Thanks for playing! The early bosses are a little more forgiving and let you mess around a bit, but Nia's the first main filter to make sure you know what you're doing. 

Thanks for trying it out again.

Yeah, there's like 2 or 3 more bosses that you're supposed to fight before that last one, and it's also meant to feel impossible as part of the story. 

I also realized I haven't updated some of the skill selection text in a long time, and that one about impurities was back when I was trying to give it more of a lore description rather than a gameplay one, although it's also not a bad idea to make it recover status effects since there aren't any options for that right now. Apart from the tutorial, there's no place where the player is forced into being exposed to the descriptions, so I'm thinking that I can make the player have to select their slot assignments manually first to let  them know that the descriptions are there.

Slide kick is meant to be more for mobility, so the damage isn't great. But the recent changes to the camera and directions also make it impossible to line up. 

For the charged skills, you only need to hold it until the twinkle effect shows up, then you can release it early. This fuzziness lets you hold attacks out a little longer for timing parries. 

That parry at the end of her spin wasn't intentional, turns out I forgot to set the flag for preventing that. Sorry. 

Also, here's a video of me beating the last boss. The reactions get pretty absurd towards the end, so I'll still need to tweak that logic some more, but this is how the skills are meant to be used. 

Played the campaign mode and got through a level 1 woods dungeon, then tried arena for a couple of rounds.

• It's pretty much a knockoff hearthstone. Pretty much all the mechanics are the same as far as I'm aware, which makes it easy to pick up, but hard to sell on why anyone would play it. 
• I think that if the card game aspect is the same, then I'd like the part outside of the cards to be different. The non-arena mode is pretty much just aimless deckbuilding to play matches, while HS would have ranked matchmaking to contextualize why you want to do that. It might help if there was some clear goal you want your players to work towards, and show progress towards that goal.  
• >Gargoyle Bat 01: "Every time you pee you poop from your butt" ????
• Card games need a lot of art, so I can't really fault you for having limited and inconsistent card art, but having names just be Entin 01 until Entin 03 with just a colour filter on it is pretty lacklustre. At least give them proper names. 
• The rest of the UI looks decently polished (albeit in that slop mobile game style), but the text contents tend to show a lack of care in the inconsistent capitalizations and phrasing. 

Thanks for playing!

For parrying, enemies are also capable of parrying, and in Nia's and the tutorial's case they have a specific effect to show that it's a parry from their end. But I agree that the current priority system for parrying is kinda nonsensical because I haven't made any proper guidelines or standards thus far, and having specific attacks beat out other attacks is really hard to convey when things go this fast, especially when some attacks are always interrupted on any parry for sequence reasons rather than the intuitive power of the attack. 

The tutorial for parrying is tricky, because if I don't slow it down, then players might get stuck and never be able to get past this, and if I skip it, then they miss out on a core mechanic. But slowing it down also means it's not representative of how actual combat will be, which is why I settled for having an effect that only shows up during this stage of the tutorial, while using attacks that you've already seen and have established the timings for. 

There's a gap currently where projectile deflects and parries don't count towards the tutorial. Probably should just remove that attack from those stages tbh. I guess I should also try and update the tutorial text based on that too.

As for skills, there were plans to make dedicated skill tutorials in that section, but I couldn't come up with ideas for all of them in time, and implementing them is also not that straightforward. Also, players aren't going to sit in the tutorial to slowly go through each one of them. It's pretty much the other major cursed design problem of this game, because the bosses and combat system are made with the expectation that you know how to exploit your skills, but there's also no good way to guarantee that without being exceptionally hand-holdy. 

