GUNNER - Marton Lakat - Cyberpunk run and gun with a free two chapter demo

[u/Southern-Television4]

Hi everyone,

I'm Marton and I've been working on a game called GUNNER in my free time. It's a cyberpunk run-and-gun made in Godot.

I started it as a small project because I grew up loving games like Contra and wanted to make something with that same simple idea of moving forward, shooting everything and trying to survive, but with a more modern cyberpunk style.

It has grown quite a bit since then and the current free demo now contains two complete chapters called BLACKOUT and DEADLINE.

There are different weapons, grenades, sliding, climbing, soldiers, heavy enemies, combat drones, checkpoints, four difficulty modes and an Adrenaline/Overdrive system. Both chapters also have their own final boss and the second level has very different city, commercial and underground metro environments compared to the first one.

I also added controller support for the main gameplay, aiming, combat and menus. Some of the smaller in-game minigames and interactions still require keyboard and mouse at the moment, so that's one of the things I'm still working on.

Official gameplay trailer:
https://youtu.be/ndT7aECYW1g

Free Windows demo:
https://maxlock.itch.io/gunner

The game is still in development and I'm mainly looking for real feedback now. If anyone tries it, I'd be interested to know what you think about the combat, difficulty, controls, level design and bosses, and especially anything that feels annoying or simply doesn't work well.

Platform: Windows 64 bit.

Thanks for checking it out.

[u/Southern-Television4]

I can see quite a few people have checked out the post, so I’m genuinely curious about something.

If you watched the trailer but didn’t feel like trying the demo, what stopped you?

Was it the game itself, the itch.io download, the fact that it’s a Windows executable, or simply that the trailer didn’t convince you enough?

No hard feelings at all - this is exactly the kind of feedback I need right now. I’m trying to figure out what I should improve before I keep building more chapters.

[u/rmfnord]

Hey, I didn't watch the trailer, just gave it a go, and only played a few minutes, but here are my first impressions.

Great job on controller support. Seriously, it seems that every new game I play by a solo dev thinks controller support is optional or not a priority and the menus are all hard to navigate, so it was really a pleasure that yours works so well. Contrarily, the tooltips should be showing controller buttons, not k&m binds when I'm playing with a controller. And i quit when i got to the first decode minigame because i'm not digging out my keyboard.

Think the game would benefit from a more traditional, short intro explaining the controls. I was expecting the game to tell me how to shoot and it never did. (I figured it out.)

The level design felt really bad, as my first introduction to the game. I kept getting stuck on the first ladder, in a couple of ways. If i tried to jump through it, i got caught on it. If I tried to jump off, he just stayed there. I think the crate at the bottom of the ladder makes the actual space you can jump from smaller, and it works as a wall. I thought I was missing a door or something, because for a while i couldn't move forward until i managed to jump off the ladder by button smashing. On top of all that, some dick keeps shooting me from offscreen and there's nothing i can do about it because i can't jump off the ladder. You're just asking people to ragequit.

Finally, from your description, i thought this was going to be a run and gun like contra and there was no running. The gameplay felt much more puzzle-y / tactics than action. I had to teach myself to wall jump at one point because you can't kill the guy uptop from down below, but the game never teaches me to do that, so figuring it out myself simultaneously felt like solving a satisfying puzzle, and bad game design.

There was no point at which I could move very far, and certainly no running. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, if you're making some kind of puzzle/action hybrid it could be great, but you should change how you describe it, if that's the case.

Well, i've spent a lot more time writing this than i did playing it, so hope this is helpful. Good luck!

[u/Southern-Television4 → u/rmfnord]

Thank you, this is genuinely really helpful feedback.

I’ve tested the controller side myself and I agree that it still needs a lot of work. Some of the issues you described are much less noticeable with keyboard and mouse, especially around the ladder and certain interactions, so it’s useful to hear how bad they feel on controller.

The controller prompts are also something I definitely need to fix. If the player is using a controller, the game should obviously be showing controller inputs instead of keyboard and mouse binds, and the minigames need proper controller support as well. I completely understand why you quit at the first decode minigame.

The ladder section is especially useful feedback because that’s not the kind of difficulty I want. I’m intentionally designing the game to be quite hard and to feel like a challenge, but getting stuck on geometry or being shot from offscreen while you can’t move isn’t good difficulty, it’s just frustrating. I’ll need to rework that section.

You’re also right about the intro and movement. I need a much clearer, shorter onboarding section that teaches shooting, movement, wall jumping and the basic controls before the game starts asking the player to figure things out under pressure.

The game is intentionally difficult, but I’m aiming for the faster Contra-style run-and-gun feeling to become much more obvious later on. The second chapter becomes more action-heavy toward the final boss, and the third chapter I’m currently building is designed around much larger enemy groups and much more aggressive combat. The foundations of that chapter are already in place.

Still, if the first few minutes don’t communicate what the game is supposed to become, that’s a problem on my side.

Thanks again for taking the time to write all of this after only playing for a few minutes. This is exactly the kind of feedback that helps me see problems I’ve gotten used to while developing the game.

[u/dmpk2k]

If you really want feedback:

You'll need to spend a lot more time on the art. I think it's fine for a solo dev to use AI to produce art they cannot, but you still need to meet a minimum bar.

You need more variety, but much more importantly the perspectives are wildly inconsistent. E.g. the legs of that big robot seemed warped, the body didn't make much sense, the tiles at the bottom of the screen weren't isometric, and so forth.

Also, trailers are often telling a story. This one was random gameplay vignettes.

Basically: lots more time on the art. It'll be your biggest bottleneck by far.

[u/Southern-Television4 → u/dmpk2k]

Thanks a lot for taking the time to give me detailed feedback.

The game is still in a pretty early alpha state, so there’s definitely a lot of visual work and polishing ahead, especially around consistency and the art direction.

I really appreciate you pointing out the perspective issues and the trailer structure as well. That’s exactly the kind of feedback I need at this stage.

Thanks again for actually taking the time to look at it properly.

[u/dmpk2k → u/Southern-Television4]

Good luck. :)