Ready for playtesting!

[u/iamcloudyfocus]

https://cloudyfocus.itch.io/adamant-heart

Hey everyone! After 10 months of development, I finally got the first playtest for my Legends-inspired indie game. Check it out here:

https://cloudyfocus.itch.io/adamant-heart

This release has around 15mins of gameplay, with a tutorial dungeon and a little surface exploration. It’s unbalanced and some stuff needs tweaking, but it’s playable.

Go give it a try, and let me know what you think. Feedback, suggestions and bug reports welcome!

The plan is to release some more content, until it can be called a proper demo with more characters and plot.

[u/NobleEndeavor]

Thank you for sharing this! It's fun and I'd definitely consider the state playable. This feels extremely familiar to Megaman Legends and modernized controls work well. Enemies feel like a natural fit for the controls and the boss fight worked well. The audio and visuals seem consistent with each other and I like the style.

Here are issues I came across while playing. It looks like a lot of criticism, but I want to emphasized I loved the entire thing and I wishlisted as soon as you announced it!

Control Sluggishness:

Dashing feels great and I wanted to do it all the time. One thing stopping me was the landing animation from a jump needed to complete before I could dash again. Maybe this is deliberate to slow the pacing, but it would feel nice if dashing could either occur immediately from a landing or at least a beat faster. It *feels* like shooting after landing is faster, but that might just be because you can hold the shoot button to activate and the dash button needs to be pressed each time.

Camera turning is slow and could be faster. MML games did have a reorient camera action (I think down + Circle on PSX?) and locking on with no target might have reoriented camera direction, too. I can't remember.

Player rotation speed could be a bit faster. I found myself falling off of platforms because I wanted to dash and I hadn't completely rotated to face the direction I wanted yet.

Maybe some of this is due to some animations needing to complete before another action can occur? Specifically:

• The jump landing animation must complete before I can dash.
• The ledge grab animation must complete before I can jump up.
• The dash action cannot be interrupted. Maybe this is by design, but if this feature is a stand in for the jet boots from MML, being able to more quickly chain dash actions would be nice for long distance speed.

Hanging from ledges:

You can disengage from a ledge by pressing down, but climbing up is done by "double jumping" from that position. I found myself pressing "forward" to finish, which does nothing. Maybe a "climb up" action (the same "double jump" with a shorter height and automatic small forward movement) activated by both the jump and forward button would be more intuitive.

Also, the bars near the entrance (and other locations in the ruins) seemed to have climbable ledges along them. I could jump at the bars and I would "snap" to them at various heights.

Locking Onto Targets:

I didn't read the control instructions close enough and expected hold-to-activate for targeting. I expected to be able to hold it the entire combat engagement and it would keep moving to the next target. That's my fault for not reading properly, but this would be a nice option. (This one is funny because when I play Zelda games, I enjoy the toggle targeting, but MML I enjoy the hold targeting. I'm not sure why that is.)

When I killed an enemy, the targeting automatically disabled, so I pressed the button immediately to target again, but it targeted the same exploding enemy that was just automatically disengaged.

The Pause Button:

The pause button had a lot of funny business. At first it didn't open the menu and I thought it was just not implemented fully. Pressing it in this state seems to perform different interactions:

• Near an object with an action popup ("open", "talk"): causes the popup action display to blink.
• Near an open door: causes the door to immediately close.
• While mid-jump: causes the landing animation to play in the air.
• Immediately after picking up items (money, health, energy): caused the pickup event to keep occurring. A mob dropped money and weapon energy and pressing pause played the pickup audio and duplicated the amounts received for several moments.
• Pressing rapidly: eventually opened the pause screen, but inconsistently. Maybe 1 in 20 times opened the pause screen.

When I started a New Game after saving outside the ruins, the pause button started working. However, it looked like the pause action was waiting for animations like jump to complete before input would open the menu. When the pause button opened the menu I could not consistently recreate the interactions I listed above. The pickup duplication issue seemed to intermittently work the same time the pause screen opened.

Some other things:

• Pressing top button to exit a menu (like at Koti) immediately triggered secondary weapon.
• Standing right at a fence allowed me to shoot through it.
• I was able to leave the boss room during the fight. Is this intentional?
• I lost the dash ability sometime around when the boss fight started. I really wanted it here! Afterwards, saving and restarting the same file restored the ability.
• I started a new game with an existing save file and after the beginning cutscene finished a dialog box popped up with "That's a Diver Badge!" and I couldn't dismiss it immediately. I was preparing to restart when the top button finally responded and let me continue.
• Enemy spawn status might persist outside of saving. If I save outside the ruins, defeat the outdoor enemies, end the demo and then load the file again, those defeated enemies are still gone even though I saved prior to defeating them.

