The Knight Witch

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dai jou bu
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The Knight Witch

Post by dai jou bu »

So yeah, it's not a traditional shmup. It's basically what would happen if alucard from symphony of the night (or Miriam from bloodstained) could fly the entire time and had to deal with opponents who fight like shmup enemies. It's mutliplatform, but Nintendo seems to be the only one who has the most recent trailer that showcases the animated cutscenes which look really nice:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oICh9uZJrJ8

Really hyped for this game and plan on getting it soon, unless they announce a switch physical copy (but I'll still get the PC version anyway). Would've bought it now if it weren't for Touhou Spell Bubble distracting me since that's basically the speed chess version of puzzle bobble lol.

The last shmup that got me this excited for a game in this genre was assault android cactus because that was basically the spiritual successor to Zero Gunner 2.
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Re: The Knight Witch

Post by BulletMagnet »

I'm actually playing it now, and plan to leave a review on Steam once I finish (it's also on GOG, though I can confirm the Steam version is DRM-free). Overall I'm liking it quite a bit - it's the first game I've played in a while that's had me staying up too late, which has to count for something - though I couldn't tell you if more hardcore shmuppers than me would be quite as taken with it as I am.
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Re: The Knight Witch

Post by Bassa-Bassa »

Can you play it with the d-pad or is it analog-only?
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Re: The Knight Witch

Post by BulletMagnet »

Analog only IIRC, the d-pad is used for menu shortcuts, and I don't think there's an option to change that, though I'd have to check to be sure.
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Re: The Knight Witch

Post by Lander »

Oh yes, this one looked really interesting from the initial trailer. Shmuptroidvania seems like a genre mashup that's surprisingly underserved.

It'll be good to see some opinions on it from more experienced STG folks - complaints about card balance and a specific submarine section seem particularly prevalent based on the steam reviews and forums, but I'm always wary about those as a source of information since they tend toward pack mentality and shitposting.
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Re: The Knight Witch

Post by m.sniffles.esq »

I initially thought the trailer was scored to a generic twee-car-commercial song, which is lame. But once I realized it was actually a theme song, I did a 180.

More games need theme songs...

The game itself looks like it could go either way. But theme song? A+
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Re: The Knight Witch

Post by dai jou bu »

Kind of mad that the forum logged me out since I had a lot already typed down, which when I hit the “post” button, it just ate all of that text and jettisoned it into outer space as it sent me back to the login prompt, so I’ll just keep my take of the prologue and the first zone very, very brief instead of retyping that last hour of text:

I love everything about this game, and the hardcore danmaku crowd is going to get the wrong impressions and roast it to kingdom come because the controls and hitboxes doesn’t play like a traditional danmaku game and isn’t as finely tuned as those danmaku games even though games of this type rarely exist to begin with (if at all), so imposing those standards for a game like the Knight Witch shouldn’t apply anyway and instead use this experience to get an idea of how to make another entry of this style even better in the future. Also almost died to the first boss because I underestimated their capabilities when they got closer to death.
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Re: The Knight Witch

Post by Bassa-Bassa »

dai jou bu wrote: because the controls
Analog-only for a pure 2D game... Freakin' times. Will pass, thanks BulletMagnet.
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Re: The Knight Witch

Post by dai jou bu »

Bassa-Bassa wrote:
Analog-only for a pure 2D game... Freakin' times. Will pass, thanks BulletMagnet.
Worked for geometry wars. The reason why the game will only play nice with controllers that have analog sticks is because your main weapon requires a second “directional pad” to aim it. You know what happens when you have to make a game where you need to aim your main weapon somehow in another angle other than forward, but you only have one directional pad (or stick) to work with? You get funky and unintuitive workarounds like the one found in Zero Gunner 2.

As I said before, this is not a standard shmup game, and I love the developers for trying something really unusual. Also, the PC version has keyboard and mouse if you want to have your “precise” movement.

And zone 2 is really nice. The experience is much more pleasant playing through it than watching some dude on youtube.
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Re: The Knight Witch

Post by m.sniffles.esq »

You get funky and unintuitive workarounds like the one found in Zero Gunner 2.

Uh...

"What? I have to PRESS A BUTTON??!? What is this funky and unintuitive nonsense? I have never pressed a button during a videogame in my life and I'm not about to start now!"
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Re: The Knight Witch

Post by BulletMagnet »

I probably should have noted earlier that there is a demo for this on Steam, so anyone who's curious but isn't sure whether or not the game will click can play through the intro area and see what happens.
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Re: The Knight Witch

Post by dai jou bu »

m.sniffles.esq wrote:You get funky and unintuitive workarounds like the one found in Zero Gunner 2.

Uh...

"What? I have to PRESS A BUTTON??!? What is this funky and unintuitive nonsense? I have never pressed a button during a videogame in my life and I'm not about to start now!"
Hold the button down+movement is the default setup, double tap+hold+move to turn a little slower is a lot more complicated than just using another stick to reorient your main shot. Trying to explain how zero gunner 2’s mechanics work to someone who grew up with dual stick controllers will make them believe this game is more archaic than it should be.

