Feedback /Suggestions

[Faish]

Hello, I really enjoyed Ender Lilies so far, especially the gameplay and the atmosphere. I don't want this game to change much - it only needs some polishing around the edges imo. As a consequence, most of my suggestions are very minor, quality of life things. I know other people have already mentioned some of these issues, but probably not all. Sorry for mentioning them again, and sorry for wall of text.

tl;dr: read bold text for main points.

Combat:

I hate it that spirits have limited number of uses and that's probably the only thing I hate about this game. While I understand why the ammo system is there (to make players switch between their spirits, instead of spamming one; to force players to rest and respawn enemies), it doesn't feel great to have another resource to worry about. I think some kind of soft-lock would feel better, without affecting overall game balance... much. I mean, I've never ran out of ammo (I'd always lose health sooner), so this doesn't seem to be balancing factor at all (as opposed to limited number of prayers), at least for me. Just an annoyance.
Suggested solutions (mutually exclusive):

1. Spirits with 0 uses can still attack, but deal (much) less damage than usual.
   
2. Spirits with 0 uses can still attack, but trigger longer cooldown than usual, like 2-5 times longer. Spirits that normally don't have cooldown (Eleine), will also have some cooldown when used without ammo.
   
3. Most complicated solution: Spirits with 0 uses can't attack, but ammo regenerate naturally over time, maybe only up to a threshold (for example, 30% of max uses), at rates similar to the increased cooldowns form the above solution.

Some spirits have different attack animations on the ground than in the air, most notably Siegrid. How about beeing able to use air animation on the ground, while holding "up" button? (It wouldn't make much sense the other way around though.)

When I use my ranged setup (Eleine + Merchant) vs few ranged enemies, there are so many particles on the screen I can hardly tell which missiles are mine, and which ones are harmful. Maybe you could make some clearer distinction between friendly and enemy missiles? Like different color? Maybe as a menu option?

Exploration:

When falling down from great height, Lily is falling faster than camera. I think she should be always visible on the screen, no matter how fast she's moving.

Please let us move camera up/down by holding up/down keybinding, after short delay. Lily already has an animation for looking up, so it only seems natural that this would move camera slightly.

Please add an option to disable auto-climbing, so you need to hold "up" to start climbing instead (still without the ability to cancel the animation once it's started). There were some situtions when I didn't want to climb (because there was an enemy on that platform, for example), but Lily did it anyway.

Swimming:

While Lily is floating on the water surface, directly under water-pillar-thingy (it's not really a waterfall, as water goes up, not down :P ), she still needs to jump to swim up. I think it would make much sense if using "up" button worked too, but it currently doesn't.

While swimming on the water surface, Lily can't dodge left/right, even after acquiring proper upgrade. Fixing this would require new animation though.

After falling into the water, Lily automatically swims up to the surface, even after acquiring upgrade. This is fine by itself, but she can't dodge during that animation (you need to press "down" first), even with said upgrade.

While underwater, and without any player input, Lily is always falling to the bottom slowly. Same with swimming directly left/right. I think it would be more realistic if she was going up, not down, however, from the gameplay perspective it would be best if she didn't move at all, unless you press proper button.

Also, it would be nice if you add animations for swimming diagonally.

Keybindings and UI:

Purifying spirit after defeating it uses the same keybinding as "UI Controls - Confirm". I think it should use "Interact" keybinding instead, as purifying is part of the gameplay, not menus.

During some scenes Lily walks instead of running, maybe add keybinding (hold and/or toggle) to switch between running and walking in other parts of the game? Just for flavor.

Alt hides UI when in-game esc menu is opened. This functionality is great, but this means alt-tab with this menu opened also hides UI. This can get really confusing when it combines with alt-tab bug I mentioned in another thread. So, I'd like to be able to set this keybinding myself, instead of it beeing hardcoded, and I'd also like it to hide UI during gameplay, not just in the menu.

Please add another slider in the menu for volume of UI sounds (split it from SE).

As far as I know, you can only pan/zoom map with your mouse. Please add keybindings for these functions, so you can do that with keyboard instead.

Map in this game looks so technical, like a diagram or a molecule, like it was taken from a sci-fi game. I wouldn't even mention thing like this in any other game, but everything else in Ender Lilies seems to work towards this haunting atmosphere, while the map looks out of place.

Other:

When Lily sit on a bench, screen goes black for a second. Maybe there's a reason why this happens, but I think it disrupts the game's flow, and should be removed if possible.

At the end of EA version, I had enough relic slots to equip 4 out of 5 relics I had. So there's not much strategic choice here. I think there should be either more relics, or less slots, so players actually have to make decisions about their build.

[Xanzibareus]

Thank you for giving ENDER LILIES a chance in Early Access, and for taking the time to give us such detailed feedback. I've added all this to our notes for the team. As you suspected, a lot of this is new, and with the launch approaching quickly we may not be able to get a lot of these in right away, but we won't stop updating when v1.0 launches so these are things we can definitely consider post-launch.