cody wrote: ↑Thu Oct 17, 2024 12:55 pm
I dont play psyvariar so maybe this is sacrilege, but why not have dedicated buttons for roll, concentrated shot, etc?
For rolling the idea was to keep the old feeling of performing a deliberate action that fits into your movement gameplan... you choose to roll by going left-right, up-down and so on depending on what fits best the current situation, bring down some enemies and avoid some obstacles in a fell swoop, before the barrel roll expires and you once again assess the situation and prepare for another swoop. Animation was pulled into this with the airplane rolling but also pitching whenever you activate a roll with up-down motions, making your gameplan and intentions more obvious in a replay.
Then, to refine the old feeling a bit I raised the duration of a barrel roll up to 1.5 seconds, this seems to line up well with the gameplay in the levels I had going on, you don't need to wiggle around all the time and your swoops are long enough that they tend to line up with your macro-dodging needs.
For the spread shot that you get by tapping fire, the idea was to make it a tool that you use when needed, rather than an alternate weapon. Much like the roll you won't need to apply lots of rapid inputs often during gameplay. You can just leisurely tap when needed to clear a popcorn wave, and the lack of an extra fire button lets you focus on the simplicity of pressing Fire to launch a barrage of shots, pausing for just a moment before your energy maxes out, then slamming Fire again to get a Reaction.
That's my feeling on it. If this issue comes up a lot though, then I will look into adding the extra buttons.
Lethe wrote: ↑Thu Oct 17, 2024 4:53 pm
I don't like the sound of a roll button. This game promises more emphasis on pragmatic survival rolling than Psyvariar, and the executional dance is half the fun of these games anyway. I agree that the wide shot can be fiddly.
I would love a way to see my energy/judge the rate without glancing away from the ship. You could do it by colorizing the hitbox indicator so it gradually turns red (or whatever) as you get closer to a level. If you wanted to be wacky and eye-catching, you could have the player's camo texture hue-shift in a similar way.
About visuals, although there's plenty of progression in stage 1, it doesn't leave much of an impression on me when I'm playing. The stage is also uniformly brown. Lighting variation could help both things - for instance colder colors when the camera moves high up, as it can increase the impression of distance. Or varying the amount of fog.
Stage 2 is visually much better. The rain of pipes at the end where they're all static is weird... they should spin or something, it's trivial to avoid them.
I was hoping the energy bar turning bright red at the top is enough, since I usually catch that out of the corner of my eye, but some kind of midscreen highlight may be needed if that trick doesn't work.
Stage 1 will certainly keep being iterated on along with the rest of the demo content. As for the pipes at the end of 2, I found they can be exciting at times since their placement has a random element and like all obstacles they move faster on 2-B and fastest on 2-C, but they may need a tune up after all.
Shatterhand wrote: ↑Thu Oct 17, 2024 5:28 pm
My computer isn't exactly new. Ryzen 5 2400G, RX580, 16gb ram. But I can run Street Fighter 6 at 60fps (the newest game I own).
Judging by how slow the timer moves in the boss battle, I'm running the game about 4 times slower than intended.
Strange, the hardware should be more than enough to run the demo. Maybe the game is using the onboard graphics somehow instead of the main GPU, or a similar problem.