We can argue this point until this forum window turns a shade of blue, and it already did.

Also, knight witch uses those extra face buttons for spell cards, and it’d feel crazy awkward implementing a manual aiming system with one directional pad without breaking this design.
Lander wrote: It'll be good to see some opinions on it from more experienced STG folks - complaints about card balance and a specific submarine section seem particularly prevalent based on the steam reviews and forums, but I'm always wary about those as a source of information since they tend toward pack mentality and shitposting.
I haven’t run into any serious spell card balance issues yet. So far they’ve been pretty good in giving you a new spell card right before the encounter you face will really need it. The concern I have is that it’s a slog to get enough mana consistently to whip them out as the more useful ones have a higher cost associated with them (the devs seem to be really aware of this too and couldn’t figure out a more elegant way to address this other than placing Crystal nodes in certain rooms that automatically refill your mana by just hanging around it and are strategically placed in spots where you need to spam your spell cards more often) , and there’s also RNG on what button they get mapped to after you used the previous one up.

I haven’t gotten to the submarine section yet, but the videos I’ve seen of it do make it seem like a slog to go through.
BulletMagnet wrote:I probably should have noted earlier that there is a demo for this on Steam, so anyone who's curious but isn't sure whether or not the game will click can play through the intro area and see what happens.
Oh that’s neat. Got my copy via gog.com and there was no demo. Yeah, that should help people figure out whether this game will click with them or not.
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Re: The Knight Witch

Post by Bassa-Bassa »

As I said before, this is not a standard shmup game, and I love the developers for trying something really unusual. Also, the PC version has keyboard and mouse if you want to have your “precise” movement.
I wonder who in the world doesn't want precise movement in a frigging 2D shooting game. Or just what kind of game it really is if you don't need it.


The thing is, analog controls make sense if there's analog movement, if there isn't any, the analog stick is playing the role of a digital controller, only that it can't ever be as adequate, by definition. Abysmal digital controllers have made people (game developers included) believe otherwise.

And dissociated aiming and movement with standard stick/d-pad has been solved very competently ever since the eighties (as well as real-time item selection with just two extra buttons), there's nothing short of "workaround" in ZG2's control system - it's a game conceived for those archaic arcade sticks.

Bloody freakin' times.
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Re: The Knight Witch

Post by m.sniffles.esq »

Trying to explain how zero gunner 2’s mechanics work to someone who grew up with dual stick controllers will make them believe this game is more archaic than it should be.

Yeah, I don't know. I always said "push the button" and that seemed to do the trick.
Maybe I'm just real good at explaining stuff...
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Re: The Knight Witch

Post by kid aphex »

Bassa-Bassa wrote:
I wonder who in the world doesn't want precise movement in a frigging 2D shooting game. Or just what kind of game it really is if you don't need it.
Hey, have you watched any video of the game?
Because I watched 20 seconds of a gameplay video and recognized that this isn’t the kind of game that requires digital controls to avoid bullets.
That’s what kind of game it is.
Wonder no more.

Wanting dpad control on a game like this is… mental. Sorry dude.
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Re: The Knight Witch

Post by Bassa-Bassa »

Wanting digital controller on a 2D game with digital movement is the natural thing to do - hopefully this doesn't sound like a revelation.

I hadn't watched any video before though, and despite it's conceived as a twin stick shooter where the weapon aiming is indeed analog, I find no reason to think otherwise other than current dpads suck and they don't want to encourage people to play their game with non-bundled controllers for obvious reasons.

I agree with you over this, anyway - very likely it's a game that doesn't require digital controls to avoid bullets. I'm not sure after the video that it actually demands anything but anti-tedium pills, indeed.


-I ended up kind of shitting on your thread and it wasn't really my intention, dai jou bu, sorry.-
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Re: The Knight Witch

Post by dai jou bu »

I’ve come to expect extreme responses in this thread simply because the game is unorthodox. If a game like Senko no Ronde elicited confusion and a tons of discussions over whether or not it was a shmup, then I already had an idea how this thread was going to start off. Be glad I wasn’t here talking about One Step From Eden when it first came out two years ago lol.

If you guys are that adamant on using digital controls, get the PC version and use a controller to keyboard binding application since the game does use keyboard (for movement) and mouse controls. Manually aiming with the mouse/right analog stick only increases your primary shot’s damage, and if you fire without aiming, your main weapon auto-aims to the closest target, but the bullets are smaller and deal less damage (I’ll probably do a digital movement only run sometime in the future to see if you can even complete the game like this). This feature was added in because it helps you focus on movement and what spell cards you currently have available, and I’ve used the auto aim a few times because my thumb wasn’t quite at the correct angle yet to fire at the opponent or I needed to focus on not dying because there are certain encounters where you need to pay attention more towards dodging.

