Demo feedback

[2Dement3D]

First things first, I really enjoyed the demo. I'm not usually a fan of survival crafting games, but I think the fact that, A: there's a tower-defense element that keeps you on your toes, B: the machine moving around means you'll constantly be exploring new places, and C: the puzzle elements (following cables for the TNT, finding a key in a coffin etc), these elements all really made it a fun enjoyable experience. Side note, but when I (eventually) found the radar and saw that you can track resources and send a flare to their location, I thought that was an ingenious idea.

I wanted to say all that in advance, before I move onto the unfortunately negative point I often felt during my time with the demo: gameplay fluidity.

Basically, what I'm referring to is the general feel of the game and how snappy everything is. A simple example of this is when you are changing between tools on your hotbar. If you had a tool in slots 1-4, and you started off equipped with the tool in slot 1, then you pressed 2, 3, and 4, back to back, in the vast majority of games, you'll end up with the tool in slot 4 equipped. Here, you might only have slot 2 or slot 3 equipped, while the 4th tool slot is lit up. The game did recognise you pressed it, but it was during another animation, so it didn't actually swap to it. It feels sluggish.

Another example of the game not feeling snappy would be during combat. My inputs were frequently being buffered, so if I were to try swinging a weapon by clicking LMB repeatedly, then suddenly hold block, it would often ignore the block input and swing an extra time (long after I stopped clicking LMB), leading me to get hit by an enemy. This is also evident with the special attacks that felt like they had more endlag than they appeared to have. I basically stopped using the wooden sword spin special as my time with the demo went on, because the endlag on it meant I couldn't block or act before getting hit by a zombie or two.

All in all, I think you have something great here, but would love to see the fluidity/feel of the game be improved, and more responsive. Apart from that, I just want to mention a couple of smaller nitpicks, like the dodge feeling practically worthless when it costs 1 energy for the shortest of dashes, when you can easily just move out of the way manually; not to mention energy felt like an extremely important resource for offense (kicks/specials), to bother wasting on a dash. Also, trying to kick a zombie off the machine would always make them float midair and then teleport back onto the machine; this sort of felt intended design(?), but I was really hoping for a cool "sparta kick from 300" moment.

Anyway, hopefully this feedback is of use to you whatsoever, haha. I wish you folks the best of luck with the rest of development and release.

[Berdol]

First of all, 2Dement3D, thank you for taking the time to write such valuable feedback for us, we really appreciate it! We still have a lot of polishing to do on Survival Machine, and it's likely that your impressions of the game and combat system come from the fact that we shifted most of our efforts to refining co-op for the current demo. But we’ll improve a lot more before the game’s Early Access release! Thanks for your kind words!