Hey Phoenix-Really cool stuff so far!! Mojo and I did separate playthroughs so here’s what we found:
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When you first use your ability and create the first staircase, if you just walk off the platform and onto the stairs without jumping you’ll die or respawn where you started. Not sure if the collision is set up properly or if for some reason you’re still hitting the spikes that were there before the stairs appeared? I took a screenshot from the video KrautPotato posted to show you the location:
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Another issue is the controls seem to lag a little bit. So if we press the jump button or the dash it has about a half second delay. Overall we would like the controls to feel a little snappier so as players we will feel the reaction is happening immediately. A good example of snappier control movement is Ori or Strider (both are 3D sidescrollers on XBox one). They both have really well animated characters that move dynamically and are snappy and responsive in control. A lot of the older 8-bit game sidescrollers (like Mario, and Mega Man) have the same feel.
Here were some videos that talked about animation transition and improvements on control feel:
Ori:
Metal Gear Solid (fwd to 6:10):
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Mojo got some tutorial white text on a solid black rectangle in his bottom left corner at the beginning of his playthrough and it never went away. The black square made it hard to see where he was jumping on platforms because it blocked the view. I don’t think that was supposed to stay there because it didn’t happen on mine, but having the text on an alpha card would really help out.
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When I used my Ability for the second time/obstacle, I pressed the Right Trigger and the screen changed color as if the Ability was activated, however nothing was happening. I started spamming all of my buttons and text showed up on the left hand screen in a column saying “FOUND ME” over and over all the way down the entire screen. Eventually everything worked and the text went away.
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Framerate issues like some of the others mentioned are present. For us it was mostly on the FX where you use the projectiles. I was afraid the game would crash when killing all the blocker stars because we fired off so many shots and there was a ton of slowdown, but we sure showed them!
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Camera angle mad it a little hard to see on the last jump-zip-zip over the pit before the end of the demo. It zoomed into the character if you got too close to the right edge so I died a lot here because it was hard to see at points when trying to jump.
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We know this may still be too early, but for graduation sake it would be cool to have a sense of urgency or climax at the end of the level so it feels rewarding for players when they finish. You learned everything so now let’s put you to the test and make it a timed obstacle so you can use your skills, survive for the finale and feel smart. Btw have you ever played Mega Man 2 quick man stage? The Ori video above also relates to this in terms of level pacing.
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I really liked the purple portal warp where you saw it at first and were like, “What IS that thing? I can’t reach it even though I got this awesome triple jump!” And then later on after you get your relic you get to use it and are like, “This place again? how did I–oh nice one!”
Overall you’ve accomplished so much and it’s really creative and fun! We can’t wait to see as it continues to grow. Prologue was amazing too! 