Hydralia : Donovan's Demise - Playtest

The demo is cool! I'd say that the cost of leveling up should be different for the attack and health. Killing my first few mobs were hard because I just did such little damage. But once I got my first damage upgrade it was much easier, then I just pumped a few more damage upgrades in, ignoring health, and I was able to kill most things without any issue. I even got king donovan down to around 100 health my first attempt. I like bullet hell style games. I'd say some of the attacks on this are too fast.

Great demo! I’m still griding my no-damage run, having a great time.

I would suggest adding some iframes so we don’t get hit by multiple swords in a single mouse swipe.

Also, I think it would be interesting if the red sword pattern had a little bit more space between each sword so we can micro dodge between them. It can be done if you’re far away from the top of the screen, but the hit marks are positioned to the sides, so we’re rarely at the bottom.

Another thing I would mention is that the bullets come from the top, but the gameplay area is horizontal, so it is a bit awkward. I think taking inspiration from horizontal shmups would be better, or changing the game area to 3:4.

Amazing! I came here from YouTube, and the game feels really good right now. I think it shows great potential and I’m looking forward to the full release.

Suggestion: The enemy health bar is placed too far away from where my eyes are focused. I need the health bar closer to the action so I don’t lose track of the battle.

Great devlog on YT and a really elegant concept. I think, you should really go for it and make the finished game!

Played the demo on PC, beat it the first try, but then lost 3 times in a row. Overall feels quite juicy and satisfying to beat. I guess the first win was due to having already seen the pattern in a video :)

Some thoughts and suggestions:

1. Maybe give the player a bit of a breathing room between enemy phases. That could help with the feeling of progression (for every battle/enemy type) and pattern memorization, but also having a constant stream of attacks doesn't seem quite fair 

2. As people have already suggested, having anticipation indicators may also help with combat feeling more fair. But honestly, players can appreciate the harder "die and learn from your mistakes" type of combat as well

3. Idk if this will be relevant, but having different mouse-sensitivity settings may result in players having different experience with the game. Idk how to approach this problem, but you could lean into it and design an encounter specifically for higher/lower sensitivity and run a demo again :)

All in all, this is a very inspiring concept. Worth investing your time into. Cheers!

Hi. I came here from your last YouTube video. Undertale is one of my favorite games of all time, but I feel like the formula is not as fresh as it used to be. The keyboard/controller controls seemed boring and brought nothing new to the table. Now, the mouse control caught my attention, so I stayed watching and finally decided to give it a shot. After all, it was what made me click on the video in the first place.

I really enjoyed the experience. I feel like this really is a unique experience, different from other RPGs that use bullet hell mechanics, and shoot 'em ups, in a good way.

Starting the battle is satisfying and the control is really fun. I also agree that the more deterministic and phases-based combat is more rewarding. When you die, you don't start from scratch, but with the knowledge you've learned from the previous attempts, which feels really good. And the fact that it's not 100% deterministic keeps you on your toes, making future rounds not trivial and still engaging.

Now, I think a small grace could be given after the player takes a hit so they don't take multiple hits in a fraction of a second. I must add that I'm not that good at games, and although I beat the fight, it was hard and sometimes it felt unfair. With that said, I think that if what you mentioned in the video ends up being true, that as your stats get higher, the previous encounters become easier, then that could work for me, similar to how other more traditional RPGs work. Maybe then, getting i-frames after taking a hit could make the game too easy. Something to think about.

Finally, performance was flawless, but I also run a Ryzen 5, RTX 4060 and 16 GB of RAM, so take that with a grain of salt.

Good luck with development!

CPU: 12th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-12900H

GPU: GA103M [GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Mobile]

RAM: 32.0 GiB DDR5 4800

Game feels really good. This genre of manual, dexterious, precision mechanics is exactly what I like. I've played through Undertale multiple times, Deltarune, Cave Story, Hollow Knight, Celeste, osu!, etc.

This felt entirely skill-based to me. I beat it first on a touchscreen device and then twice on PC with the final being hitless. Playing on mouse was significantly easier but touchscreen felt intuitive. Best strat is obviously just stand still until the red triplet spawns and then make your move. Also abuse the fact that you can hug the left or right walls to avoid the knives on the far sides.