Some other notes I had watching the video (more so on things I need to somehow teach players about):

• Nia's grabs are likely to miss if you keep moving, and they can even be deflected unlike Louise's. 
  • but maybe teleporting into it might be too much (even if it is the major telegraph for that move aside from the flash)
• The intended playstyle is in using all of the skills to land attacks constantly with as little downtime as possible, so this actually still isn't enough aggression. 
• Maybe I should use another tutorial pop-up for Lynette's fight? It is a gimmick fight, but part of the fun of gimmick fights is figuring it out on your own, so spoiling it so obviously doesn't feel good. Not sure where else I should take this to make it more of a proper fight rather than an elaborate tutorial for one mechanic. 

Also, if you've got time to revisit the demo, I'd like to hear your thoughts on the ??? boss at the bottom of the list. It's supposed to be an optional boss just before the final boss, so it'll serve as the ceiling of difficulty in the game to test the limits of this system.

Thanks for playing!

No, you really do just have everything from the start. It is a major problem that I genuinely have no idea how to approach other than just hoping players play around with it or tell each other how to use it lol

I do plan on completely reworking Louise in the near future, though, since my skills and knowledge have improved a lot since back when I first made her over a year ago. The concept will likely remain the same, just that the attack animations and general strategy will be reviewed. 

• Cool, but really hard to tell what's going on. I thought the 'F' prompt in front of the portal was some other kind of sigil...
• I can't tell if parrying ever actually works, and it probably needs some other effect to show it go off and when it's active. 
• Spells feel good to use.
• Dashing feels unimpactful. 
• Sometimes it feels like enemies are teleporting around in a buggy way. 
• Because the controls use LMB a lot, it's easy to accidentally click upgrade just as it shows up without being able to read what it says. Probably not that bad since it only shows up after a level when enemies have all died for a few seconds, but it happened on my first run when I didn't know about it. 

• Please have full-screen mode and resolution settings. Also, volume was at 1% by default?
• The default ship is terrible, but somehow, changing chassis and re-attaching some new guns totally changed it to something that seems OP with a much higher rate of fire and damage. Razer blade boss died instantly on the 2nd ship. 
• EXP should probably be stickier. Feels like it just gives up if you move even a little bit away.
• I was expecting one of those pick 1 of 3 things from the level, but seems like it doesn't do anything. Also, if it is meant to be one of those, then it takes way too long to get that first level. 
• 2nd floor, made it back to a tutorial room, stopped there. 
• Gets dull really fast since there's only one enemy type and it's hard to hit.
• The camera behaves weirdly for big rooms of more than 1 screen horizontally. I would expect it to be more continuous like the long vertical rooms, but there's this snapping horizontally that feels jarring. It's not so bad that I can't get used to it, though.
• Speaking of the large rooms, it's too easy to lose targets and have to slowly look around for them. 

CRT filter makes text painful to read. 

• CRT filter makes some text borderline unreadable, especially as you zoom out even a little. 
• The "next available upgrade" button returns me to the start of the skill tree if there are no upgrades that can currently be bought. 
• The gold that drops from enemies looks more like meat under the filter.
• This is coming from someone who does not enjoy incremental/idle games, but it's both too active to be 2nd screen content and too passive to be 1st screen content. 
• It arguably becomes somewhat idle-able after a certain point, but it still needs some attention to respond in time which is pretty annoying. There isn't much I can do to get through the fights better, only things I can do worse  (or not do at all) that will make me die. 
• The chance of potions dropping is too random for how big of an impact it has. Some runs basically live or die whether or not you get an extra potion here and there. Towards the end, I made several attempts that almost killed the boss of the 2nd dungeon, and I finally did it just because I had one more potion drop from the group before the boss. 
• I am really not fond of just throwing bodies to gain marginal progress with almost zero control over the situation (which might even fail because of potion RNG). 
• It's interesting to think about how I need to save Strike to deal with a ranged enemy up ahead, and how the layout is always the same so I can plan ahead and route it, but the chances where this is relevant are too few and far between. It also becomes stale after repeating the same sequence so many times. 
• The upgrades after getting the healer really aren't interesting. Single-use skills like curse are too precious to use on anything less than a boss, and simply blocking healing isn't that important if the target doesn't even get healed. (AFAIK, the boss doesn't heal, but I always just threw the curse on him anyway so I don't know if he does)

Never got into driving games + I don't have a license so a lot of the driving stuff flew over my head.

