Man,this game is awesome! I really rarely see beat'em up games with such good damage evading system, so this is my third favorite game in this genre after TMNT Shredder Revenge and Star Wars Episode III (GBA/DS). I hope someday every Beat'em up developers understand that parry, recovery and evade fits good not only in Japanese hack & slash games...
Yeah, just as you imply I pretty much stole the system from soulslikes :P (stamina bar included, heh)
A lot of older scrolling beat 'em ups have basically no mechanics to speak of, you do the same handful of actions all the time (you'd think with 6 total face/shoulder buttons on a SNES controller there'd be more than basic attacks, jumps and the "hurt yourself for dubious benefit" special move button so many of them stuck with) so I felt like I had to expand on it somehow... also I suck at character animation so I wanted to keep the number of attack animations low; the single-frame shield/dash poses were perfect for this.
I feel like soulslikes are basically a combination of scrolling beat-em-ups and metroidvanias so it'd be interesting seeing if more indies realize the potential of backporting mechanics going forward - we've got the River City Ransom reboot and one of the UFO 50 games both adding a couple modest RPG elements to a scrolling beat 'em up, far from a big trend but it's something.
Ahoy if it isnt our favorite developer ^_^. Huge beat em' up fan so this was exciting to see. Only complaint I had personally was there was no recovery time after falling down. So the enemies were able to continuously hit me until I died. Aside from that I love the base nature of this so much that I want to throw all of my money at this to get the engine/nuild/source code or what ever you did to accomplish this.
I actually had a good deal of fun with it but mostly because I chose Sunny. I felt as if the “beat ’em up” part of this beat ‘em up was super risky, and it was a lot more safer if I just managed my bombs for hard knockdowns and or used my double jump attack. This was because normal attacks didn’t combo (or string) together reliably, with some enemies being able to hit you during your attacks without much warning.
Enemies also didn’t have much of a tell which makes them even more dangerous. Especially ranged enemies or ones with the instant kick.
In a future game I would like to see grabs added for added safety (especially with invincibility frames), more options for air juggles maybe, and dashes/powers having both a cooldown and maybe a desperation attack option to cost some HP. That way you’re not completely helpless when you’re out of power.
Thanks for the feedback! I don't play fighting games a lot so I don't really know what mechanics are expected/desirable, and everything is on a very rudimentary level as a result. Air juggles and throws sounds like fun additions, right now the jumping mechanics are very undercooked so doing stuff like throwing enemies straight up (to follow up with aerial attacks) or having special intercepts for jump kick enemies would plug that hole.
One mechanic that probably isn't communicated super well is that enemies will get superarmor after a bunch of hits (to prevent you from stunlocking them indefinitely), when an enemy randomly ignores hitstun this triggered. (There's a sound cue when it happens but maybe it isn't clear enough...). The amount varies between enemies, some lesser ones like frog thugs and wheelghosts never get superarmor, while the tankiest ones can get 2 hits' worth of superarmor every time you hitstun them.
(Sunny specifically has half the regular HP and less damage/hitstun on her melee attacks than the others, you're meant to play her as a "squishy wizard" kind of character - if you play Daiyousei or Cirno you'll have a completely different experience)
We'll see about potential sequels, I kinda feel like I hit the cap for what the mechanics could do pretty early on in this project (which is why it's so undercooked overall) but seeing what people think about it might give me some new ideas.
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Man,this game is awesome! I really rarely see beat'em up games with such good damage evading system, so this is my third favorite game in this genre after TMNT Shredder Revenge and Star Wars Episode III (GBA/DS). I hope someday every Beat'em up developers understand that parry, recovery and evade fits good not only in Japanese hack & slash games...
Yeah, just as you imply I pretty much stole the system from soulslikes :P (stamina bar included, heh)
A lot of older scrolling beat 'em ups have basically no mechanics to speak of, you do the same handful of actions all the time (you'd think with 6 total face/shoulder buttons on a SNES controller there'd be more than basic attacks, jumps and the "hurt yourself for dubious benefit" special move button so many of them stuck with) so I felt like I had to expand on it somehow... also I suck at character animation so I wanted to keep the number of attack animations low; the single-frame shield/dash poses were perfect for this.
I feel like soulslikes are basically a combination of scrolling beat-em-ups and metroidvanias so it'd be interesting seeing if more indies realize the potential of backporting mechanics going forward - we've got the River City Ransom reboot and one of the UFO 50 games both adding a couple modest RPG elements to a scrolling beat 'em up, far from a big trend but it's something.
Ahoy if it isnt our favorite developer ^_^. Huge beat em' up fan so this was exciting to see. Only complaint I had personally was there was no recovery time after falling down. So the enemies were able to continuously hit me until I died. Aside from that I love the base nature of this so much that I want to throw all of my money at this to get the engine/nuild/source code or what ever you did to accomplish this.
- Smirnovff50
You can dash out of the grounded state (if you have stamina), and the dash has iframes for the entire duration. So this lets you escape.
Hmm, it's all custom so it might be possible to turn this into an asset pack... will need to clean it up quite a lot first though...
This looks like more fun than the Battletoads game released on XBOX in 2020.
Mission accomplished, then! ^__^
Hi Yal, I just beat this game.
I actually had a good deal of fun with it but mostly because I chose Sunny. I felt as if the “beat ’em up” part of this beat ‘em up was super risky, and it was a lot more safer if I just managed my bombs for hard knockdowns and or used my double jump attack. This was because normal attacks didn’t combo (or string) together reliably, with some enemies being able to hit you during your attacks without much warning.
Enemies also didn’t have much of a tell which makes them even more dangerous. Especially ranged enemies or ones with the instant kick.
In a future game I would like to see grabs added for added safety (especially with invincibility frames), more options for air juggles maybe, and dashes/powers having both a cooldown and maybe a desperation attack option to cost some HP. That way you’re not completely helpless when you’re out of power.
Thanks!
Thanks for the feedback! I don't play fighting games a lot so I don't really know what mechanics are expected/desirable, and everything is on a very rudimentary level as a result. Air juggles and throws sounds like fun additions, right now the jumping mechanics are very undercooked so doing stuff like throwing enemies straight up (to follow up with aerial attacks) or having special intercepts for jump kick enemies would plug that hole.
One mechanic that probably isn't communicated super well is that enemies will get superarmor after a bunch of hits (to prevent you from stunlocking them indefinitely), when an enemy randomly ignores hitstun this triggered. (There's a sound cue when it happens but maybe it isn't clear enough...). The amount varies between enemies, some lesser ones like frog thugs and wheelghosts never get superarmor, while the tankiest ones can get 2 hits' worth of superarmor every time you hitstun them.
(Sunny specifically has half the regular HP and less damage/hitstun on her melee attacks than the others, you're meant to play her as a "squishy wizard" kind of character - if you play Daiyousei or Cirno you'll have a completely different experience)
We'll see about potential sequels, I kinda feel like I hit the cap for what the mechanics could do pretty early on in this project (which is why it's so undercooked overall) but seeing what people think about it might give me some new ideas.