Demo Feedback and overall feelings

[Diatomic Muffin]

Let me know your feelings and any feedback you have about the demo here

[Kish-Mish Seller]

This game is perfect for me. Thank you for this creation, I am truly grateful to you.

[Blank The Gamer]

The demo Is great
Its kinda harder than Sword With Sauce
Im excited for it to release

[Radu Ionescu]

In the full game, please put level 4 way further, and create easier levels to lead up to it. The combat is absolutely fantastic and the parkour level is great as well, but I am afraid some players who bought the game especially for the combat might get frustrated and refund.

[ipodplayer777]

The wrecking balls in level 4 make it less skill based and more RNG based. You cannot always avoid them.

[HellCat383]

The new parkour level is MUCH better, it only took me one attempt from the 58 it took me to complete pre update, the wrecking balls are MUCH easier to get past now. Great improvement, i'm excited to see what the full game is like!

[StormtrooperAimm]

Big fan of SWS and already a big fan of this game. Here are some of my thoughts after playing the demo

Movement:

• Running feels too rigid. With how fast the player moves forward, strafing doesn't have much effect on the overall movement, which makes it feel like I can only move fast forwards. I think increasing strafe speed (and maybe decreasing forward speed) could improve overall control over movement, where you can move around targets while keeping them in view instead of turning away to run forwards, then turning back to the target to attack. The mostly-straight parkour map got boring after a while, I wish more 'agile' changes in direction were baked into the game's movement and maps.
  
• Does camera sensitivity decrease while running fast?? If so, why was that a choice? It removes every bit of precision for me because I never have a constant sensitivity to snap between different targets (or I'm just going crazy).
  
• The momentum is a bit odd where you can't make sharp turns while sprinting. Every time I do a 180, the my character halts to a stop and ruins the flow of the game for me.
  
• Air mobility feels nonexistent where the movement keys have little effect on air drift if you already have momentum midair. I know this is more realistic, but it really limits control of movement (and is more punishing too if you make the wrong jump, but I'm less concerned about skill-issues). I would also like it if the left arm would sometimes stick out instead of only the right while jumping, having it decide based on the running animation cycle would be amazing too.
  
• Sliding feels 'clunky'. Maybe a minimum slide time would help with more fluid motion; where tapping CTRL would do a 0.5s slide and holding CTRL would slide until released. There's often times where pop into a slide for a split second or get dead slides randomly (or I just need to get used to the movement). I also don't like how sliding locks the camera limits where you can't spin further than 180°.
  
• The camera movement while running/jumping seems too 'smooth' to me, like I'm gliding on rails. Maybe there could be an option for more screenshake to exaggerate the steps/jumps/slides even more?

Combat:

• Due to my notes above about movement, it's hard to weave in and out of combat - to bait and punish enemy attack swings. I usually end up a 1v3 brawls while spamming attacks if I don't have more range than my enemies
  
• Health regen while dealing damage is a cool mechanic, it rewards fast and risky playstyles. But this might be too much healing. More modes/modifiers to decrease healing or only heal on kills would be neat
  
• ^Same thoughts about staggering enemies. Feels great, but might make things too easy

Other thoughts:

• I really enjoy the item grabbing, it feels amazing to pull in weapons midair (kinda like Superhot VR)
  
• I wish the maps/environments would play more into the parkour aspects (especially if we were given more control over movement). Even just adding some verticality would be great. I currently play as it a brawling game because movement seems less rewarding/enjoyable
  
• I'm excited to see how the powerup system will play out, it looks like it'll introduce some good replayability to the game
  
• The kick ability is super fun
  
• I wish there was an on-screen timer so I could check my pace without pausing
  
• The 'progressive experience levels' and 'mission levels' having the same name might get confusing

Post-note: I've gotten gold on all of the levels, and I think Level 5 is a bit too strict with the timing (still got 53.17s somehow). From what I can tell, gameplay focuses around actions per minute for fast-paced combat rather than movement and evasion. I feel like it's way too easy to win group fights by standing still and swingings. I do still think that weaving more parkour elements into the expected gamestyle would be incredible.

[ScarfKat]

I don't really wanna just repaste my whole post here, so I'll just link to it. But I gave all my feedback in another forum post over here .

EDIT: Oh I just saw that you updated that level lol. I'll give it a look.

[electrifying]

no 4k
60 fps lock
bye

[Diatomic Muffin]

Originally posted by ⎝⧹Quirken⧸⎠:

I liked SWS a lot, but the fact you abandoned that is going to make a lot of people hesitant to put any money down on this.