Anyway, finally got back to playing my second major session with the game. Stopped at the middle of the second zone which is also where you get the blink mechanic. It’s pretty sweet and kind of reminds me of Suguri/Sora, but dodging attacks feels way more manageable. It is a little bit too overtuned since you can almost get away with a lot of stuff that should’ve nailed you, but considering that the later zones have enemies whose attacks take this ability into consideration, it can get… hectic, and my joycons using custom drivers that give it input lag doesnt’ really help either. And It’s drifting left =/

Anyway, zone 3 is the infamous submarine stage. This is where the first difficulty spike happens. And here’s my reason why it really sucks:

- The water makes it impassible terrain unless you’re able to transform into a submarine at certain nodes. It’s not a big deal, until you realize that the parts filled with water have very narrow corridors, so it’s harder to dodge things and it doesn’t help that the super-duper blink ability you got in the previous zone doesn’t work when you’re in the submarine.
- I believe the submarine sprite is the true size of your hitbox in human form. That’s really the only positive I can say about the submarine. You can only fire horizontally, and auto-aim is disabled. I think this might also be a nightmare if you’re playing this with digital controls only because you need to use the mouse/right analog stick to aim left or right. The auto fire speed is at max, but I’m not too sure if the damage modifier is based on how often you were focusing on your Knight side of upgrades every time you leveled up.

I can also see where other players would ragequit while they’re doing this zone:

- Since your main shot can’t aim vertically in submarine mode, the developers added these turrets strategically positioned at certain angles, that when hit with your main weapon causes them to spit out enemy bullets that also do friendly fire. There is one puzzle that requires you to destroy a bunch blast doors (and has some really annoying enemies trapped behind one of them, so you have to time your shots correctly so you don’t free them on accident) using those turrets mounted on a spinning contraption in the center of the room, and yes, I almost killed myself trying to solve this puzzle because triggering the trajectory of the bullets to fly at the right angle is that tricky.
- The enemies in this zone are very tanky. So not only do you have to contend with rewiring your brain to think in ways to position yourself to get a good horizontal line of fire, you’re dealing with enemies aren’t handicapped by their firing angle, but they also soak up a ton of hits, which doesn’t help with the fact that spell cards are the only way to way to fire at an angle, but the really useful ones eat a ton of mana, and it’s still hard at this point of the game to replenish it quickly.
- Speaking of mana, there’s two enemies exclusive to this zone that shoot depth charges; one of them flies upward (though it starts from the floor first), and the other launches it from the top downward. For some reason, the developers programmed the mana orb drops that you can pick up to restore your MP mid-fight to slowly descend to the floor, which is WHERE ALL OF THE DEPTH CHARGES ARE HANGING OUT AND YOU CAN’T SEE THEM BECAUSE OF THE WATER EFFECTS AND THE BULLETS FROM YOUR SUBMARINE. Granted, they can be shot, but once they hit the floor, you’re actually too high to hit it with your main shot unless you use a spell card to change your bullet type to one that has a bigger hitbox.
- All of these problems come all together in a mandatory ambush encounter while you’re in the submarine; You have a sort of comfortable amount of screen space to work with, but because there’s a section of the screen that’s not filled with water, a good portion of the screen is not available for you to move around in. There are enemy turrets that spawn on the ceiling that can only be hit either with spell cards or (more likely) those puzzle turrets that you need to shoot at, which there are 4 of them, and you need to find out which torrent is going to hit them at the correct angle ASAP because fish are going to be spawning real soon that, while they don’t fire, have a fairly big hitbox and swim horizontally, and take a beating, meaning that they’re going to also absorb that puzzle turret fire. Also, did I mention that the encounter also spawns those depth charge enemies too?
- Also, the boss that you face at the end of this zone is harder than the one you’ll fight after this one. Story-wise, it makes sense why but at least you’re fighting them outside of the water.

After zone 3, it the difficulty curve starts evening out again. It’s probably because of all of the skills I learned from having to play super-aggressive, especially for that optional ambush encounter in zone 3. This is also around the time where the game’s performance on my anemic MacBook Air is more consistent since they’re not trying to show off all these particle and lighting effects like they were doing for the first three zones.

You go through a small part of a later zone for story reasons, but zone 4 is where you get the sword, which does a lot of damage, but it has a pretty slow startup (you can do a cool anime dash with the sword if you time the blink right as the swipe animation starts, which is about 2 frames after you hear her do her battle shout; yeah, that timing is really odd). You primarily use it to hit anvils which either cause a stone slab to either disappear or appear. The two interesting enemies in this zone are one that peppers the screen with targeting reticles that you shouldn’t be hovering in when they go off, and these towers in the background that aim a targeting reticle on you that you can either avoid by hovering behind a piece of wall in the background, or spamming the blink button right when it fires off (which fortunately you don’t need perfect timing because they also tend to have enemies hanging around these areas shooting/ramming into you as well). What’s stupid is that the NPC that tells you how those towers work is on the right side of the zone, which can only be reached by obtaining the sword first, which is on the left side of the zone, which has two rooms of those towers firing at you lol.

So far, the game has been a fun experience, and I’m with bulletmagnet in that I almost lose track of time while playing it.

