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Whos feeling brave enough?

Started by July 13, 2024 05:14 PM
3 comments, last by jeffmoretti86 1 month, 2 weeks ago

This is my first ever solo game dev creation.
Including all artwork.
If you have a spare bit of time and you want to play something new,
that runs in the browser and is free,
then please, check it out!
https://duxziiproductions.itch.io/2dcv
OR
check

Tried it using VirtualBox, so i have no GPU acceleration and it's not fluid.
But this exposed issues you maybe don't know about. This was my experience:

Initially i was busy figuring out controls. What's the jump button? Not sure - it seems to work only sometimes.

I noticed the player probably has constant velocity movement, and the camera follows gradually and smoothly. That's not bad and quite common, but i want to point out how Super Mario solved the problem so much better (imo):
We control acceleration of the player, thus the player itself moves smoothly, and we can just snap the camera to the player. This gives two critical advantages:
1. Controlling acceleration creates natural latency, giving the player more time to predict the future. (Because the latency is naturally based on laws of physics we experience in the real world, it does not feel like lag.)
2. Having the camera snapped to the player character gives the player full control over the camera, which is again important to predict the future regarding motion trajectories. If we control the camera by some algorithms instead, e.g. to smooth it out like you do, or add some cool shaking effects, etc., the game becomes harder to predict and thus more frustrating.

I think those are facts, and it's not a matter of personal preference.

I always wonder why i still see so many constant velocity movement in games. This makes sense for realtime puzzles or PacMan, but for jump'n'run it's always inferior. (which actually is personal opinion)

That said to propose some potential improvements. Continuing with reporting my experience…

After having figured out the basics of movement eventually, i felt ready to start playing.
But i could not. Because at this point, even after dying, enemies always spawned very closely. So i died immediately again and again. The constant falling down on death was confusing and everything felt glitchy.
Then i saw a big sign explaining controls in detail.
But i could not read it. Because i would need to go some steps to the right to get to the sign, but the enemies always killed me before that, falling down, camera goes down too, could not read.

I gave up, concluding i could probably play this if the framerate would be higher as expected.
But if you increase overall stability and robustness, the game should be playable just fine even with a choppy framerate, at least for the first level.

This does not sound too positive, but it's just honest feedback you can use to improve.
The game does not look bad, but it deserves (and needs) more work on gameplay.

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You're about halfway toward a playable game: you have a game, but it's not really playable in its present state.

I really need more time to familiarize myself with the controls before I am swarmed with invincible instant-kill teleporting spawn-camping enemies. I can walk and jump. Jumping height/distance is pathetically small, so small that I'm not sure why you even bothered to include it at all. I can't clear any obstacles. There's also an attack. Wait, I need to move my hand over to the mouse to attack? Why? And there's also a dash, presumably to make up for the pathetic jump – Oops, I just died while reading the instructions.

I don't know if the enemies are actually invincible. I can't reach them because they either fly above my reach or below the ground, and they attack with an (apparently) unblockable teleport/dash attack.

It looks pretty cool 🙂 Seems fun and all too, but I wonder if maybe the character should be able to jump higher? Either that or I can't figure out how to pass the first jumping obstacle.

Maybe in the future version of this game the tutorial part might be a little longer in order for people to easier learn how to play? Not sure, but maybe.

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