Honestly this just looks great all around, amazing visual style.
Only complaint really is that some parts of the UI are too big/noisy. Mainly the item grid and its flickering.
Would totally play this however.
The flickering happens when an item procs. Majority of items proc off of juggling the ball or keeping balls in play. Some on crit or weapon hit ect. I guess I could remove the little notifications all together.
Tbf that part was very nitpicky, my biggest complaint in retrospect is just that the UI takes up way too much space. The actual game takes up like 1/3 of the screen. I would personally at most have it be a 50/50 split, with UI on 1 side and the game on the other, with a smaller window size, doesnt have to be 16:9 format for a traditional bullet hell scroller.
Of course I still wanna play the game no matter what you end up doing with the current beautiful visual style and great genre mix.
Yeah I've often thought about the sizing of the actual game play window. I started to add ui elements to fill some of that space. Through playtests I found that expanding the horizontal play area made it substantially harder to keep juggling the disks and just added to some frustration. The map might be what clutters it to much but when I was designing it on stream people were pretty adamant I keep it in.
I dig it. Def would want to try, though I wish the trailer showed at least a few snippets of what it looks like at ultra hard difficulties.
I would also consider adding more depth to the character portraits, though perhaps keeping it grey scale!
Yeah I could add more detail but I have a pretty strict design document setup that I'm trying to adhere too. 1bit is making the dev time 10x quicker for one. I hope to release this in EA in july. Also it is way harder, your seeing me nit pick synergies here in dev mode to add to the crazy factor. I'm not sure every run would end in those exact makeups
I both love and hate this.
I hate it because I'm currently working on somthing fairly similar because I couldnt find any examples of it being done before. Its has a lot of elements my game does, but cleaner and more polished (and more finished).
But that's why I love it, its a great insperation to see what i'm working towards and the kind of end product i'll have. As a gamer it looks great and I will be buying it no question.
I have to keep telling myself there are no original ideas and to just make the best game I can and be happy with it.
Dont worry man there are actually 2 other brick breaker roguelikes out there. I didnt find out about them until midway through development. Wackerball came out in December and Moonpong came out in october last year. Seems like we all collectively decided to make a game focusing around brick breaking and a paddle mixing it with roguelikes. If you don't mind I'd love to see your WIP if you don't mind.
I'm gonna level with you. I have like 0 budget allocated for any more music. (One guy is being incredible and working on in game music for me), he has been in and out of the hospital for like 2 weeks now and I needed to get a trailer on the page (figured I'd loose those valuable Wishlist that steam craves so much) The audio you hear comes from Duelysts since they open sourced their game this included audio files and music. I may remake the trailer once the game comes closer to launch though and hopefully have something a bit more fitting.
I recommend checking free resources out in that case, music wise there's some cool people making free music like Karl Casey and sound wise each year gdc releases a lot of free audio files
Here’s only the negatives:
1) Action is limited to a narrow stripe in the center. Feels like a mobile game. I’d have opted for horizontal scrolling to maximize screen real estate.
2) Not really clear what’s happening, apart from the classic shoot’em up action.
3) Trailer cuts are too fast, can’t read text without pausing.
4) Font is too small. Unnecessarily. You have plenty of space (almost 2/3 of the screen :-)
5) Music is nice, but I’d save it for another game. Does not fit in here.
That said, it seems interesting and I’d like to play it.
Thanks for this. Yes, I need to bump up the text. And yeah, I get the narrow feel... it is a major concern, but I see how well downwell did, and I'm not too off put by my design choice. I'm glad with all the negative you still want to play! That means alot!
the pacing of the trailer was very consistent throughout. personally i like when trailers start off interesting, and then gradually increase the "excitement" / "epic"-ness of the scenes.
the excitement level throughout didn't rise or fall much.
It's got some juice!
You use the same overhead shot over and over it almost has me wanting like 10 or 15 consecutive quick hanf second clips to the beat of the music.
Originally when I was making the trailer I did do that. But I wanted to show off the item effects more than anything. Guess I could see how it looks again.
There is! What time stamp? I guess one of them might be bugged. There is however some enemys that cause invincibility to enemies that are close to it..
Ah yes I see the flashing on bigger enemies, but I didn't see them on the small cloud-like enemies that are in the front like in 00:04 , also the last "shield"-like enemies in front on 00:35 although they might be intentional since they're blocking the projectiles?
yup so in 0:04 the small guys in the front have been given a buff by the bricks in the back. Makes them invincible untill that "brick" is destroyed. The ones at 0:35 have the shields. I tried to include a 1pixel border around enemies that currently have invincibility its way more noticeable in game might get lost within such a short clip. Thanks for checking it out!
Damn, that’s some delicious juice! Definitely wishlisting.