I think it's probably fine since most of the audience for this would know enough about driving, but it is also a really technical game so some things like downshifting might need better explanations of what it does and why to do it. Minimally, showing the key combination for doing it in the tutorial would help a lot, since I only found the gas and brake keys by trial and error during the tutorial. I still don't know how to properly start the car, either. 

(It's probably my fault for not picking the easier control modes, though.) 

Ended up off course quite a lot, and the engine needing to be started again was unexpected. Some kind of reposition or quick restart might be handy for those cases. 

I would probably enjoy this a lot more if I could actually drive. 

67

• The chips falling in the menu look really weird since they're at a flattened perspective but rotate around. Just feels really jarring, but maybe dropping them flat with their face towards the camera would look better?
• Would like if tutorial text could skip to the end of the animation if I click it. 
• Highlighting the area to focus on would be good. I looked away during the tutorial animation and somehow missed the pass line until I went back to the menu and did the tutorial again. 
• You can probably set the default game speed to be max from the start. Default speed of 3 just felt flaccid. 
• The colours on the UI make the pass line the most prominent place, although "ROLL!" would actually be the most immediately important when available. (oh, this is done in the normal game, but not in the tutorial.)
• I feel like the tutorial taught me how to use the interface, but not what Craps is actually about. I skipped the advanced tutorial, but even aside from the other bet types I still felt like I had little idea about what I was actually doing. 
• I don't get what the items and other players do most of the time. There is a lot of terminology that just isn't apparent to someone who has never played craps before. 
  
• What I understand from the tutorial and playing a round is:
  • You must bet at least 10 chips on the pass line. The first roll decides what some of your blue and red squares will be. 
  • If you roll a red square you lose everything, while you win if you roll a blue square (and gold too?)
  • NPCs and items can influence rolls somehow. (But I don't know what these terms refer to most of the time)
  • You can do bets on field for most of the number range (???), or bet on a specific number at the top, ...and that's all I understand from it. 
  • At the end of each round, you get to buy items to influence your dice. (However, without knowing how to play the game, these items don't seem all that useful to me. )

first for pregnant parade

Combat feels a lot better now, crazy amount of polish on that end. Movement on the other hand doesn't really have much to it yet. 

It feels like there's a lot more that can be done with the available skills now, and I even cleared the 3rd encounter in a single turn just using all of the debuffs. Aside from the available actions, I couldn't tell whose turn it was, and I didn't understand how the turn order worked. 

Main thing for this update is phase 1 of a new boss 

You should really try and beat everyone else first, because this one is meant to be right before the final boss. It's meant to be a little unfair. 

This will most likely be the last or 2nd-last DD for this game. Hopefully. 

Thanks for playing! 

The barrel section is kind of an easter egg/hidden area for later, I just kept it in as a little secret because the rocks happened to leave that small opening. The floor collision has been fixed recently, too.

For camera easing, it's hard to find a balance because it needs to be responsive enough to keep up with some of the other enemies. Locked camera also has to offset itself a little to frame things from a slight angle so that you don't fully cover the enemy, but I also haven't considered the part of having it be dead centered too. 

The story kind of is just that, and there isn't much else you need to know beyond the few mandatory conversations if all you want to do is to fight. 

Unfortunately, regular non-bosses are part of the game's "will not do" list, because each boss is supposed to ask something a little different of the player to quickly build them up to the point where I can throw even crazier stuff out there and expect them to deal with it. At most, I might do more in-depth ability-focused tutorials/training mode in future, because even the fox can be done in under 2 minutes if you understand how to maximize your damage with the skills. 

Sorry for the late responses and DD reviews, I've been busy with managing the Steam demo launch. 

Some of the bugs that have been mentioned here are fixed in the latest builds (I hope), so give it a try and see if it still happens. 