A few final thoughts:

- Because of how the HP system works (one hit removes one heart, and you start with 3, and I’ve only been able to get two additional hearts before padding them with armor), the enemies and hazards in the earlier zones still pose a threat to you even with all of the upgrades, so you can’t turn your brain on autopilot mode when you’re navigating through them. I like this since other metroidvanias make it a slog to go through earlier areas because of all the upgrades make them trivial to deal with.
- Weird that they don’t have fast travel between rest spots, but I guess that’s fine since the zones aren’t that big.
- I really love the thought they put into the music. There’s a more silent track that plays when you’re navigating an empty room, and then then ramps up when you’re approaching an enemy encounter.
- My idea of using lots of cheap spell cards and not using the more expensive ones (comes from the my experience in playing deck building card games) until I get a more reliable way to obtain mana quickly flew out the window in zone 3 because a lot of the cheap offensive cards relied on proximity to the enemy (homing weapons, self short range bullet-clearing AOE) which doesn’t work when there’s turrets on the other side of the screen, but there’s also those stupid fish swimming between those turrets. Hilariously, after I cleared that zone I got a card that literally gives you free mana when you use it.
- Speaking of which, I can sort of start seeing some of the issues that people raised in regards to card balance. There’s clearly some very nice cards and some that perform the same role but work way better in certain situations (that card that gives you free mana is good and is just found by exploring the map, but there’s also another card you can only obtain by spending a special currency and hoping it appears in the selection of 3 that pops up which gives you free mana for each enemy you defeat for a short period of time, which is actually very good in a lot of rooms in zone 4). It’s not that big of a deal though, since that’s to be expected when a game gives you several options on how to tackle a problem. The only issue I have is that there’s an NPC that can create an extra copy of one of your spell cards, but only certain ones that are duplicated reduce the mana cost by one, which is utterly bizarre.
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Re: The Knight Witch

Post by dai jou bu »

Didn’t have a long session this time, so here’s a few rapid-fire things I’ve noticed:

- Switch pro controller connected via usb to MacBook Air is a lot more responsive. Still going to wreck my muscle memory when I play this game on actual switch hardware though.
- Zone 4.5 makes you go backtrack through most of the beginning area and reintroduces you to some of the enemies that you met in zone 3.5. What I didn’t know was that one of the enemies that shoots homing chaff at you randomly turns one of your spell cards into a hex card (lose 3 mana on use) if you get hit by them. Pretty nasty if you ask me.
- Also hilarious is the short dialog cutscene will trigger every time you enter room that contains the teleporter that sends you to the other zones and the monsters respawn. They’ll have to fix this in a future patch lol.
- I also discovered that the sword is more useful than I thought it was. At first the startup time was pretty bad until I realized that most enemies’ firing patterns have a long pause in between them, and interestingly enough, if you’re able to see the swing of your sword when you trigger your blink, sword’s hitbox is applied to your blinking sprite and remains active for the duration of the blink, even if the sword’s swing animation completes before the blink does. This is insanely useful in taking out those enemies that generate rolling missile shields (that they also fire homing versions at you) that have to to shot at before you can hit their soft center, and they go down in one sword strike, and their death also causes any of their missiles to self-destruct. I was surprised by its effectiveness for one of the ambush encounters that can only be reached with the Zone 5 ability upgrade.
- Boss 4.5 is crazy hard if you don’t load out your spell cards correctly. The strategy for this boss is to find a way to deal consistent chunky DPS before you get overwhelmed by their increasingly complex attack patterns (I wouldn’t say bullet patterns since the boss likes to reposition themselves a lot in this fight, with them most of the time getting into your personal space). I was able to do it by a combination of the hand cannon and bullet reflect spell cards, both of which are bought using the special currency if I remember correctly.
- I got the magical cat (the same version of the cat that you see on the loading screens) right as you approach zone 5. When you press the button assigned to it, the cat plops down where you currently are on the screen. It’s used to solve a majority of the puzzles in Zone 5, but it has the added effect of most of the spell cards coming from the cat instead of from you; there’s a spell card you can find in a hidden area of this zone that’s similar to the low-level smart bomb you get at the beginning of the game with the catch that it also damages you in the process of using it (it even has the same mana cost). This spell card was meant to showcase the cat’s strengths since you can plop the cat down and then trigger that spell card to do major damage around the cat (but not the cat itself).
- Speaking of which, hopefully the developers took into consideration that finding this explosion spell for the first time won’t kill you if you only have one heart remaining since the spell card will activate once for free after you obtain it.
- Since there were a few things that could only be reached in the earlier areas with having the cat in your arsenal, I also made a trip back to Zone 3. The good news is that it does seem possible to actually play this game in its entirety with keyboard movement bound to a controller’s D-pad (for those who are adamant in playing this game using digital controls) since the submarine automatically locks your orientation once you start firing. You can stop firing and then move left/right to reorient yourself before you start firing again. Still a smidgen slower than using the mouse/analog stick in tandem with that since you don’t need to let go of the fire button to switch firing left/right, but hey, if you’re going to make your bed this way, you sleep in it.
- Zone 5 also introduces enemies that shoot purple bullets which bypasses walls, and the danmaku is start to look more like what you’d see in a Touhou game. Also was kinda mad that they used the same sprite (or it looked like the same sprite) for one of the popcorn enemies in the previous zone but they didn’t behave the same way when I shot them.
- This was also the point in the game that I discovered that the sword is actually a Radiant Sword, as in, it can also clear bullets with its swing. The tool tip doesn’t even mention this, so wtf developers. With this in mind getting the sword is one of the biggest power spikes you’ll obtain in The Knight Witch.