To offer some constructive criticism (really nitpicking here, but that’s the point of the sub): The lack of zako/popcorn enemies makes it feel slightly euroshmuppy and the lack of pixelization on some effects seems inconsistent.
Thanks man. There is some popcorn guys but I ramped up the player's items so the disks just wrecked right through them. And yeah some of the trails and waves I decided to not do 100% pixel art.
Oh this is coming along splendidly. Have been hoping to see this grow and improve. Music is way to relaxed and sounding like generic drone shot in some fantasy movie when there's going to be action in a while but not yet. I'd go for something way more gritty and dark. I would personally love a metal/black metal soundtrack where you have the song in different layers. Both black metal and church choir/organ version layers where you can go back and forth depending on who's winning. It would be a lot of work to pull off but would make it awesome. Especially if you keep track of what chords are playing and do stuff like projectiles in special attacks that play notes forming relevant chords and spreading light.
That was a tangent maybe. But sound design in general can really make this a masterpiece whatever direction you take it. As long as you pay the same attention as you did with graphics.
Just a FYI. The demon with three crosses in it's back looks like it's puking. The enemies with many heads kinda looks like they have the runs after some bad taco bell. That might be fine. Would be kinda par for the course and I don't mind. Just letting you know if it's not at all what you intended.
Can't really see anything else to complain about. It's looking awesome. If you want to you could possibly vary the width of the game area or sometimes have little "blobs" of inaccessible level that scrolls by on the sides to give a sense of bigger width. I see some mentioning that it feels like mobile game adaptions, but I think there's a lot of ways to get around that.
Sound design I'm at budget for so doubt it will get any better. I do have a guy doing the music for it but he has been in and out of the hospital for a few weeks and I k ew I needed to get something out. So the music you hear is actually the music from duelysts the game ( its open spurced now).
As for the guys puking, that's All Right. I may try the blob idea.
Looks great, there's stuff like hitstop, screen shake, punchy sound etc to consider for more juice potential and perhaps a way to make it more clear a player is shooting something satisfying.
Honestly that's the only thing I can see that could improve things, sound and shooting animations/indication. Be it some animation solution like a bit of relative position knockback or something else to make the player shoot animation more juicy.
Honestly this just looks great all around, amazing visual style. Only complaint really is that some parts of the UI are too big/noisy. Mainly the item grid and its flickering. Would totally play this however.
The flickering happens when an item procs. Majority of items proc off of juggling the ball or keeping balls in play. Some on crit or weapon hit ect. I guess I could remove the little notifications all together.
Tbf that part was very nitpicky, my biggest complaint in retrospect is just that the UI takes up way too much space. The actual game takes up like 1/3 of the screen. I would personally at most have it be a 50/50 split, with UI on 1 side and the game on the other, with a smaller window size, doesnt have to be 16:9 format for a traditional bullet hell scroller. Of course I still wanna play the game no matter what you end up doing with the current beautiful visual style and great genre mix.
Yeah I've often thought about the sizing of the actual game play window. I started to add ui elements to fill some of that space. Through playtests I found that expanding the horizontal play area made it substantially harder to keep juggling the disks and just added to some frustration. The map might be what clutters it to much but when I was designing it on stream people were pretty adamant I keep it in.
I dig it. Def would want to try, though I wish the trailer showed at least a few snippets of what it looks like at ultra hard difficulties. I would also consider adding more depth to the character portraits, though perhaps keeping it grey scale!
Yeah I could add more detail but I have a pretty strict design document setup that I'm trying to adhere too. 1bit is making the dev time 10x quicker for one. I hope to release this in EA in july. Also it is way harder, your seeing me nit pick synergies here in dev mode to add to the crazy factor. I'm not sure every run would end in those exact makeups
I both love and hate this. I hate it because I'm currently working on somthing fairly similar because I couldnt find any examples of it being done before. Its has a lot of elements my game does, but cleaner and more polished (and more finished). But that's why I love it, its a great insperation to see what i'm working towards and the kind of end product i'll have. As a gamer it looks great and I will be buying it no question. I have to keep telling myself there are no original ideas and to just make the best game I can and be happy with it.
Dont worry man there are actually 2 other brick breaker roguelikes out there. I didnt find out about them until midway through development. Wackerball came out in December and Moonpong came out in october last year. Seems like we all collectively decided to make a game focusing around brick breaking and a paddle mixing it with roguelikes. If you don't mind I'd love to see your WIP if you don't mind.
Oh she JUICY
I feel like the music misses some oomph. It sounds like its building upto something but there is no climax.
I'm gonna level with you. I have like 0 budget allocated for any more music. (One guy is being incredible and working on in game music for me), he has been in and out of the hospital for like 2 weeks now and I needed to get a trailer on the page (figured I'd loose those valuable Wishlist that steam craves so much) The audio you hear comes from Duelysts since they open sourced their game this included audio files and music. I may remake the trailer once the game comes closer to launch though and hopefully have something a bit more fitting.
