fight with boss start fast and finish low speed for control :(
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IMPORTANT!
This game was a rushed old project made as gift for a friend. Issues are expected to occur in this build.
fight with boss start fast and finish low speed for control :(
The opening sequence is visually gorgeous. The main character and her animation, the lava and sparks, and the layered parallax background.
It almost feels like it's a cinematic intro to the game… however, it isn't, really. It's an introductory platforming section which would be okay in itself, but you're also being targeted by sentries quite likely to knock you out of a jump into lava towards instant death, quite soon after starting the game.
You're not very mobile mid-air, and since you occupy a third of the playable height of the screen with lava underneath, it's impossible to effectively dodge anything. The lava sparks are also the same colour as the projectiles harming you which can get lost among them if there's a lot going on.
This section mainly seems to want to get you comfortable with the controls, and teach you about attacking and blocking. But to achieve that, I don't think you need *that* many sentries.
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The environments in the boss arena are (visually) very plain in comparison, but at least you clearly see what's going on. It was wise to scale the character down.
The combat itself felt a bit weird. Your only way to attack is to slightly graze the boss – by moving closer but not too close to avoid getting hurt. Since the boss is a lot faster than you, it's difficult to time it right. Sometimes you get slammed against a wall and hit multiple times, and it's quite frustrating to have to start from the very beginning of the game, not even from the start of the boss arena.
On the other hand, kudos for designing this many boss phases. That was pretty cool.
The boss phase with the splitting in four with the parts gradually starting shooting projectiles was conceptually the best part, at least to me. But in my experience, it took *an eternity* to get through. The boss is out of reach so you're bouncing the flying tiles towards him, but more than half the time you won't do it right so the tile stops just before the boss. And when you manage to pull the attack off, it knocks off like 1/20 of the total health.
I was in a hurry the morning and genuinely wondered if there was a way to pause the game somehow, because I was already maybe fifteen minutes into the phase and if I died or had to leave sooner, I definitely wouldn't care enough to replay the game from the very beginning again.
This phase is very good, it just mostly could be more lenient with deflecting the tiles and definitely shouldn't have as much health. I had the most trouble with performance during this phase, the game ran quite slowly up until the end of the boss fight.
The final phase felt a bit unnecessary because it seemed like you should have won already.
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After leaving the boss arena, I understood I should be running away, but didn't know what was chasing me and I stopped midway to consider if I was perhaps meant to investigate first. Soon I saw the rolling rocks and managed to escape with a split second to spare. If I died there (either from the wall of doom or the lava) and was sent to the very beginning of the game after successfully beating the boss, I would be quite annoyed.
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Overall, I believe the demo is nice, has interesting visuals, and the intro and epilogue almost have a cinematic feel to them. But it definitely could use checkpoints (at least entering the cave and leaving, perhaps after the boss splits, too) and better balancing at times (enemies around lava, length of boss phases).
The main mechanic is the attack/block which can also prolong your jumps. As a block and a poor-man's double jump it's awesome, but as an attack it's not very fun to use, but that's what you do for the majority of the game.
Hope that might be useful, and best of luck if you decide to continue development past the demo!
I greatly appreciate the feedback! There is definitely some imbalances and parts that are agreeably frustrating. I was a bit iffy on releasing this old build to the public, fearing that people might see it as too 'scuffed'. But, I may consider going back and make a full fledged game out of it.
The game is not working for me.
There was a mistake in the code. It should work now :]