And one final thing I noticed: The PC version of this game is 11GB in size. Like, what; the switch version barely hits 1.5GB. Guess I’ll have to buy an external SSD for my PC game collection from now on if indie titles like this are this hueg.
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Re: The Knight Witch

Post by BulletMagnet »

Finished this up earlier this evening, posted a review if anyone's interested.
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Re: The Knight Witch

Post by dai jou bu »

BulletMagnet wrote:Finished this up earlier this evening, posted a review if anyone's interested.
It's a pretty concise breakdown of the game, and pretty good. In case you're wondering, I'm deliberately avoiding talking about the story in this thread, since everyone seems more focused on the mechanics of a shmup in this forum anyway. There are mechanics tied to the story, but it's not that "important," since trying to understand why the game is designed the way that it was is more my objective right now.

Which is what I was in the middle of doing and then you posted something in this thread lol. Well, here it is.

------------

Okay, I think I have an idea of the mindset they were going in terms of the design of The Knight Witch. The danmaku bullet patterns are a red herring, but because everyone in the past 10 years can only identify a shmup by those signature danmaku patterns, they're put in there more as a marketing gimmick then a design choice to the foundation of a standard danmaku shmup template (danmaku patterns necessitate small hurt boxes on your avatar in order to dodge wave after wave of them safely). I came to this realization when they were interviewed awhile back and the interviewer mentioned Gradius to them and not the name of some vertical shmup.

In short, if you're going into this game thinking it's going to adopt those QoL improvements that the danmkau genre has been doing ever since Toplan's games over 20 years ago, you're going to get something like those top-rated negative steam reviews on the game's store page. If you go into this game as though you played early horizontal shmups, more specifically R-Type, then it's actually pretty good, if not amazing. If you don't believe me, go fire up R-Type Delta, which is considered to be the last well-deigned R-Type game in the series before Final ruined everything and observe these traits that are also found in the Knight Witch:

- Huge hurt box on your ship. The game always makes you feel claustrophobic because it's nearly impossible to play like you would in a danmaku shmup due to the fact that while the sizes of the enemies and bullets are still as they were in a danmaku title, good luck trying to avoid them with that Xbox Hueg hurt box. Also, manual speed changing is a curse in disguise because now the level design doesn't have to take into consideration that you might be coming into this next section of a later stage with zero speed power ups. So yeah, the slow bullet speed is slow in the Knight Witch because your default movement speed never changes, which also gives it that R-Type vibe to it.
- There are literally sections where it's impossible to dodge stuff and requires you to use the tools at your disposal to make a clear path to safety. In the case of R-Type, it's your Force Module and wave cannon (for waves of enemies that behave as bullet patterns) for most situations since you'll probably reach the checkpoint for the nth time without a bit or missile power up at your disposal, with the delta attack there as a "I give up and have no idea how to pass this section and hope I can reach the next checkpoint" button (except for the final boss, which is required to activate in order to beat the game). In the case of the Knight Witch, you have the cheap 1 mana small AOE smart bomb that you can also use offensively if you're daring enough, followed by the Blink ability in Zone 2, and the Sword in Zone 4, plus all of the other new spell cards you get along the way.
- Checkpoint-based spawning upon player death. This one is not as obvious in the Knight Witch because of the genre it's trying to meld together, but R-Type Delta stands out from most shmups because it's the one of the remaining games in the genre still kicking that's still practicing this concept. The only times I really started dying in this game is during ambush encounters starting from Zone 3, and that's primarily because I didn't know what enemies I was expecting to face, what order and where they were going to spawn, and how many of them I had to deal with at once. Since some of these ambush encounters are mandatory, if you can't pass them, then you can't progress further in the game until you do. Just like R-Type. If this was a danmaku title, you just keep respawning until you beat the boss, with only the feeling of guilt on your conscience that you defiled the purity of the 1CC dogma telling you not to credit feed.
- Interestingly enough, the developers said that they designed this game around spell card load outs, and to discourage the player from going through the game with most of the initial set that you get at the start. I felt this the hard way when my load out was mostly cheap early cards and found it next to impossible to beat one of the ambush encounters, since all I had to do was switch out some of those cards with ones I found later on in the game, and it only mostly bad instead of impossible. And just like the spell cards in the Knight Witch, the star of the show in R-Type is not your ship, it's actually the Force Module and the secondary fire weapon you loaded onto it. I mean, yeah, R-Type tends to give you the generally useful power up for your Force Module at certain sections of the stage, but there are also times where they just throw a weapon power up that's completely useless for the next encounter and it's only there because when you respawn you have no choice but to get it unless you want to have no Force Module or an underpowered one. Interestingly enough, the magical cat reminds me of a weakened detached Force Module since a lot of your spell cards will fire off from the cat if you plopped it on the screen instead of from you, and the cat being "attached" to you being the same as firing the Force Module's special weapon when it's attached to you. Having to deploy the magical cat to stand still in a spot to keep something activated isn't as different as tossing your force module at a spot and moving it in a way so it's constantly doing contact damage with an enemy, or more iconically, you having to launch the force module at the final boss as the only way to truly defeat it.