I will say this demo is very hard at first and that's coming from an absolute gaming warlord. As for the average bloke I imagine they think this is nigh impossible. This enemy requires laser focus. Personally I like it, but this is definitely boss-level. Would like to see one or two more mechanics during a fight such as this as well. 

A game with these mechanics is something I certainly would be excited for. Even in my own game development I try to strive for clean and tight mechanics like these.

As for the graphics, they are alright. I like that they have a more "gritty" look to some extent. Something about modern pixel are in a lot of games feels weirdly rounded and soft-shaded to the point where they all look same-y and overly organic. I would like to see something to make the characters feel more alive like in Undertale, where their portrait gets angry or something like that or becomes wounded.

There is an issue where the fake-cursor and the true-cursor can permanently disconnect unless frivolous mouse events are sent the the game to trigger a catch up.

Great work man. I've used Cocos Creator, GDevelop, and KAPLAY and it's always interesting to see what you are up to on your YouTube. It's an inspiration.

Works very well on my samsung Smartphone! But i dont win 😫😂

Thanks for posting! Really enjoyed your first video and looking forward to more.

Performance was good for me.
Intel Xeon CPU E5-1620 v3 @3.50
40gb ram
Radeon RX 480

Failed my first attempt, succeeded at 2 following, did not complete without getting hit. Played some more and had a mixed bag of success and failure. I would not say that I became more skilled at the game as I continued playing, it felt more luck based. I found it challenging for sure-- honestly in more of a tedious way than a fulfilling one.

I don't think it's an idea problem that makes it challenging/unfulfilling but more of a balance thing. Your player always need to be able to have a way to succeed, and it felt like there were too many times I was sitting between the 3 white ones, waiting for them to move down (slowly) when the pink ones came flying, hitting me before the white ones were out of the way, so there was basically no way out. I think that's a 2 part problem, the first being the speed disparity between the two attacks, the 2nd being that you introduced 2 new patterns at the same time (new white pattern where they fall straight down, and the pink, fast moving pattern). It might be easier if they were introduced separately.

2 "bugs" or perhaps oversights: the attack star can spawn in the same place many times in a row, so if you sit still you might get 3 or 4 hits in a row. Also, the first white pattern will never hit you if you don't move. I would expect the middle sword to hit you if standing still. Seems like the vector to the player might be a little off? Not sure.

Overall I still think its a great concept and I would be interested in playing a full release, just needs some fine tuning! Happy to elaborate on anything further!! Glad I found your channel.

Gameplay

This seems way too difficult IMO. The vertical knives spawn too close to the playing area. Makes it difficult to anticipate when they'll arrive. I defeated the foe after 10 attempts... but by then I was annoyed.

Performance

It ran mostly smoothly, but there were some stutters from time to time (which is kind of serious for this sort of game). It was not so bad, but it is still surprising that such a simple game (graphically and in concept) stutters : (

For comparison, my last HTML5/TypeScript game has a combat system that has some similarities, but runs way smoother (even with shaders, particles, 3d background, and more animations on screen)

My config:

• OS: Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS x86_64
• CPU: Intel i7-10510U (8) @ 4.900GHz
• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce MX350
• Memory: 16GB RAM

The game does start slowing down on my T480 (2018 laptop) during the most difficult enemy attack where there’s lots of swords on the screen.

Hardware Information:

• Hardware Model: Lenovo ThinkPad T480
• Memory: 16.0 GiB
• Processor: Intel® Core™ i5-8350U × 8
• Graphics: Intel® UHD Graphics 620 (KBL GT2)

Software Information:

• OS Name: Debian GNU/Linux 13 (trixie)
• GNOME Version: 48
• Windowing System: Wayland
• Kernel Version: Linux 6.12.48+deb13-amd64

Hello, I tried your game and I did experience performance issue, game is basically barely playable on this poor man's laptop I'm using. My specs:

Processor Intel(R) Celeron(R) N4020 CPU @ 1.10GHz   1.10 GHz
Installed RAM 4.00 GB (3.83 GB usable)
System type 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor