafing which threw off my aim while walking around the tops of the hedges.

• Considering it isn’t being used anyway, you should hide the mouse cursor when not in a menu.

• I like the subtle circle showing how loud you are, I was disappointed the reverb kicking in didn’t seem to make the radius wider.

• You really need sound occlusion, not only can you not tell if a spurdo guard is behind a wall, you can’t tell if he’s even on the same floor as you.

• Easing the interaction prompt around makes sense when moving between things close together, but when it shoots in from far away it looks a bit weird.

• Would be nice if you could grab onto a ledge as you drop down, there doesn’t seem to be fall damage but it still feels wrong to just leap down.

• It’s obviously not going to matter on release, but the final call-to-action slide bugged out and I couldn’t click on it to close it.

• The drones and the grenades they fire blend in the background a little too much

They do, I’m going to be repainting them in a much brighter color scheme

• One of the drones didn’t fall on the ground after dying

I’ve seen this happen a few times, I’ve got some ideas for preventing it

• The god ray effect is bugged. It appears over the foreground.

I’ve known this one all week, it’s supposed to be in the foreground because it’s a corona/bloom not a godray. I didn’t set up pitch on the solar corona so now that it’s high in the sky it looks completely wrong.

• The game crashed thrice when using the gyrobuster. First time I’m not sure what happened, the other two were immediately after selecting it.

Something is deeply messed up with that weapon and I can’t recreate any of these problems on Linux, I’m going to spend a day setting up a debugging environment on my old Windows partition to see what’s wrong. It’s likely invalid memory accesses that Linux just isn’t as strict about, and it’s probably caused by my entity tagging system being a hacky afterthought that was added too late in development.

It’s a shame because the gun is a lot of fun to use.

I can give you my save file if you need it.

I’d appreciate that. I don’t think the problem is related to saves but it might help with reproducing the crashes.

• Is being able to hurt yourself with the shotgun alt-fire intentional?

Yes

• Sometimes the mechs on the roof would walk past the edge and float in the air

That’s cylinder colliders for you, I don’t want to mess with the collision system now that it’s working decently well so I’m just going to accept this happening sometimes. As long as they fall off once the collider is all the way off it should be fine.

• I got stuck here. (The two screenshots are in the same position.)

Thanks, I’m putting all of these in a folder for reference.

Once again, the thumbnail drew me in, but I really love stealth games and that’s what kept my attention.

Some technical notes:

• The Linux version doesn’t seem to work, I just get a black screen. I ended up just running the Windows version with umu-launcher

• I used to be the one getting this feedback, now I can finally give it: You need a gamma slider, I didn’t even see the hedge-maze at first and was wandering around bumping into stuff everywhere. To the point where I thought the level was actually a linear progression and not a sandbox, I just couldn’t see the other ways to go.

• Echoing what others have said, the restricted camera makes sense but for the sake of the actual game it would be very useful to have a way to do mouselook, pun intended.

• I know I’m not playing it right, but I wasn’t really interested in the “quests”. Is there more story beyond the initial text of the MC owing money?

• Independent of the gooner parts, I actually dig the anime character design, the MC’s hair and face really nail the “mousy” look. I’m used to having diffuse textures do all the heavy lifting in my game while here you can get away mostly with lighting and a toon shader.

Considering the uh… intended playstyle, I’m probably not part of the intended audience, but it still works as just a low-stakes stealth game.

I don’t like these vampire survivors games but I had to try this for the aesthetic alone. Really dig the radio feature.

Works fine on Linux, but I needed to launch with umu-launcher.

Not much else to say, I only did one run up to the time limit.

I did get a bug in the upgrade screen in that pressing Escape brings back the skeletal hands but doesn’t actually go back one menu. The actual buttons had (edit) unreadable black text so I just assumed the left one was back, and once in the character select screen I could only see the character I’d already selected, all the buttons for picking a character were missing until I went all the way back to the main menu and came in that way.

Heart of Evil, yeah right. I see what you did there. This Indiana Jones-ass game gives me some Brigand vibes, just with way more polished gunplay.

• It didn’t let me pickup the machete, not sure if I did something wrong.

• I fell in the water, great sound effect. It would be good for the controls list down in the corner to flash when it changes, I didn’t notice there was a climb key and was trying to push out.

• The rudder turns you awfully fast at the slow speed, and it’s awkward to have to manually correct it like a throttle. It also seems like the first reverse gear is faster than the first forward? Maybe it’s just an optical illusion but it felt that way.

• Would be good for the dialog about the locals blocking you up to not play as they start attacking you, I didn’t have time to read it.

• You really have to get rid of those sprite enemies. Your style already has some serious clash but they especially stand out.

• Really good sound effects for the revolver. The SFX in general are really, really good.

• Switching to the dual revolver after crossing the rope thing was super-satisfying. Really felt like Big Iron there.

• The inventory is seriously generous, making the consumables into carried items instead of instant pickups would immediately add some more tradeoffs. I never got close to running out of ammo.

• The guys with the balaclavas should probably have the range at which they decide to stop and throw at you randomized so they don’t all bunch up and become headshot fodder.

• Something’s really fucked with the camera when you’re looking really high or low, the horizontal sensitivity shoots up.

• I didn’t notice the cave entrance until later, was going to ask if you’re supposed to use the blooker to rocket jump. I went back here after fighting the chieftain thinking I’d missed something and never even ended up using the coach gun.

• The speargun isn’t very good in the cave though, it kept going straight through the piranhas and hitting the floor.

• Really needs some pulpy safari music

• Fighting the chieftain my health got down to 6.00000000001. It doesn’t seem to me like you’re storing health as a float so maybe it was a UI bug.

Really cool game, keep it up.

Linux version is working fine. It’s hard for me to get invested in a menu-based game like this but your tutorial onboards you pretty easily and the tooltips are very helpful.

Seconding that the AuSome exchange seems to not work.

Depart from planet also seemed to not trigger immediately, only after I went in and out of another menu.

Art obviously has a bunch of placeholders but things like the briefing background and the buttons in the planet screen all look good.

Does the game just sort of stop after the tutorial? The assistant said we would head on another mission and then I was just left on the background.

BOOBs

Plays fine on Linux with Proton. I mean the thumbnail got my attention but FF12 gambits have my interest, one of my favorite FF games. You’ve even got the piss stream indicators, lol. Just have to have them arc out first.

Is this intended to always be an idle thing with just the gambit setup? Or will there later be movement or party members?

All this effort into the physics and no walk button? Your priorities puzzle me.

I got stuck right at the beginning. if you fall on this spot you can’t get out in any way.

Thankyou for the screenshot! As part of polishing I intend to do a big clipping pass.

the new flying drones seem to get stuck often in walls and stuff

It’s because they’re fucking retards and don’t have pathfinding. Considering how dangerous they can be in enclosed spaces I’m just going to call it a balancing feature because adding 3D navigation seems like a pain in the ass for not much benefit, they’re meant to be cannon fodder.

the mech also got too close to the wall and if i had enough ammo i could have cheesed the fuck out of it

(ammo on hard is way too scarce)

It’s partly balanced around not doing a pistol-start, I’m considering the level select to be like a challenge mode and you’re intended to play through the levels in sequence. Hard in particular is also explicitly balanced around the player getting most of the secrets as they usually give ammo for powerful weapons.

Thanks for giving it another chance! And double-thanks for the screenshot!

-There seems to be a new mech on the rooftop next to the cyan keycard arena. I killed(?) it with the GyroBStr again and it crashed the game. I think it’s just that gun killing mechs causes crashing for some reason. Win10 btw.

These guys were always there but one of the bugs from before hotfix5 was that they weren’t being serialized when saving so if you loaded they’d disappear.

Though, the hard jump that used to be required for progression has the Rocket still(or I recall that was the only way to reach it), which seems a little mean to miss, given the end of this level.

I think it’s fine for two reasons: 1st is that I’m balancing around a continuous playthrough with level-select/pistol-start being an optional challenge rather than the intended style, and on the Waterfront level immediately prior there’s a super obvious rocket launcher in the center of the map that I just hand to the player. 2nd is that on Normal and easier, there’s another rocket launcher right in front of you when you enter the final arena. So given that, this rocket launcher is kind of like a semi-secret.

-3 Mechs overwatching the cyan door, I see now. Though, it seems like I instantly die(100 HP) from their rockets, so maybe a tad annoying(I opted to run past them).

Running past is an entirely legitimate strategy, I’m being quite stingy with ammo pickups. The damage is meant to be a one-shot if you don’t have any armor, and I intentionally set up that canal so that you’re threatened by the splash damage. Out in the open, as long as you’re not surrounded, the rockets are pretty easy to dodge, especially if there’s only one firing at you.

-Water tunnel secret at bottom of cyan door area is neat, but the reward of just 1 rocket ammo feels underwhelming, so I wasted some time swimming around that roundabout pool looking for something.

You’re right about that, I’ll have to think of something. Maybe another weapon pickup or something. It would’ve been a great place for a powerup or item like in Duke 3D but I cut those from scope ages ago.

-Wrapping up a mostly cramped level with an open arena was nice. If I wasn’t worried that one of my guns would crash the game, it might have been a bit more straight forward.

I’ve actually significantly nerfed this last encounter already in one of the hotfixes. There used to be way more of the headless guys and on Hard there were even a couple of the regular Grunts in the far corners that spoiled the cover from the containers. I myself died like four times trying to beat my own creation but decided it was a little too much, this is meant to be level 5/7, not the end of the game. The Gyrobuster isn’t even that great in this arena, it takes something like 15-20 gyrojets to kill a mech. I’m finding it’s much more suited to taking on swarms of drones.

After playing the new version, I’d bump my rating of the level up. Thanks for recommending to restart the level.

Thanks again for giving it another shot, this map was easily the most fun one to put together so I got carried away a few times and it definitely has benefited from playtesting.

-Fought the first mech of the level, though eventually it walked until it was directly under the ledge, which meant all its shots were blocked and I could shoot it easily.

For the sake of expediency, I’m not too concerned with enemies being cheese-able. I’m aiming for quantity over quality with the enemies, aping how some Doom and Quake community maps work.

-New drones are fun. It was weird though, at one point one of them was frozen in the air and wasn’t doing anything while I shot it. [later] this also happened a couple more times.

This is happening if you kill them while they’re not moving at all. It’s happening a lot more on the Windows build even now that I’ve been trying it I’ll come up with something more robust for them.

-Scrolling up moves me down the number wheel of weapons. Can’t remember if it was like that last time, or if it’s backwards.

It’s always defaulted to down=next, you can rebind everything though. I also improved the binding functionality so new bindings default to their default instead of being empty.

-I was running around like a dummy since I missed the cyan card, it’s tiny and so I didn’t see it. It was also on a not so important looking ledge instead of the dead end next to it.

I’ve rejected a lot of ideas for making the cards more visible, having them float or flash would clash with all the other pickups. But I have an idea now to always put them on unique plastic crates with a matching color scheme which should make them much more obvious.

-This platforming to backtrack is annoying. And now I can’t find how to get to the cyan doors. Then I walked in to a corner(gap between two crates) and I got stuck so I had to load a save before the platforming. This is pain, literally since it aggravates my headache.

I need to do a clipping pass to patch all those up, the level was very rushed over the last few days (but I think it turned out way better than the last time I rushed a level). Could you give me a screencap of the exact spot so I don’t miss it?

-I see now that there is one spot where I can jump to the top of the crates. However, it was so far that I almost thought I couldn’t make it, and I had to reload a quick save like 4 times to make it. Now I have more enemies to fight.

I got really carried away with this part and it’s not obvious at all in hindsight. In hotfix 5 I removed a bunch of containers and added some extra crates which make it much easier to get over there.

-I was shooting the mech by the water with the GyroBStr, jump strafed, probably got hit by one of its bullets, then the game crashed. I am using hotfix4. Shooting the mech with that gun crashed the game again. Using other weapons, it doesn’t crash.

Fugg, you’re not the first one to have problems with that mech in particular causing crashes. This is actually a slightly different version of osur’s crashes so this might help narrow that down. I’m going to have to set up some debugging on plain Windows for this because I can’t find any way to recreate these crashes on Linux even with Wine.

-I pressed interact on the switch by the water-bridge(which seems to be the way to proceed). Does nothing… I download Hotfix5 but it doesn’t fix the problem. Guess I’m done now.

Yeah I don’t think I explained this right in the update, the problem is actually with the save file itself, hotfix5 prevents the problem but can’t correct for it in past saves. I’m going to add a save file version number to warn about these sorts of changes in the future. It should however work fine if you restart the level, including if you restore from a new save.

Drones were cool at first, but as it went on I realized they were a pushover, since I already have to run around all the time the grenades don’t pose much of a threat.

I do want to do another pass over them as they’re my least favorite enemy, but once again they’re intended for the role they play in larger encounters moreso than being a threat on their own.

Keep up the good work.

Thanks for playing!

I might be projecting my desire to move on to another project, but I could already see this releasing by leaning into the meme of it being a work-in-progress or a showcase of your growth as a game developer.

But if you mean to polish the absolute shit out of it you’re going to have to commit to juice and art tutorials and have an autistic attention to detail.

In the short term (this another personal preference), I’d focus on overhauling your cockpit animations so you can consistently replicate all of the little moves the cockpits make in Hawken, from the big sways to the tiny wobbles. It should all just be eased offsets stacked on top of each other, that’s the simplest way to do it.

-crate platforming doesn’t work well due to slidey movement. it took me a good few minutes just to get out of the first room (having that nasty drone just out of range didn’t help!)

That first spot is more annoying than it needs to be on account of those rails getting in the way overhead. It’s the most obvious way to get up so I do want it to be a bit easier. As for the movement though I see a lot of complaints about this but in other games as well (Hedon in particular) but I must be way more used to it as the acceleration and deceleration make a lot of sense to me.

-killing mech has a high chance of crashing the game (especially the one that spawns by itself in the courtyard after the cyan card got collected)

This is the first I’ve heard of this, that’s very concerning. Could you get me a clip of this? I don’t have any scripted spawns apart from monster closets so if he’s not always there when you go out onto the loading dock then that’s a second bug because he’s supposed to always be there on Normal and harder, though he is supposed to be up on the top of the building so he might just have fallen down. I changed the tolerances on their cornering but it’s made them much more clumsy so I’m going to undo that.

-level design felt a bit directionless: feels like you are expected to do random jumps/platforms to continue (again, returning from cyan card - either make a jump to return to the previous room, or get to that section on the left side obscured by boxes to continue)

I got really excited about platforming when putting this together and I definitely wanted people to have to jump and climb around to progress. That said the exit to the canal with the cyan door is not very obvious at all. I’m going to remove a bunch of the containers from that end of the warehouse so it’s clearer that you’re supposed to go that way

-splash damage on plasma from the mechs is huge! that kills me more than the projectiles impacting me

So is yours! It’s the same exact projectile type except that theirs do a bit less damage and travel slower (except on Extra Hard, then they match the speed of your own)

-unrelenting mech attack pattern. they remind me of serious sam 1 bio-mechanoid enemies- however those guys has a solid 1 second windup time. these big mechs start blasting asap, making them too difficult to engage fairly. i just end up cheesing them where their head sticks out behind cover, so i can shoot without being shot back

1 second I can do, 2 seconds on Super Easy, but I’m leaving it as zero on Extra Hard. A bit like Nightmare I intend for that difficulty to be downright unfair. I’m hesitant to nerf them any further as I’m very happy with how tough they are to fight one-on-one.

-drones are kinda meh. they don’t feel very fun to engage. a lot of them are also placed far away but in your field of view, making the optimal strategy to just snipe them with the SMG

Yeah I’m not really happy with them. They also don’t have any pathfinding so they’re very stupid. And on top of that they’re very hard to see in the dark, I added some little DRLs on the rotor housings but they’re too subtle. I want a flying enemy but I’m not really sure where to go with them. Often I put them in far away places so they don’t spot you early, but it’s tough because they don’t really have any logic for changing their altitude.

Linux version appears to mostly work fine, but I couldn’t hear any music except on the main menu.

• This is my fault for using a tiling window manager, but having the two intros skip on any input means I missed the legal disclaimer and the intro from having to hit a key combination to switch to fullscreen. So I only got to read/see them after I enabled fullscreen in the options then exited and started again.
• Did you do the music? The main menu theme is schway as fuck. I don’t know anything about touhou but I recall there being a big musical following.
• There’s no UI juice on the difficulty select which was a bit jarring, I could’ve sworn the main menu had highlights and click flashes.
• Thank you so much for using F as the interact key instead of E
• Your explosions have mixels, that’s really jarring. On the other hand, the pixellated text during dialog is also a little harsh on the eyes and could use a thin outline or something
• That Ice ammo looks just like some of the ammo pickups from Star Wars Dark Forces
• I like that ICE is playing everything completely straight. His intro gave me horrible flashbacks to Cuff from that Isekai game Sony made and thankfully he’s nothing like that.
• Once you get into the base it’s a bit hard to make out what’s floor and what’s walls. In general you need to employ more contrast in the tileset to make important objects a little more distinct because it all sort of blends together at the moment.
• More fast-paced top-down shooters tend to frustrate me so I really appreciate this being a bullet hell crossover, dodging patterns is less stressful than trying to time shots against one-hit kills like in Hotline Miami. It’s reminding me a little of Barkley 2, I backed that back in the day and am disappointed it fizzled out.

Great game. I don’t know if it will have wide appeal but I like it a lot and the Touhou fandom is a huge pool of potential customers. I think the only thing you really need to focus on is clarifying the visuals.

Thanks for the full playthough, this sort of thing is very useful. My testing playthroughs are usually on Normal difficulty so it’s actually very useful to see how things work on Easy and I’m pretty happy with the results.

I hate jump and crouch, i wish the levels didn’t require this.

I try to avoid having “crouch at peak of jump” in the critical path but I discovered it by accident when writing the step handling for the character controller and really like doing it.

I got lost in the final level I made it to and couldn’t progress.

This is the actual jumping puzzle part, after the spot in the warehouse with the mech you have to find your way up and over the the left-hand-side stack of containers as well, behind it is the room that leads you to a Cyan door and allows you to return to the rest of the level. It’s not very clear but I did want there to be an actual jumping puzzle part, though I might add some strategic lighting to guide the eye towards the easiest way.

This game’s a hot mess but I love coming back to it.

• Linux build is still solid, no issues
• I think I’ve said this every time but your basic gameplay is solid, you just need more visual polish to sell it, but the changes I’ve seen are going in the right direction.
• I like how the cockpit is shaping up, but it still has a lot clean empty panels that need buttons, wires, LEDs, or even just some etchings. I can already see the resemblance to the Hawken UI, I always reference the interiors from MechWarrior 3 as well for 2D elements.
• The flashing is great feedback for the enemies, I used to do exactly the same but now feedback when you take damage is lacking by comparison. I like the sound and the little BSOD on the matrix screen but you might want the whole cockpit to jerk away with the impact as well.
• It’s great how the one-on-one fights have your opponent combo up the powerups and then retreat to repair themselves just like you can.
• So many AGDG references! Understand that it’s going to make us biased in favor of the game!
• I like how the story references itself being a game. I think you should continue to lean into it and don’t sweat too much about redoing anything, with how much you’re learning along the way I think the game is always going to look like a mess so you should embrace it and leave any idea of polish for the next project.

Had to upload yet another fix, I hadn’t tried the new level on the hardest difficulty yet and didn’t realize it had exceeded the overly strict entity limit I’d set. I’ve doubled said limit and now the map should load fine on Hard and Extra Hard difficulty.

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
• Edit: Is there no controller support?

Uploaded another hotfix, drones were causing radial damage even if they hadn’t gibbed yet.

Aha, I found the problem, I was using an unsigned value as if it were signed and Linux was not noticing the segfault while Windows was. Hotfix2 should now work as intended with no features disabled.

Yeah I know what the problem is, I’ve uploaded a hotfix for now that stops the drones from gibbing after death. For some reason that reliably causes crashes on Windows only which I don’t have any debugging set up for, I’ll have to fix it later.

Well that’s no good, I have had some issues with those drones before though. Did it crash as soon as you shot it or when it fell onto the ground? And you’re playing on Windows right?

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.

Good to know, thanks for telling me! I don’t test it much on toasters and haven’t done a whole lot of genuine optimization, but I do try to not to implement features in obviously wasteful ways. I do have a frame counter but it’s disabled in the release builds, I might as well turn it on because it’s useful for anyone to know. Yes of course, resolution settings will be a must, for now it just matches the window.

Ooh! Oh yeah that’s a challenge, I’m sure it can be done but it’s a bit like trying to melee a Baron of Hell to death without Berserk. I did have an idea for a melee powerup before that I might add back in. I was going to have expendable pickups like in Duke or Shadow Warrior but it would be less work to do this one the way Doom did.

There’s definitely enough ammo on the jungle/highway level, and at the moment they’re very weak to the shotgun. In the waterfront/downtown level there’s even more options but it’s much tougher if go straight there with level select.

You know… I have difficulty options now, he’s not there on the Easy difficulty… just sayin’

Not sure if it is intentional, but could only play the tutorial.

That’s definitely not intentional. Did you push the big red button and see all the confetti? It’s advancing normally on my end. There’s supposed to be four levels and you can access them all with the level select in the main menu.

This is not a huge update, if you don’t want to try and break the save system then there isn’t much else new besides some difficulty options which mostly affect spawns on the first two levels. The second level has also undergone a big visual makeover to fill it out with trees.