The Art of Flight - releasing early 2025

[pagetopixelpublish]

Hey all! Wanted to shout out our upcoming shmup release, The Art of Flight, which is releasing on Steam in early 2025. We just launched our demo today and would love some feedback on the gameplay loop, music, art style, etc! (and feel free to wishlist as well ) Check it out here:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1706 ... Of_Flight/

[pagetopixelpublish]

I have Steam codes for the game we released earlier this year (Interwoven Emotions - not a shmup) that I'll happily give away to anyone who plays the demo for a few mins and sends feedback my way

[PC Engine Fan X!]

Reminds me of Sega's classic Tac-Scan arcade sci-fi shooter (circa 1982) with it's multiple fightercraft that the player controls, gameplay-wise.

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

[m.sniffles.esq]

I looked at this demo, and I think this has the potential to be a very cool game. That said, there's some problems (I'm sure you didn't need to be told that)

First, it's a little weird how requirement intensive it is. I have a nvidia 1030 (one notch below your recommended) and the starting res ran at probably 10fps. I had to crank it down to 720 to get (what I assume) the proper speed/framerate. This struck me as odd seeing that something WAY more graphically intensive like Dariusburst runs fine at 1080.

Anyway, the game: One general recommendation I would give is a little more padding between waves to allow the player to screw around a bit more. First, the games mechanics aren't exactly instantly intuitive. Second, the only way I figured out that switching the 'lead' ship was even possible was screwing around and hitting random buttons. But, a half a second after this discovery, there were 200 enemies bearing down of me so I was never given an opportunity to see how it worked and what I could do with it.

The other general recommendation is either make the player's regular shot stronger or the popcorns weaker. There's WAY too many of them to require 2-3 hits per.

More specific things:

• While I like the idea of a shifting soundtrack, way too often there's just two separate tracks playing on top of each other, and it sounds like a mess. If this is intention, you may want to set a root key for all the tracks to keep things from turning into a cacophony

• The zooming... I would start with a happy medium and zoom slightly in or out. To start so close--then to zoom so far out--makes it feel like your eyes are failing in real time.

• I can't figure out what the slides are supposed to do (other than throw you into enemies and make you lose a ship)

• The thrust needs either a graphical or sound indicator that it's actually happening. Which leads me to...

• Sound in general needs to be punched up. I was convinced my guns weren't making a sound at all until I really strained to listen

[pagetopixelpublish]

Great feedback, thank you so much for checking it out. Sound in particular is really important to the dev team. I'll make sure I pass it along.

[pagetopixelpublish]

Would love more feedback if anyone else got a chance to try the demo!