MORE BETA TESTING
Who's hitting me?!
I'll try to keep this one a bit shorter. All games have feedback. When you're hit, the game has to tell you that you're hit, or you probably won't even notice it. This is a problem. There are people born with almost no sensation of pain, and some of those stories include a young girl who had to be watch closely, because if she got an itch on her eye, it was very likely she could scratch it out. Feedback in a game is like your sensation of pain in reality, and it's important.
1) So far, when you're hit, there's a bit of time given with invincibility frames and partial invisibility, and the character makes a sound. Didn't notice that? It's high-pitched. The sound could probably be reworked, but really, I think the easiest fix is to have the outline of the character flash red or give a more obvious visual indicator. The sprites of this game are somewhat small, so animating the character to do something probably won't serve as enough of an indicator. Either there has to be an obvious sound that doesn't muffle into background noise or get drowned out, or there needs to be a much stronger, more obvious visual indicator.
2) I'm not sure how widespread this is of an issue, but specifically with the "Dodging Strike", I really feel like there needs to be a bit of invincibility added to the beginning of the move or something like that. If very poorly timed, an enemy can smack the player out of the move entirely. HOWEVER, I understand that being very, very good with this skill has the potential to break the game. I scored an "S" on the Furious Giga Slime mostly thanks to 550 damage hits with Dodging Strike. I'm totally cool with getting the answer back of "No, it's fine as it is, just learn to play better." It just depends on how the devs envision this ability and how hard (fair) they want to make this game (because this skill is stupid awesome).
NEXT UP: Oh, I don't know. I'll have to playtest more skills and combat styles. putting a lot of focus into one skill right now can be really powerful. I'm also not sure what the intended level cap is going to be or anything, but I'm not sure how the skill tree development is going to play out over the course of the whole game. I got 2 combat skills (Piercing Dash and Dodging Strike) to silver ranks, and barely got Chain Lightening to silver ranks. I'm at level 15, and it's becoming obvious there won't be enough points to max everything out. I say
good. We can't have everything we want. This isn't Kingdoms of Amalur. It probably adds some replay value (wow, that's going to be time-consuming) to restrict the player to a limited focus on skills. If there's anything that really needs to be looked at with a focus, shout it at me and quote part of one of these posts to generate an alert. I'll do what I can.
So far, this is a pretty fun, awesome game. Any suggestions I've included in any post are just to tighten things up. There's a lot of content still missing from this game, so I'm pretty hesitant to suggest major changes, for the most part. If anything, I'm hoping this gets completed by the end of the year. Good luck on development, and I'll add more suggestions as I break things in the game!