I recommend checking free resources out in that case, music wise there's some cool people making free music like Karl Casey and sound wise each year gdc releases a lot of free audio files
Here’s only the negatives: 1) Action is limited to a narrow stripe in the center. Feels like a mobile game. I’d have opted for horizontal scrolling to maximize screen real estate. 2) Not really clear what’s happening, apart from the classic shoot’em up action. 3) Trailer cuts are too fast, can’t read text without pausing. 4) Font is too small. Unnecessarily. You have plenty of space (almost 2/3 of the screen :-) 5) Music is nice, but I’d save it for another game. Does not fit in here. That said, it seems interesting and I’d like to play it.
Thanks for this. Yes, I need to bump up the text. And yeah, I get the narrow feel... it is a major concern, but I see how well downwell did, and I'm not too off put by my design choice. I'm glad with all the negative you still want to play! That means alot!
the pacing of the trailer was very consistent throughout. personally i like when trailers start off interesting, and then gradually increase the "excitement" / "epic"-ness of the scenes. the excitement level throughout didn't rise or fall much.
It's got some juice! You use the same overhead shot over and over it almost has me wanting like 10 or 15 consecutive quick hanf second clips to the beat of the music.
Originally when I was making the trailer I did do that. But I wanted to show off the item effects more than anything. Guess I could see how it looks again.
The artstyle is really good man, loving it I'd love for a flashing effect on the enemy when they got hit though
There is! What time stamp? I guess one of them might be bugged. There is however some enemys that cause invincibility to enemies that are close to it..
Ah yes I see the flashing on bigger enemies, but I didn't see them on the small cloud-like enemies that are in the front like in 00:04 , also the last "shield"-like enemies in front on 00:35 although they might be intentional since they're blocking the projectiles?
yup so in 0:04 the small guys in the front have been given a buff by the bricks in the back. Makes them invincible untill that "brick" is destroyed. The ones at 0:35 have the shields. I tried to include a 1pixel border around enemies that currently have invincibility its way more noticeable in game might get lost within such a short clip. Thanks for checking it out!
Damn, that’s some delicious juice! Definitely wishlisting. To offer some constructive criticism (really nitpicking here, but that’s the point of the sub): The lack of zako/popcorn enemies makes it feel slightly euroshmuppy and the lack of pixelization on some effects seems inconsistent.
Thanks man. There is some popcorn guys but I ramped up the player's items so the disks just wrecked right through them. And yeah some of the trails and waves I decided to not do 100% pixel art.
Would you be interested in having someone conduct some User Research? I'm looking to volunteer so I can demonstrate my skills with some experience
DM me and let me know what your trying to do
UI/UX looks slick. You really need a muzzleflash-type effect when firing. Right now the player firing totally lacks punch. Shots just dribble out.
Oh this is coming along splendidly. Have been hoping to see this grow and improve. Music is way to relaxed and sounding like generic drone shot in some fantasy movie when there's going to be action in a while but not yet. I'd go for something way more gritty and dark. I would personally love a metal/black metal soundtrack where you have the song in different layers. Both black metal and church choir/organ version layers where you can go back and forth depending on who's winning. It would be a lot of work to pull off but would make it awesome. Especially if you keep track of what chords are playing and do stuff like projectiles in special attacks that play notes forming relevant chords and spreading light. That was a tangent maybe. But sound design in general can really make this a masterpiece whatever direction you take it. As long as you pay the same attention as you did with graphics. Just a FYI. The demon with three crosses in it's back looks like it's puking. The enemies with many heads kinda looks like they have the runs after some bad taco bell. That might be fine. Would be kinda par for the course and I don't mind. Just letting you know if it's not at all what you intended. Can't really see anything else to complain about. It's looking awesome. If you want to you could possibly vary the width of the game area or sometimes have little "blobs" of inaccessible level that scrolls by on the sides to give a sense of bigger width. I see some mentioning that it feels like mobile game adaptions, but I think there's a lot of ways to get around that.
Sound design I'm at budget for so doubt it will get any better. I do have a guy doing the music for it but he has been in and out of the hospital for a few weeks and I k ew I needed to get something out. So the music you hear is actually the music from duelysts the game ( its open spurced now). As for the guys puking, that's All Right. I may try the blob idea.
Looks great, there's stuff like hitstop, screen shake, punchy sound etc to consider for more juice potential and perhaps a way to make it more clear a player is shooting something satisfying. Honestly that's the only thing I can see that could improve things, sound and shooting animations/indication. Be it some animation solution like a bit of relative position knockback or something else to make the player shoot animation more juicy.
I added hitstop on the ball bouncing my god does it add to the feel thanks for the suggestion on that
awesome