So yeah, that's why I'm finding this game fun. It accidentally is scratching that R-Type itch I didn't know I had.
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Re: The Knight Witch

Post by dai jou bu »

So like, the last boss gave me Suguri flashbacks but in a bad way because the entire fight was a good showcase of how hard it was to keep track anything going on because the information was literally on different corners of the screen. It also tests how well you built your deck using some of the optional cards that are absolutely mandatory for this encounter, as paradoxically as it sounds.

Overall, it's been a pleasant experience playing this game. Now it's time to figure out how to unlock the harder stuff. And trying to play the game using a Saturn pad, because people here seem to be dying to know what the experience is like playing the game that way.
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Re: The Knight Witch

Post by dai jou bu »

Alright, so I went through the intro portion of the game again using a USB Sega Saturn pad that had its button presses mapped something else on the keyboard. After spending about a good 20 minutes figuring out which button number Windows assigned by default to the Saturn pad, I came to a few observations during this step:

- There's only enough buttons on the Saturn Pad for all of the actions you need to execute throughout the entire game. The start button is assigned to the system menu, not the game menu that allows you to fiddle around with your spell cards
- You can't use the Saturn pad to leave a menu screen because there's literally not enough free buttons, and because you're trying to emulate a keyboard (which has infinitely more buttons to press than a Sega Saturn pad) the game's assuming you'll just press the Esc key instead of assigning a secondary context action when you press the B button on the Saturn Pad inside these menus.
- As a matter of fact, you'll have to use the mouse pointer to access the menus properly if you're going with this special Saturn pad layout. Or press a button on the keyboard to access one of the game menu screens, unless you're using the start button to instead go straight to the spell card selection, which is stupid since you can't modify your deck anyway unless you access it from a checkpoint.
- There's also a prompt that pops up when you're able to level up, which if you're using a controller detected using XNA inputs, is a trivial button press away since the game is programmed to work with that specific control scheme in mind, not this Frankenstein monstrosity I just put together.


Alright, so what about the game itself? Just put up with these minor inconveniences just so you can get your precise movement on an actual D-pad and not an analog stick, right? Well, here's the thing:
Image

You see that spinning orange reticle to the left of my character sprite? That goes away when you're using an XNA-approved controller and you stop moving the right analog stick since that's the direction your manually aimed shot will fire, but it remains on the screen for as long as the game detects that you're pressing buttons on the keyboard or moving a mouse. Yeah, no big deal since you assigned the auto-aim shot to the Saturn Pad and not the aimed shot, right? Since the Saturn pad has no right analog stick to use that targeting reticle, you shouldn't have any problems using your mad shmup dodging skills gained from using that awesome D-pad, right?

Image

Now imagine if this I was in this same situation in zone 4 where those smaller turrets have a semi-auto firing speed, their salvo goes on for more than 2 seconds, and their projectile velocity is 3 times faster. And I had one heart left. That's not the kind of situation you want to be forced into, but since this is the intro stage, we'll let that slide. But here's something more interesting:

Image

The auto-aim wasn't working on this specific section for whatever reason (there were enemies below the blast door, and the previous encounters before this fired my main shot in the correct angle which hit the blast door in the process, but for some reason didn't work for this one you're looking at before I annihilated them with one of my spell cards), and I spent almost a minute trying to figure out how to break open that blast door without using the mouse to aim downward. If I had the spell card that transformed my main shot into hand cannon shells (which I didn't have access to for this specific run), strangely enough the bullet trajectory will now correctly fire in the direction that you're moving towards, but for some reason the bullets from your main shot inexplicably don't do this by default. Somehow I was able to move my sprite in a way that one of the bullets fired would hit the blast door somehow, but imagine trying to do this same thing with your actual main character who doesn't start off with this rate of fire in the prologue stage?

Yeah, this Saturn keyboard binding thing is starting to sound more like a bad idea the more I encounter these types of quirks. I'll fiddle around with it some more sometime later, but yeah, the developers clearly didn't take into consideration players who wanted to use the D-pad for movement instead of the analog stick. This problem would'v been mostly averted if there was a simple setting that changed this, and maybe made a few tweaks to the menu interactions based on this preference for a pure game pad setup.
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Re: The Knight Witch

Post by Immryr »

i think you've made a bit of a leap by assuming anyone who wants to use a dpad would want to use a saturn pad or something similar to play this. ps5 controllers have dpads, those 8bitdo controllers with the dual analogue sticks have dpads... etc
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Re: The Knight Witch

Post by dai jou bu »