Thanks for playing! Yeah, there's a lot of bugs in controller focus, and I'm slowly working my way through finding them all. 

Lynette sexo

Thanks for playing!

It is intended for players to figure out how best to use the skills on their own, but I'm still thinking of how I can add extra tutorials for those...

Lynette's a pure projectile parry check. You either learn to reflect them and win the fight in under a minute or you spend forever trying to get past it. The shields have a duration equal to their cooldown, so they'll swap to the next colour if you don't manage to break it in time, and it's also unlikely for you to be able to break the shield without performing reflection against a whole sequence of the projectiles. 

Someday I'll add small bits of voice acting....

I haven't seen other bugs related to that area, but you should be able to just move and leave the dialogue pose. There's a lot of dialogue related bugs that popped up, which I've fixed in recent updates. 

Got the warning too, but I played it anyway. 

The VN system is pretty weird, clicking doesn't advance it and only the keyboard does, but I need to click the options with the mouse. Having everything be stuck together in one text box is very strange. 

As for the writing, there's a lot of spelling and grammar mistakes, but I like the fact that there's words to hover over for definitions. The other guy is okay and the rough way of speaking fits his status as an Outer, but the other 2 women are much more vulgar than I would've ever imagined, especially for what their designs would suggest. I'd have expected the Inner woman to be more stuck up and military-like with a strict personality, and I expected the nomad to be more monk-like (perhaps with a cunning side due to the trading role of the Nomads). Instead, I just got to see them call each other all kinds of insults. 

It tells enough to paint a picture of what the place and mood is like, but I'm don't find the characters other than the 2 guys any interesting so far. 

I think you mentioned something about wanting more feedback leading into your EA launch (I don't think it's ready for one tbh...), so I'm going to be as thorough as I can in this post. 

Most pressing issue with the game right now is the new player experience? I haven't ever tried the multiplayer, so I can't speak for the appeal on that side. Kinda got filtered by trying to make a coffee too, so these are my thoughts and suggestions from a very short playtime. 

1. You're only told to open the cafe and serve customers with the place still in a mess with nothing prepared. 
2. It would probably be better to start you inside the cafe, and then tell you to clean it up and prepare to open (I think most other cafe sims follow this format of having you get things ready first to teach you the basics).
3. Having a dedicated tutorial segment where your senpai (TL Note: senior) maid teaches you how to make coffee would be good, since there's an awful lot of steps to get everything set up. When I'm left to try and figure things out for myself, I run into a lot of problems of try something -> turns out I need to do some other step first -> turns out I need to do something else first which leads to some frustration. You could even just have this as a separate single player mode before you come out and start your career(s) as maid cafe managers. 

Graphics are still really lackluster. You could try grabbing some free textures, rather than having flat colours that don't feel cozy or cute. Try playing with lighting a bit more, and it would also help immensely if the exterior of the cafe looked anything more than just a greybox (or, you could simply not let the maids leave to stop them from seeing it). Could also look into using other shaders like liltoon or poiyomi or whatever's popular in VRC/asset store stuff. 

Default font is cheap-looking, and you should try to make sure nothing in the game screams default Unity UI. Maybe a font that's sans serif? I took a quick look at Google fonts and something like Josefin Sans feels like it'd be a good fit. (although this was while I was cross-referencing the artbook PDF for Kemono Teatime and seeing if I could find a font with a similar vibe. )

Since you've already got vroid models set up in your pipeline, just use them for your customers as well. Give them a bit more personality than blue capsules. Make some serious-looking businessman come in and be a total maid nerd. I think seeing people that you would or wouldn't expect to be in a maid cafe is part of the charm in this idea. You just need some animations for them sitting down and making emotes back at the players, and possibly even have traits for what kind of orders they make. 

Also, if you're going for the friendslop route, then you should also consider what kind of wacky events you can put in, since those go viral for the stupid stuff that make an entire friend group laugh, rather than having everyone be stressed out managing orders.

