Thoughts on the battle minigame

[Total_Nubbins]

I have to admit, it took me several tries to even figure out what the heck you're supposed to do, but I think I mostly understand the battle mode now and can give somewhat educated feedback on it. From what I understand, your goal is to click the hearts at the perfect time to do damage while simultaneously scrolling your mouse wheel to maintain your defence. I don't know about anybody else, but I found this to pretty tough, especially considering how apparently the scrolling is supposed to be done at a certain rhythm, according to the tutorial message? Maybe it's a skill issue, but I thought it was awkward to have to move my mouse around and clicking while also scrolling.

The only other thing I had issues with was the fact that hearts pop up all the way across the screen, making it difficult to precisely hit them, let alone hit them with perfect timing. It felt kind of cheap to lose some health because a couple of hearts popped up in quick succession, but at very large distances from each other, causing me to miss one. Overall, I think this game could be interesting, but the battle mode doesn't feel fair at the moment.

[Mighty Max]

Hey, thanks for trying the demo!

Indeed, there's a lot of fine-tuning and clarification to be done on the combat system. Plus, we wanted to add a different QTE for each soda. We have to change a lot of things, and I've often been told it's a bit hard.

I also think that the staging needs to be better defined, and players need to be told that it's more important to click on all the hearts and make perfects from time to time than to try to make perfects everytime.

Thanks for your feedback, will look into it!

[Afterglow]

@Total_Nubbins
I felt that way during the first few tries, but I did get the hang of it with practice. As in, give it three to six tries. Sure, I'm still missing some hearts, and the timing to the music feels sketchy sometimes (that could use tweaking?), but I'm doing fairly well.

I think the game needs to teach me more about how the END of battles work. I understand that filling up the meter on the right triggers a climax button you can click. When I did that, I'm supposed to mash click, right? Well, I did, and every time I do that, the game ends after just a couple clicks. Also, what exactly is Knockout? I guess that's a win state? I've seen that happen both with and without climax, and I never know what I did to make it happen. Confusing.

[Mighty Max]

Yeah I think we need to work on a more "boxing" staging. the Knockout is effectively the end. However, this is not a rhythm game, and the timing is not based on the music. Hearts are a way of inflicting "damage", and the timing is mainly to press at the right moment, like a classic QTE, to do more damages. But the game lacks onboarding, and we'll fix that for release.

We took our inspiration mainly from the mini-games in Criminal Girls: Invite Only, But we still have a lot of work to do to make it all fit together.

[Afterglow]

The timing ISN'T based on the music? Really? That's surprising. It felt like 4 times out of 5, it was synced up, so I started using that as my guide instead of the animation, since trying to sync it to the animation always got me a late grading.
I also notice that you get punished for clicking even a hair late, but it's rather forgiving if you click early.

[Mighty Max]

Lol yeah it's a big coincidence. But I think we'll be moving towards a combo system for ease of understanding, rather than a system that looks a rhythm game.

[rALYNN]

I haven't made it that far. I came here because I can't get the barista thing to work. The second card of instructions keeps skipping so I can't read it with a single mouse click and I came here for information on what the heck to do as the confirm button doesn't light up and the extra ingredients aren't available.

Anyway, feedback on mouse scrolling: this mechanic makes it impossible on a laptop game with only a touchpad (or maybe someone could do it but scrolling and clicking sounds horrible. I dislike how games assume that everyone plays with a mouse because it limits what I can do, and some games are simply unplayable. Good to know this will be one of them, at least as currently designed.

[Mighty Max]

As I said on the other thread, you can scroll through the pages using the right-click/left-click buttons. You may have missed some information about the mini-game indeed, we've just tested it and it's working properly, there's no bug.

For the scroll mouse, we'll try to add some accessibility options, like scrolling with keyboard keys or something else. It's true that we didn't think much about this kind of feature for the demo, but we'll take note!