fivepersondude ,
Sean Noonan , I finally had some time to try your games yesterday. It's quite funny that you whip candles / lanterns in both, heh.
The Carpathian Night demo looks like a solid, classic Castlevania and that's great because with the transition to Metroidvanias (and the latter's adoption by the indie community), classic / linear ones are nearly dead. I liked what I played a lot and only really have criticisms about the input method, namely:
- You should be able to control the character with the d-pad (in addition to the analog stick).
- The analog stick needs a deadzone. It's so sensitive that it even walked on its own at "resting" position sometimes.
- Similar to the above but separate, the diagonals in the analog stick also need to be less sensitive. What I mean by that is that if you tilt the stick in any direction except perfectly up, you whip diagonally (to the point at first I though there was no "straight up" attack). It needs a more eight-directional segmentation of the analog area.
- The buttons seem to be misplaced too (on an Xbox controller, I jumped with B and whipped with Y, where it should probably be A and X).
The only non-controls gripe I have is that the boss of the demo was far too easy. This is because any attack you perform interrupts him, so you can pretty much stunlock him to death, even with the circular whip. I literally beat it first try without getting hit once. The rest of the demo's difficulty was much better balanced.
All in all, great work and hope to see more of it.
As for Jack B. Nimble, man, is it deceptively addicting; I didn't expect the "time whip attacks to destroy lanterns" to be such a big spin on the endless runner formula. I played until I unlocked the second stage and second character, and had a ton of fun. Really nothing negative to report here, just masterclass minimalistic design and use of resources. It really shows you're the one with a day job in this field, haha. :)
There isn't a dedicated OT for requesting game-dev collaborations on ERA? Or is there? Might be a good idea to get something like that going...
Game development is already a niche community within era, so such a thread would be a niche within a niche and probably fall off the first pages within a day. It's probably far better to do so here, which already has a pretty lively community and sees daily activity. But all the same, there's zero harm in trying to get one going, if anyone wants to do the honors (probably, er, someone who actually needs someone in their team, to get the ball rolling).