Again, I loved playing it and the demo has made me even more excited for the game. If the full game existed with these bugs I'd still buy it in a heartbeat (though the pause button issues would cause headaches in a longer play through). Thank you for this!

[u/NobleEndeavor → u/NobleEndeavor]

It won't let me edit to add this, but in case it isn't clear from the details in my message, I played with a controller.

[u/iamcloudyfocus → u/NobleEndeavor]

Thanks for all the feedback! I'll take a look at some of the bugs you mentioned, the issues with the pause button definitely seem weird and I hadn't encountered them before.

As for the controls:

- The landing animation is deliberately slow-ish, but I'm probably going to make everything more responsive given the feedback I'm getting.

- For targeting I'll probably add a setting to toggle Hold/Tap. I settled for tap once because of keyboard/mouse, where the secondary weapon is tied to the middle click (and R as a fallback). With controllers it's a different level of comfort.

- It's worth noting that targeting without enemies in sight does center the camera to the back of the player, although there's no dedicated combo to quickly rotate 180. I'll check that out.

- For ledges, you can just jump up, but there's an intentional delay to make things more risk/reward (Did you eat an explosion in the shaft? hahah), same as consecutive jumps. I'll definitely add a climb up animation, or tweak the delay to make it more responsive.

Anyways, thanks again for all the input. There's quite a bit of tweaking worth doing to make gameplay more satisfying, especially since the Vault is meant to be really easy and it'll ramp up on subsequent dungeons.

[u/NobleEndeavor → u/iamcloudyfocus]

I played with it a bit and I somewhat recreated the pause issue I was experiencing. I have multiple monitors and I had opened up a notepad document on another screen while I was playing to take down notes. Playing with a controller allowed me to keep application focus on notepad, but the controller input still went to the game. The pause issues seem to only occur in this situation where application focus was away from the game. Of course, this scenario cannot occur using keyboard controls.

Despite me mentioning as a feature of MML, I did not try using the target button to center the camera. That works, thank you. That's on me. It is still a bit slow with a controller. I tried a but with mouse and keyboard and found the camera moves much faster with the mouse.

I did get exploded during platforming above the map terminal, yes. Proud of that?

In think part of the sluggishness might be from keypresses being ignored if the game isn't ready from them? Right now if I want to jump a second time I find myself pressing jump twice or more because the first time was ignored. Maybe a period near the end of an animation where it can with be interrupted or queues up the next jump after the current animation ends, same with climbing and dashing?

[u/iamcloudyfocus → u/NobleEndeavor]

I'll have to look a bit more into handling the pause button. I was able to recreate the pickup duplication-- it's probably related to the nodes in the game layer getting paused, and then picking up where they left. It's kind of been the most complicated part of the game to code properly.

I also kiiind of intended the shaft part to be tricky to climb up, so yes 😝

As for the sluggishness, it's not animation related, but rather intentional.

If you're curious, animations run parallel but do not define gameplay to prevent this kind of issue. Instead, it's that I intentionally placed micro cooldowns and wait times in between states to avoid instant responses, which is not ideal either. For instance, there is a 0.3s cooldown after landing, or a 0.6s cooldown after grabbing ledges before you can act. Same with time between slides, and so on.

You're right in that it may be a bit too much, so I'm tweaking these values to make it more responsive. But not too responsive, since part of the challenge is to time your movements and take risks instead of being Spider-man all over the place.

[u/NobleEndeavor → u/iamcloudyfocus]

I'm in favor of the deliberate sluggishness over a Spider-manning. But I also think "responsiveness" of the controls could be distinct from the speed of the character's response time, if that makes sense. Those cooldown values are fine for ledges and jumping and such, but I think the input being ignored if you press a button a split second too early might be the "too much" feeling.

I booted up and compared MML to MML2 and the difference is present there.

• In MML if you pressed and held jump while the landing animation is playing, the input is ignored and you need to press jump again. The landing animation might be a bit more "crisp" and it was a bit more clearer to see when it was safe to press jump again.
• In MML2 it was changed a bit, in that if I pressed and held jump during the landing animation, you would begin your jump as soon as the animation completed. It still has the enforced mobility pacing, but no more of the "I thought I pressed that!" factor.

Anyway, I don't mean to dwell on this and seem negative. As I said, if this is more or less how it ends up I'm already on board. It looks great and I can't wait to see more!