That said... my main notes of feedback from the demo:

• get rid of the "press enter to continue" - this is awkward and requires moving one of your hands just to continue. Just use left click. Or space bar. And you might as well replace the "click this button to retry" with "click anywhere to retry"
  
• combine the tutorial levels - at least the first 3 that are primarily melee-focused. the tutorials aren't really very complex (they boil down to "melee heals you, melee weapons do more damage but break, hit r to throw"). Having to sit through a load time just to smack like 5 enemies and then do that again just to smack a few more, and then do that AGAIN with a large number of enemies (some of which now have ranged) is really not necessary. Anyone who picks this up has probably played FPS games with melee before
  
• on that same tutorial note... it'd be best to have all the tutorial stuff in one unified level to reduce the time until the player gets to the "real" game. Start the tutorial with the movement mechanics, then give a new popup with melee, and have someone wallrun to an area with enemies to start doing melee attacks, etc.
  
• the nail gun is a bit anticlimactic of a weapon
  
• the wall running tutorial level is a bit hard for a tutorial - between the falling scaffolding and the swinging traps, a player can end up having to replay that a bunch of times. I had to do the section between checkpoint 2 and 3 like 30 times. AFAIK, this game isn't trying to be Mirror's Edge or Ghostrunner or Cloudbuilt, so quit with that unless regular levels are going to have extended wallrunning sections like that. I nearly ragequit because of that dang wallrunning level.
  
• The cooldown on kick is super, super weird. Very few FPS have cooldowns on your melee attack. If you don't want people spamming kick, add a stamina bar or something, don't add a cooldown.
  
• it can be hard to find and/or equip items that are on the ground. having nearby weapons auto-highlight rather than having to look right at them would be nice, since you could pick up without looking away from enemies, but barring that, some less pixel-precise system would be a big improvement
  
• the way enemies just run at you ad nauseum and always know where you are is pretty boring and makes it feel like a horde shooter. Sword With Sauce gave you some flexible gameplay style. This doesn't.

After having completed the demo, I mostly just wish you'd kept going with Sword With Sauce, even if that meant a complete overhaul to it, or creating a new game that was inspired by it but not tied to it. SWS was something kinda unique - sorta like an immersive sim. You had a lot of flexibility in how you approached a level - charging in, stealth, melee, guns, etc. This... is just a pretty bland melee game with bland guns and bland enemies, with some cool movement mechanics. The little trailer at the end of the demo showed more cool movement... and more meh everything else.

I appreciate the feedback and but please don't post links to other store pages here. This discussion isn't a place to advertise other upcoming games

[KarliLinux]

the game is great, really satisfying combat and parcour, I'd love to see more of the parcour stuff, but level 4 on gold rank feels impossible in contrast to all the levels before, however I don't know how it will compare when the full game is out, sooo do your best I guess

[Lyrik]

No way I'm hyped to see you back at it! Loved the feel of the demo, totally excited for release

[tf2 pomson enjoyer #FIXVACPLS]

It's okay, coming from SWS the combat feels pretty similar which is nice and overall is good, the arenas are quite nice, lack of content makes since it's a demo for now, comat is nice, parkour flows well but is a bit hard to control
OVERALL: Good

[Pundyly]

Cool and interesting

[zenel.kodra]

Fix the bugs of the release version of the game this also includes for the difficulties

[DeaddFinally]

I finished the game twice.

I really enjoy the boss mechanics; figuring out how to defeat them is pretty fun and interesting.

The parkour levels were also fun but challenging. Level 6 was particularly difficult, and it took several attempts to beat it. Level 6 will haunt me for the rest of my life.

Overall, the game is very enjoyable to play.

(Ideas/Features)

[DIFFICULTY]
I noticed that many players struggle with the game's difficulty, which is understandable. It might be helpful to add a difficulty dropdown with options like Normal and Hard. This could adjust the speed, damage, or health of the enemies.

[Custom Content]
Although adding mod or workshop support is difficult, a custom map editor would be a great addition to the game. I understand that implementing this feature could be challenging, so it's okay if it can't be added.

[New Game Mode]
What about introducing a game mode where players can continuously fight infinite enemies?

Why?

Players can learn how the enemies behave.
They can practice countering attacks.
The game currently lacks a mode where players can fight enemies without progressing toward a specific goal.
(Objective: Just survive and reach your personal best wave.)

And last thing i wanna say to new players: don't give up, bosses are hard for first time, but after learning how they works it's pretty fun.