The general chore-ness of most things, the low-quality feeling graphics, and the default Unity UI takes me out of the experience of being a cafe staff. As it stands, it just doesn't have enough polish to feel like something I'd want to pay for, even if I were to be a job simulator fan, but on the other hand, there's a lot of actionable items you can do to immediately improve the appeal of the game as a whole. The idea itself has a lot of potential, but a lot of it just hasn't been realized yet, and I hope you find a good direction to take it in.  

The loading screen is probably the only part of the UI that looks half-decent. It doesn't help that the main menu image is really blurry lol. 

Controls are fine, but the direction changes are hard to react to if you don't already expect it. There needs to be better signposting for when and where it's going to curve. Collectibles have annoyingly small hitboxes, and I end up missing them by a hair's breadth. The levels feel like their lighting is really flat and asset-flippy for the somewhat realistic style of the assets. It might be a little better if you throw on some post-processing?

Really cool, very creative take on the turn-based combat. Just needs stances to be more readable, I don't know who's doing low or high guards, and it's hard to tell when my parry is coming out since there's times where it'll completely miss a whole sequence and I can't tell if I'm just mistiming it or if the game didn't register it. But a lot of the art is still placeholder,, so there's lots of room to improve on something that shows a lot of promise already. Getting guard broken and juggled by a mob goblin is pretty wild. 

Nothing seemed to happen at the bed, so I couldn't progress (just like in real life)... 

There's some weird animation states, like being able to stand mid-air when the walljump tutorial popped up during a jump, and  trying to attack while climbing up a ledge also just leaves you standing in mid-air. The 2H sword is so much stronger than the 1H sword with how fast it hits. 

Feels way better than the last time I played it, but I accidentally hit the PYW a few times when I didn't mean to. New power-ups are nice. 15 waves do drag on for quite a bit, though, I felt it had already run its course around wave 6-7  (died on wave 8). The enemy variety is appreciated, and most of them bring meaningful differences to the table, but the jumper just feels like a slower normal crab. 

Menu animations are cool. The maps can get really big, which also means that a lot of enemies can end up spawning and flooding the whole map while I'm stuck with just the basic ship that's completely outgunned in every single encounter. I also feel like I got stuck on the level geometry a lot, especially around the doors they spawn from. The breakable obstacles can hide enemies underneath them too. 

Been seeing this for a long time, but this is the first time I've actually played it. Very GMI, love all the cute loading screen art, and the puzzles are at a comfortable but satisfying difficulty. Unfortunately had to leave mid-way through my session and it didn't save, so I wasn't able to play Coast-10 and the bonus level. 

2nd jump didn't work. Character moved very slowly after that, and holding multiple keys together made it just take one pose while playing the same sound over and over again. 

this has got to be the most unhinged platformer i've ever seen holy shit 

Made it to the 10 scarab dance soda and managed to do it, then got filtered by the whole section next to it with the multiple balloon jumps. The demos are nice, but it would be nice to be able to fast forward it, especially to skip the negative examples. 

Pretty cool. I'm surprised at just how far the grapple extends to. Feels less about swinging and more of just pulling myself toward the target. It gets pretty jittery when you're swinging with a very short rope length on a wall, and that can be used to just propel you upwards by releasing it at the right time. 

Didn't manage to make it that far in the game. I'd just get pushed around by a sudden mob and die before I even get to figure out which direction they're in. 

