Nice game
, though melee is indeed an agony.
To give some pros:
> Liked the character roster and levels, nice work.
> good amount of content, it wasn't just some short 'minigame', it was a proper game with extras and everything. That was good.
> music was also good.
> somewhat elegant to have it all condensed to just two buttons. Am i right in assuming it's all based off the mechanics of a gameboy game(explains the arrows and A B input)
> perhaps it was just me, but how the battles played out was surprisingly spot on, normally in the budokai tenkaichi games for instance, you would fight say... raditz, with goku and piccolo, but only actually use goku to beat him. While in this game, i actually lost with goku and delivered the final blow using piccolo(with beam no less
), and this sort of stuff actually happened very consistently, so much so that i realised it must have been tweeked & tested specifically to make such outcomes more likely.
Cons:
> melee ugh*
> movement needs work too*
> dashing is awkward to pull off*
> (why can enemies do a flurry of punches, but i can only punch slow?)
*(i suspect these 3 are actually very much interlinked, and fixing one will also alleviate the others)
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Suggestions:
Mouse -
Something you might not have considered, but since you're on a computer(and i doubt given the nature of this that you're going to be 'porting' it elsewhere)I would suggest perhaps swapping out arrow controls to something like the Mouse. Currently your combat is two buttons + direction anyway, why not utilise the mouses more precise input to make moving and dashing far more satisfying/responsive? Even if it's just a control option.
The main problem is that arrows felt incredibly awkward, especially when your ai flies so fluidly around like that... as a player,
I wanna be able to move like they do, and 4 directional buttons just don't cut it. (My first thought as soon as a started playing was 'man, having an analogue stick or something would make this so much easier').
Esspecially given the gameplay involves using the whole screen space, free movement is one thing that while 'ok' right now, would really be worth getting far more polished.
Dashing/melee:
If you could dash attack in different directions easier that would actually alleviate the clunkyness quite a lot. Tying in with the mouse suggestion simply moving your mouse and clicking to dash in that direction would be much easier than having to attack and double tap and hold two direction keys and have it not register half the time...
Perhaps that is the greatest current flaw with the controls, dashing is awkward to do, yet it is the only viable form of melee.
(which isn't nessecarily a bad thing, when it works dash attacking is incredibly satisfying, especially with your nice crash landing effects and such
)
I don't think I ever landed a 'normal' punch successfully and was always smacked to the dirt for my efforts, so you're going to have to look back over that system and decide how exactly you want it to work, and what needs to change to achieve that. Do you want melee combat to be dash-focused, or do you wanna re-jig the system so 'normal' punches work.
Part of that comes down to a bit of feedback too. Even when I was successfully hitting them, I really couldn't tell. Perhaps having a different hit sound for the player and the enemy, land a punch, so you can tell the difference between landing a hit and getting hit. (maybe change the 'punch bubble' too, make them different colours to further tell whose punching what).
Controls:
Last thing i was tempted to say was maybe separate some of the abilities, so blocking and charging aren't the same(so annoying when not only does the enemy block the attack, they are now also charged up. And on the flip side, kinda discourages me to do much when i can just stand in the corner holding block to charge, then do a blast, then block to charge again, (especially given the point above about awkward movement/melee, there's not many other options than block/charge->spam->repeat.)
HOWEVER, by the same token, i also often found myself accidentally pressing the wrong button. Adding more keyboard buttons into the mix could make things worse, and as i noted in the pros for the game, it is elegant having just two buttons. Perhaps a good compromise with be to combine directions with buttons. For instance, hold the block button and press down arrow to charge (when charging, you could also be vulnerable to attack, so you have to chose between). Maybe also make it so you just hold the attack button and press a directional button(or press and hold) to dash attack, rather than the awkward/inconsistent double-tap.
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Anyway, despite saying all that, just gonna reiterate: You've done an awesome job, you should be proud of what you've put together, and i know it's only going to keep getting better.
