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Deleted 2 years ago

Hey! For business you can contact tylerandrewmyers  at  gmail  - sorry for the late reply!

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Hi!
I wanted to talk about the things I already like about the game and some other things that I'm curious about/have critique about.

First of all the game feels incredible to play.
To move and to attack is an incredibly smooth experience.
The animations of both your character and the enemies is very endearing and gives them character. It's easy to tell when your enemies are about to attack because of the animations and effects, giving it a good level of visual clarity that lets the player know what's going on.

Also small mechanic details like: when you try to "uppercut" in the air in order to pogo jump onto an enemy in order to continue the combo and you MISS you instead get punished by having a lengthy animation of your character slowly trying to pry his sword from the ground. It rewards skill and makes you learn. Things like slicing arrows from mid-air rewards precise timing and gives players that have good reactions an advantage over others, which gives players a level of skill-expression and increases the skill range of the in-game mechanics making players play, not only because of how fun the game is, but also to get better at its mechanics. I'm sure some people will play for the optimization of mechanics such as these, the result of which might give leeway for an active speed-running scene and to me, that sounds quite exciting.

The enemy design is also quite solid, the first type of enemy: the "Skull Goblin" as I'll dub it from now on, only takes a few slices to kill and is meant to let you learn the game, ( the fact that the very first skull goblin, the one that kills the knight, has quite a lot more life than the others, which lets you try the combo prompts you get on the screen, is a very good form of a tutorial) the archers are the first ranged enemy you come in contact with so you get to know both base types of enemies very early on. (Also the archers have a small visual bug where when you move too fast, while they are aiming for you, they will grotesquely contort their arms behind their back while also still looking to the side)

The third enemy the: Female Goblin Brute (it looks female to me, because of the ear piercings, the big eyes and the red nose, this might have not been the intention and also not cannon to the lore, but they look quite cute and lets me imagine them even cuter if I think of them as such)
This enemy is very nice and probably the hardest enemy in the demo so far, more so than the boss even.
You cannot normal slice them while they are charging up their attack in order to stun them, neither can you pogo jump on them to stun them, the charge attack also doesn't work. The only way you can stun them is to uppercut them from the ground and combo them thereafter. But the uppercut move doesn't have the biggest AOE and so when trying to kill a big pack of enemies which consists of some other enemy types plus a female brute, or even worse, a full pack of female goblin brutes, then you need to start thinking about how you'll attack, instead of brainlessly mashing your attack button.
Also the fact that the two melee classes of enemies try to match you when you roll/dodge away and also periodically dodge when you look at them or after a set amount of time between their attacks, makes them feel more real and adds a level of difficulty to them.

Now lets get to the boss, the boss is pretty cool in design, but quite easy to beat in execution. His first attack: the long-winding axe swing that tracks pretty well and will actually most likely hit you if you try to dodge it while anywhere near him horizontally is not bad. Unfortunately its extremely easy to just dodge it vertically instead, where the little dash he gets in order to close the gap between you and him when he's exerting his axe attack is not even close to as big as your vertical roll. Also if he does hit you, then his attack doesn't do much more damage than your normal enemies and sort of invalidates his boss status. His other attack: the rally cry, is nice and fits into his character as Chieftan. The bulk of the difficulty that this boss has is trying to fight the boss around the troops he spawns instead of the boss by himself, if this is intended, then the boss fight is fine, maybe tune the damage numbers on his axe attack to be a bit higher, but if the boss is supposed to be hard by himself, then I would consider adding a few more mechanics. 
(once, while I died fighting him, his troops also had a war cry and were enveloped in a red aura shine, if this is a hint to a mechanic which might buff the troops with each subsequent war cry the boss does, than that's pretty cool, but that's just speculation and might just be a victory cry upon killing the player, which is also pretty cool).

One last thing I want to talk about before I go into small things that might need fixing, is the dodge roll. 

Personally I like the dodge roll a lot and yes it's obviously a way faster and more efficient way of travel instead of walking normally, but I think that's honestly just fine. It's fun to just roll around the entire map, it's fun to jump and roll in mid-air and to follow that up with a pogo jump onto an enemy into a full-combo etc. It might seem cheesy, but it's extremely fun to move around in this way and if it was nerfed in any way say: smaller distance of the roll or bigger cooldown, movement as it is in the game right now, which is one of most fun things in it currently, will be a bit less exciting in the future, also some enemies already accommodate themselves to you being able to roll this much, the melee enemies match your dodge roll and try to follow you if you go to far out. For speed-running and/or fun purposes I would leave the dodge roll as is right now.

