I'll try to give it a try soon-ish and post some feedback. Ideally today or tomorrow, but this weekend is turning out a bit crazy (and stressful).
Cool, looking forward to it! :)
Gonna be honest here, in regards to the shooting system, I don't think I got it. I went back to your demo and figured I could kill the shield generating enemies if I hit them with the homing projectiles before they shielded. So I managed to reach the end twice, once using only the machine gun, then again armed only with the shotgun. I mostly pressed and held the firing button for a bit, released, then repeat. The firing sound changes and has this progression sense to it, but I'm not sure if that means I'm doing it correctly.
You should also be able to hit them with your standard weapons while they are not shielded? Though there might be a small issue right now as they are smaller than the player and if you stand too close to them and shoot, the projectiles might fly over them.
There isn't really a "correct" way to play here, but I think the more familiar you get with the music track, the easier it will get overall, and the more efficient you will get. Default enemies move on normal beats, shoot on the downbeat. Shield enemies throw their shield every second bar on the first beat (iirc). Similar, the bigger enemies with the "!" over them also have their specific, repeating timing on when they charge and shoot their projectile. So once you get a feeling for that, you can time activating your own shield accordingly.
Going in, knowing only what you wrote in your post and the name City of Beats, maybe a bit, I guess? Didn't feel like I was that much in tune with the music for shooting stuff or predicting enemy movement. When I reached the boss though, was a whole other story. I was really having fun there, best part of the demo. The shooting sounds, combined with the boss attacks and minion / bullet pandemonium made it feel a lot more rhythmic. If you could manage to extend that feeling through out all the combat zones it would be pretty dope. Still felt like I was moving a tad too slow though.
Agreed on the slow movement, will have to improve that. Plus it'll get easier once I've got some sort of dash in.
The boss is also my favorite part, I'm planning to extend the boss battle to the whole track at some point. The problem is that it's quite a lot of effort to do these specific moments like adding the extra melody for the boss projectiles, as it can only be used for that specific track in that section for that enemy. Lots of back and forth between my composer and me to get it right from both a music and gameplay perspective :D So I can't simply apply that to the rest of the game without handcrafting and having unique music composed for each encounter.
That's why most enemies just stick to the drums/beats for their timing. Here I have a fixed pattern and can decide which enemy should do which action on which beat. But I can totally see that this might not be too obvious for many players, especially because it all happens automatically and you can get away with just holding down the fire button and trigger skills whenever you like. So, not totally sure what a feasible solution would be here. I think the music/gameplay sync might get more obvious once I've added more elements like hazards (e.g. laser beams and floor traps that rhythmically turn on/off) or minibosses/elite enemies that play out more like the boss encounter.
If you have any ideas in that regard, I'm eager to hear them :)
It's a difficult choice. On the one hand, I enjoy the current point and click map system, as it is a nice, relaxing break from all the hectic movement from the combat areas. You can simply focus all your attention on your resources and where to go / what to do next. Map navigation is also straight forward, even though the first time I played it, I was a bit confused that you couldn't travel backwards as the node I was at still had the connecting line to unexplored areas.
On the other hand, I like flying around in the hovercar, even though there's not much to do with with it. If you can't go back to previous nodes, would exploring the map while driving the hovercar be a bit annoying because of a constantly advancing invisible barrier behind your back?
I think I'll try the "fly around in the overworld map" approach first. It's the easier change of the two, so if it doesn't work I could still go the full open world exploration route. I agree that having an open world where you can only go to a very limited number of places at a time probably isn't the best combination though. Having this strategic layer where you constantly have to choose between multiple options is very important to me, instead of allowing the player to go anywhere, do everything, get all the rewards.
Again, thanks for taking the time to play the build and giving feedback!