• Felt like I was taking damage from things I couldn't even see, only to find that I'm surfing on a wave of demons somehow. Probably needs that directional damage indicator you see in most FPS games. 
• This is the first time I'm playing with the gravity mechanics, but it feels too binary in how it anchors you to platforms. Just jumping is enough to "disconnect" me from some platforms, even if there aren't any other platforms around. The camera also seems to turn around to align with the platform's direction, which made me flip around instead of just rotating my camera around where I'm already facing. 
• The basic demons die in one hit, so I don't see any reason in using the shotgun. It's got a slower fire rate, and it's rare that things bunch up enough in the early stages for it to make a difference. 
• The scale of the demons feels too big, or they're coming way too close to the player that it's hard to see what's going on. It would be good if they could stop temporarily after each attack, or their speed could be lowered. 

also >stroming hell 

• Died once and was stuck at 0 HP. 
• Not sure what the walls that disappear when you walk under them are supposed to be. They don't block bullets either, so what's the point?
• Collision seems a bit wonky on some of the obstacles, or I just saw wrongly because it felt like one of the enemies was able to just ignore the rocks entirely while moving. 
• I think the inventory broke? I just got lots of number items. 
• Crafting doesn't seem to work, or I don't know how it's supposed to be used. 
• Screen shake on everything is absurdly high. 
• Chests take a really long time to open. 

lots of changes since the last build since i went and polished it up for a steam demo

even i have no idea just how much i've changed 

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3863820/Illusive_Domain_Demo/ 

I'm working on the new version, and the version that was on Itch had gotten too outdated while focusing on the Steam side, so I took it down temporarily. 

A new update will be released next week, so please wait warmly until then. 

Managed to beat it this time! Ammo feels a lot more generous, and I was able to pick up most of the weapons in this version. Probably because I didn't miss out on the elephant level this time, so I went into the boss with a lot more resources. I think ammo might be a bit too generous right now, since I never really worried about it unlike my previous attempt, although I found a lot more secrets and had more weapons to use this time. 

Elephant: Only the projectile attacks seem unfair. It's hard to see it in the dark, and it tracks in a weird way that I don't really understand. Unless I managed to get it stuck between some trees or something to block it, it would always hit me a few times. 

Chieftain: Overall much better, but his jump slam attack seems to trigger even when he lands on objects that aren't the ground, so the hitbox ends up being higher than I would expect, and this killed me a few times. 

Only played for a short session up until I died to one of those bigger enemies, but it does feel like the world is quite empty, or that it's too big at the initial sections without much else to do but walk. I'm sure there's some upgrade later on for it, but I'd like to have a melee attack option to deal with the small enemies when they're up close. That's pretty much all I have to complain about, everything else is insanely good. 

Seems like some of the ambient audio tracks kept starting without stopping. It stops once I move on from the Spaceship, but starts again shortly after. 

That aside, menu is fantastic and the gameplay is everything I would ever want from a speedy precision platformer. Just that I am not someone who really plays precision platformers. 

I played up till a little past the first introduction of the blue lines (or whatever colour you usually play it as, the number of colour palette choices was pretty crazy), but everything up till then was surprisingly really intuitive to understand. Love the star fart key blocks teaching you that you can fart to go downwards faster too.

Made it to the 3rd floor, then had no idea what to do with the fish slope. I guess I should do something with shooting, but I cleared everything before with putt mode only, so I don't really know when I should be using shooting over putting.

First time playing it. Some of my deaths just happen too fast and suddenly that I don't even understand what happened. It took me a while to start noticing the vending machines and drones exploding out of nowhere. 

It can be hard sometimes to locate the hat. Slow-mo focus on enemies dying always feels weird, because it's also used when I get hit, so it just feels like I messed up if I'm seeing it. 

I found the UI to be really small on my screen, probably needs some scaling. The in-game HUD was fine, though. 

Tutorial was mostly fine, but I have no idea what to do in the 2nd level. 

The cannon tutorial could do with some more direction, because although it's already facing the right direction, also saying that I can turn it around makes me try that and fall a few times before I figure out that it already was facing the right direction. 

Interesting style, just that some things tend to blend in with the background. Only being able to fire forwards means that it's hard to shoot at enemies when they're too close, which could be a part of the combat as some kind of positioning check, but there also isn't much space to move around in the small maps. 

The results screen has a black fading overlay that gets cut off a little bit at the right side of my screen.