The major complaint that people have about this game is no d-pad input for movement. The game will not allow it with those controllers you mentioned by default as it maps those to menu shortcuts if you configure it to be “correctly” detected by the game. So if you found a hack that allows that same controller to have both the perks of both an XInput device (basically no graceful menu interaction unless the game detects you’re using one) while allowing you to use the d-pad to move, I’m all ears.
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Re: The Knight Witch

Post by KennyMan666 »

Finished this today. The concept of a shmup Metroidvania definitely gave me some unreasonably high expectations, that it didn't manage to live up to. Previously mentioned too big hitbox meaning any tight dodging wasn't doable, areas reached through a hub rather than an interconnected world, and a very notable lack of fast travel, making me feel like it came up short in both the shmup and Metroidvania categories. And yeah, the submarine section was horrible and I was really hoping that the reward at the end of that area was going to be the ability to go underwater without the sub, but alas. And the writing was kinda mediocre.

I definitely didn't hate it, if I did I wouldn't have finished it almost 100% but I don't think I'll go back for those last 2% or whatever. The spellcard system was kinda cool, the Ghost Gun with the shot-copying familiar was absolutely stupid. So one of those games that I enjoyed enough to see trough, but was still disappointed.
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Re: The Knight Witch

Post by dai jou bu »

KennyMan666 wrote: So one of those games that I enjoyed enough to see trough, but was still disappointed.
The Knight Witch suffers from a chicken and egg problem of games of this type not really the norm at this level of production quality, with danmaku and metroidvania fans breathing down its neck because the ideas for its inspiration have had examples of the pinnacles of their respective genres from over ten years ago that many assume are trying to match their level of game mechanical execution as its baseline. On the developer's first try.

From here on, it's going to take courage either from the developers of this game to press on make a sequel with better quality of life features because I know they feel pretty demoralized from the feedback I've been seeing in the Steam forums, or someone else takes up the mantle and uses these ideas and make it in their stead. I do have a lot of ideas on what they can do to improve the sequel without completely overturning the core mechanics that are set in place with this game (i.e- R-Type sized hurt box despite the danmaku bullet patterns, spell card resource system, and 360 manual aiming) and completely losing its identity, but I believe the developers don't use this place as a think tank for their ideas, so I won't mention them here.

That reminds me. I need to continue my wacky play through of the game using a hacked game pad/arcade stick that maps its controls to keyboard inputs because XInput-detected hardware does not allow you to map directional movements to the D-pad.
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Re: The Knight Witch

Post by Technicolor »

It’s a shame to see all of these complaints pop up when looking into the smaller details, because on a surface level this formula seems like a solid compromise between the arcade and mainstream gaming scenes. If you added a separate Score Attack mode where the player picks a single zone to play through, trying to balance clear time with milking strats, you’d have something special on your hands. It wouldn’t have to be a metroidvania at all; just having shmup gameplay in a more open-ended play area is enough. I’ve had similar thoughts about Deltarune for a while now based on the per-chapter format and the concessions that game makes for speedrunners.

In metroidvanias you're always exploring, uncovering new areas, going back to different places. Plus we have a shooter on top of that, and exploration/shooting does not deal well with long dialogues. I wanted to write the longest possible dialogues, but ultimately tried to keep things simple.

Based on quotes like this, though, I doubt that separate modes or anything like that would have even been in consideration in the first place. Another subtle sign that they aren’t familiar with this genre’s evolution.


I already have tons of ideas bubbling on what else they could have done or how they could’ve done it better, coming from my own influences and the power of hindsight, but I think it’s more telling that they made these mistakes in the first place. These appear to be experienced and skilled developers, yet they also appear to have failed to do their research on the shmup genre; most likely, they subconsciously assumed that they didn’t have to. Part of me worries that that’s an alarm bell for how obscure this forum and this genre really are, but if people are complaining about the metroidvania side of things as well, then maybe they really did just get overambitious here. Really, it’s probably a little of both.

dai jou bu wrote:From here on, it's going to take courage either from the developers of this game to press on make a sequel with better quality of life features because I know they feel pretty demoralized from the feedback I've been seeing in the Steam forums, or someone else takes up the mantle and uses these ideas and make it in their stead. I do have a lot of ideas on what they can do to improve the sequel without completely overturning the core mechanics that are set in place with this game (i.e- R-Type sized hurt box despite the danmaku bullet patterns, spell card resource system, and 360 manual aiming) and completely losing its identity, but I believe the developers don't use this place as a think tank for their ideas, so I won't mention them here.

I hope they make a sequel. They clearly love the game they made here. With the right touches, a lot of other people could too.


I think the genre needs more games like these— games that are willing to negotiate with the mainstream on what shmups are, what makes them worthwhile, what ideas they can bring to the wider conversation— but they need to be made by shmup enthusiasts who are aware on a base level that those negotiations are happening in the first place. If said enthusiasts became more willing to make those negotiations, to make them cleverly and with the right amount of attention, they’re the games that have the greatest chance of turning the industry’s attention back to the arcade format.