If you would like to validate walking/running in another way, like for example a running slash than can only be done by running for a certain while without stopping before hitting an attack key, which does more damage and has a bit more stun than a normal slash, then maybe you could look into something like that. Also I just recently found out about the charge attack and the fact you can charge it up while midair, in the middle of a combo or while standing up from the ground is very nice and let's you get it off a tiny bit faster than if you would just start off charging it normally.

Small things, which might or might not need fixing:


- There is no potion counter in the browser version.

- The tutorial prompts completely disappear if you roll from the very beginning or only show up partly.

- If you choose quit in the browser version it will just freeze the game instead of going to the main menu screen.

- If you roll fast enough and kill the enemy before it kills the ally knight, you get to keep him as an ally with infinite health and the mobs completely ignore him, while he swings at things you also try to swing at. (?) Not sure if this is a bug, if it's a demo-only Easter egg then it's pretty cool.

- The aforementioned visual big with the goblin archer.

Overall the game runs really well both in the downloadable version and the browser, but these are some things I noticed.


Thanks for making this game, I can't wait for the next gameplay demo and I'm always down to test some more.

Good stuff and keep up the great work!

P.S.
I found out that the Chieftan actually makes the enemies war cry also while the player is still alive, not sure if this actually does anything, but it's pretty cool.
Also found a little secret that might or might not have to do with a "king" figure, pretty cool easter egg! Don't want to ruin it for others who might want to explore it themselves.

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Hey, thanks for taking time giving feedback <3 I'll read through and address it after I'm done with today's work.

Alright lemme start. At the beginning it read a lot like a review, I think you're being a little benevolent on some things, stating the purpose of some decisions that were made, not necesserily how well these things were executed :) If you liked, then sweet. I laughed out loud when you mentioned the uppercutting goblin is a female, I never interpreted the art as such, so it was quite a surprise seeing that you did.

The boss is only half-done, and I didn't have much time to tweak it. In the future we'll likely reinforce the current direction, where he's mainly a tank and guard for the goblinkind goons. Thanks for the feedback and suggestions on that part.

Regarding dodge roll, I'm not a fan of any type of cooldowns, so if the roll was nerfed it'd need a little thought put into it. I don't want the knight to feel too sluggish either. Perhaps a consecutive roll could have a alternate animation which wouldn't cover as much distance, or perhaps we add sprinting mechanic which will cover more distance than roll. Perhaps it'll stay unchanged, it's not a high priority thing right now, as it works quite well as it is. I'm glad you like it as well :) You should like the marksman in the next demo too, as he is quite a bit more mobile than the knight.

Regarding the bugs:

The potion counter should be there, I do have it on my own machine. I'll see if I can repro on others. The quit button shouldn't be there in webGL version, my bad. Being able to save the knight is an easter egg, I don't think he has infinite HP, but yes, enemies aggro the player and not him, so he won't get hit very much usually. I'll double check that he loses the hp at some point later. I'm also aware of a lot of small quirks, most of them are in the backlog and will get fixed eventually, thanks for pointing them out!

Thanks for giving the game such a thorough try! Also you're the first person I'm aware of to find all 3 secrets :) Maybe I should hide them better next time? Thanks again for all the feedback <3 and have a nice day!

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Hi! thanks for being communicative and addressing the things I had to say. Can't wait for the marksman demo, pretty hyped!

Also an update on the "bugs" in case you needed more details. Apparently it only happens when the game is set to full-screen that: A. The potion counter disappears and B. The tutorial prompts don't show up written, but instead what shows up is only the slightly darker background tinge in order to make the prompts more readable.

[ I can provide video proof of this if it's needed or a log of my browser code, whatever helps! ]

So far this is true for itch.io only. I wanted to test it out for the Newgrounds version as well but as soon as I tried it, it made OpenGL completely inaccessible to me on both the itch.io and Newgrounds version, when it worked completely fine on the former previously.

[ I have tried another browser as well and it did not fix the problem. Also I tried restarting my system and it did not solve the problem of it not being able to launch on the newgrounds version, it did make it playable again on the itch.io version though ]

Screenshot: 

Itch.io

Newgrounds


Also the knight does lose HP, I tried it out, that was my bad.

Thanks again and have a good one!