Demo Feedback

[Insanitys Muse]

I've played probably too many roguelites, and a fair number of FPS ones (as well as a ton of single player FPS games), so that's where my perspective is coming from.

The game is just missing... some things. The optimization I see mentioned in other threads is true, it's atrocious - I have an Nvidia 3080 and my fps was averaging like 30-45 on medium settings with CONSTANT stuttering. That alone would be enough to keep me away from it.

But then, the gameplay - there is an alright foundation here, but it needs expanding. Right now the only strategy is basically "walk backwards in a circle and shoot", and it's not because of lack of enemy variety, it's because that's really the best offensive strategy too. The gunplay feels pretty bad - hipshooting is largely useless, so you're quick-scoping everything, and just shooting at center of mass because there's no headshot bonus (that I could tell), most enemies die in one hit (except the incredibly spongy ones who take 4-5 reloads each), and enemies move so erratically. There's also just no incentive for mixing it up - you have 1 gun, you have no melee, your abilities are just "throw in front of you" anyway, etc.

I played / replayed enough to craft the shotgun to see if it felt better and it actually was worse. It already feels like you spend more time reloading than shooting with the revolver, the shotgun is basically 80% downtime. Also, if your reload animation is just "magic beam", why make them just plain guns in the first place?

The other aspects are the rogue ones. Like every roguelite with metacurrency as room rewards, you're going to want to prioritize those in 100% of your runs until you unlike the best stuff, and then just ignore them forever. It's a terrible system that is intended to introduce choice, but doesn't. The only reason to NOT to do that as a player is to intentionally make the game harder for yourself and slower / more restrictive. The problem is there are SO MANY currencies in this game already - so targeted farming does feel required. Changing up all that would help a lot.

The other half of that is the upgrades - the elemental upgrades are sort of interesting but ultimately repetitive and boring. There need to be more, different ways to upgrade your gun as you go - more ammo, faster reload, more damage, more accuracy, etc. So combine the metacurrency rewards with normal room rewards and make run upgrades more dynamic.

The metacurrency upgrades themselves are also pretty boring - stock standard stuff combined with just a limited selection. I imagine there'll be a lot more equipment to craft at the workshop but the Well tree needs a lot more love. Additionally, adding upgrades for weapons at the Workshop would be another way to make it feel better and differentiate the guns.

All that said, would I pick up the game based off the demo? No, and honestly if I got it free I'm not sure how much I'd play because I already was bored by the time I got the shotgun. It's just incredibly repetitive right now, and the optimization is worse than some infamous ones lately like Jedi Survivor (which I could at least getting a STABLE ~30 fps on).

Like I said, there is a foundation here, but it feels like a concept more than a demo.

Edit: Because I see it being asked and I hid it in a wall of text:

Nvidia 3080
i7-9700k
SSD
Medium-to-low-to-off settings

Basically never got above 60 fps, and stutters were every time I dashed, or turned to much, or just sometimes. Also FPS dropped significantly in some rooms, no major difference I could tell

[Dark Master]

Thank you for your feedback!

The performance aspect of this is really weird as I get a silky-smooth 60FPS with a 3070Ti. So I'd like to get to the bottom of this, as finding out the difference in how we play could mean the key to solving this.
What resolution are you playing at? Do you have the latest GPU drivers installed? Are there any enhancements enforced from the NVidia system software?

Please let me know, I'd love to get to the bottom of this.

[Insanitys Muse]

I forgot about resolution, but 1440p (no extra wide or anything like that). Latest drivers, no enhancements. It's a 144hz monitor which is usually the fps I aim for in, well, FPS games, but obviously wasn't happening here.

I had the in-game vsync enabled (didn't notice any screen tearing), and the in-game FPS limited to 144. I turned motion blur off and everything else to medium, except I think effects and shadows to low (partially to see if low effects would make enemy attacks easier to see through all the other enemy attacks and your own attacks)

[BuckyCannons]

I'm running a similar setup (i7 8086k, RTX 3080, 32GB RAM, and NVME SSD) and, at 1440p, I usually averaged about 110fps, rarely dropping below 100fps, but the stuttering/hitching was really bad for me as well! Nearly stopped playing it before I started because of it but I'm glad I pushed through. It mainly seemed to happen when things were loading/spawning and it got better the longer I played.

I left all graphical settings on High except Shadows which were Medium. I turned v-sync off (because of g-sync) with no FPS limit. My monitor is HDR, which is turned on in Windows, so I don't know if that may have had some effect (some games, like Dead by Daylight, HATE HDR!)

I mostly agree with the rest of Insanitys Muse feedback as well. I think there is a lot of potential here, but there definitely needs to be some additions/improvements for it to shine.

[Dark Master]

Originally posted by Bucky Cannon:

I'm running a similar setup (i7 8086k, RTX 3080, 32GB RAM, and NVME SSD) and, at 1440p, I usually averaged about 110fps, rarely dropping below 100fps, but the stuttering/hitching was really bad for me as well! Nearly stopped playing it before I started because of it but I'm glad I pushed through. It mainly seemed to happen when things were loading/spawning and it got better the longer I played.

I left all graphical settings on High except Shadows which were Medium. I turned v-sync off (because of g-sync) with no FPS limit. My monitor is HDR, which is turned on in Windows, so I don't know if that may have had some effect (some games, like Dead by Daylight, HATE HDR!)

I mostly agree with the rest of Insanitys Muse feedback as well. I think there is a lot of potential here, but there definitely needs to be some additions/improvements for it to shine.

Thank you for the detailed description! I am currently working on a shader precompiler that will run at the start of the game -- this should alleviate the micro stutter problem at least! Stay tuned, as this will go live soon!

[Dark Master]

Uploaded a new version that precompiles shaders, let me know if it helps at least a bit!