It’s concerning that the developers most willing to experiment with the genre are consistently those who know the least about it.
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Re: The Knight Witch

Post by BulletMagnet »

Technicolor wrote:It’s concerning that the developers most willing to experiment with the genre are consistently those who know the least about it.
That's probably inevitable to at least some extent, since the ones who have spent the most time playing and studying "the greats" (not just in terms of shmups or video games, but anything) will likely (though not always, of course) be the ones to hold them in the highest esteem and treat them with the most reverence (not without reason, mind you, especially within a "storied but faded" genre), and be more concerned with "living up to the legends" in their own work as opposed to shaking things up. Off the top of my head I recall what a big deal it was that Streets of Rage 4 put "invisible walls" around the playfield so enemies can't be knocked offscreen; think of how long it took for a single beat-em-up to finally dare to implement that one small change from tradition.
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Re: The Knight Witch

Post by dai jou bu »

Technicolor wrote:It’s concerning that the developers most willing to experiment with the genre are consistently those who know the least about it.
I'm on the side where these outsiders bring in perspective that everyone else entrenched in the genre seem to overlook. For example, Square's Einhander was able to surpass Rayforce in terms of cinematic presentation and seamless stage transitions while bringing a lot of interesting ideas to the table on top of that (ie- dynamic speed change in both directions as opposed to one direction like Thunderforce [which R-Type used ever since Delta], stealing weapons attached to enemies, etc.):

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rQXCigGWPzU

But right now there's no precedent for this kind of innovation to exist anymore, and... I'll stop that train of thought right there.
Technicolor wrote:Based on quotes like this, though, I doubt that separate modes or anything like that would have even been in consideration in the first place. Another subtle sign that they aren’t familiar with this genre’s evolution.
I kind of alluded to this in my past posts in this thread, but I believe the idea the developers were going for on not having convenient fast travel is because of the way the game mechanics are designed in regards to damage, every enemy and hazard remains a threat throughout most of the game until you know how to consistently spam powerful spell cards, plus memorizing the enemy placement, patterns, and dealing with them through repeated play throughs simulated in this game via going back and forth between earlier zones still sticks to the design philosophy of a traditional shmup. It also prioritizes you to really consider going there is worth it right now and making sure that whatever it is you need to get is in that spot, especially at the starting area. In traditional metroidvanias, fast travel was implemented due to both the maps being 10+ times larger than the knight witch, and that a lot of times you need to go back to areas you explored earlier in the game, which by that point the power level disparity between you and the enemies/hazards in those spots is so great having to walk through it is literally a PITA because nothing can really hurt you.
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Re: The Knight Witch

Post by Technicolor »

The ideal marriage would be for experienced shmup developers and passionate indie developers to reach out to each other and work on games like these together. Like, imagine if Toby Fox announced tomorrow that his team would be working with Qute to develop Deltarune chapters 3-5. The dude writes Famitsu articles and has done an interview with Zun, he has pull among japanese game devs… the fact that that combo’s technically possible is a little maddening to think about, actually.


It goes without saying that this forum has a bad habit of scaring people away, but something I think gets addressed less is that most of the people here are very, very rusty at being outsiders to the genre. A balancing act between those two perspectives, both informed and thoughtful with regards to creating games together, could produce wonders. I guess that mostly comes down to developing the shmup community rather than moving forward with any one game development project.

BulletMagnet wrote:That's probably inevitable to at least some extent, since the ones who have spent the most time playing and studying "the greats" (not just in terms of shmups or video games, but anything) will likely (though not always, of course) be the ones to hold them in the highest esteem and treat them with the most reverence (not without reason, mind you, especially within a "storied but faded" genre), and be more concerned with "living up to the legends" in their own work as opposed to shaking things up. Off the top of my head I recall what a big deal it was that Streets of Rage 4 put "invisible walls" around the playfield so enemies can't be knocked offscreen; think of how long it took for a single beat-em-up to finally dare to implement that one small change from tradition.

Reading older discussions on this topic has been illuminating, but it’s also been very strange observing my own opinions shift with time. (Not that my preferences are worth a damn yet, but still.) I’m at least glad to see the torch being passed to indies and doujins— a lot of the old cynicism seems like it predates stuff like ZeroRanger, Blue Revolver, etc.

dai jou bu wrote:I kind of alluded to this in my past posts in this thread, but I believe the idea the developers were going for on not having convenient fast travel is because of the way the game mechanics are designed in regards to damage, every enemy and hazard remains a threat throughout most of the game until you know how to consistently spam powerful spell cards, plus memorizing the enemy placement, patterns, and dealing with them through repeated play throughs simulated in this game via going back and forth between earlier zones still sticks to the design philosophy of a traditional shmup.

I can’t really comment on the metroidvania side of things at all, but this is really interesting. Shmup-style gameplay properly interpreted through the lens of modern gaming tastes is something you almost never see. The closest thing to a real “home-console” shmup would probably be euroshmups, but that’s kind of as if home-console platformers stopped with Mario 3; any shmups you play on consoles nowadays are still designed to emulate the arcade model of player motivations and incentives.


Ideas like this, centered on bring the “what” of shmups into the “why” of modern gaming, scream potential. Potential for the advent of a whole new genre, depending on your definition of things. Maybe one that ought to have come into being years ago.
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