A few design ideas/questions that ocurred to me: Seeing the backgrounds and the bat enemies, and that you play as garlic, I imagine you're going for a vampire slayer setting? But then I saw the ladybugs and butterflies and got slightly perplexed by the theming. What do you have in mind for the world? And in the same way, the gliding with bat wings weird. One could argue you're stealing the wings of a vampire and using it, which would be raw, but I think the gimmicks should weaponize your mcs defining elements, the garlic and bow and arrow. A hook arrow for platforming comes to mind quickly, but a glider has many possible interpretations. It could be a garlic shaped hot air baloon like (using a flaming arrow as your fire) or a cape of garlic leaves.
Lol I know I'm way too late but maybe he has a plan to take the bat wing ability later from a boss or something. It would make sense as its a metroidvania
I normally don't watch devlog #1's cause 9 times out of 10 the project never goes anywhere. But seeing that yours has 1 year of development and looks promising is inspiring. One suggestion. Maybe give some slight animation or movement to the environment. Slight sways to the plants or flickering of the lights. The world looks eerily still atm.
I notices that the green plants do have some sway to them, but maybe adding that to the vines would help liven it up as you say. And a little flicker to pulse on the lamps might be nice.
Looks good! I think the camera shake may be a little to much. Also, the hitstop imo should only apply to the participants in the interaction. If it were a melee attack, yes te player should freeze too, but it being a ranged attack, only the enemy that has been hit should freeze. What do u think?
I think the hitstop affecting everything should be kept. That's usually how hitstop works in games. If it only affected the enemy, it would be really unnoticeable, I think. And it might even look like a hiccup on the knock back animation
Looks great! Perhaps have the arrows stick into surfaces and enemies and on the killing blow have the enemies body then fall to the ground (think a ragdoll). Would look super cool to have the bodies of bosses have dozens of arrows sticking to them.
Wow, hey, this is a really nicely done video with clear explanations, definitely a hidden gem. Looking forward to more updates! I hope you channel catches the wind of the algorithm so more people can see your progress.
This looks really cool, thanks for showing your progress! I thought I'd just mention that something about the gravity doesn't seem right. Maybe the player accelerates downward too quickly? It makes the jumping seem a little odd. Keep up the great work!
The game definitely gives off a very polished high-quality vibe that peeks my curiosity. Really interesting art and game feel so far. I would definitely purchase this game because it looks superior in quality compared to other games. What you showed has a potential to be a 10/10 game.
The camera doesn't need to move up with every part of the jump. In this way after 5min of playing we will get nausea. Camera should move up only when the character will be about 3/4 at the top of the screen. Also enemies are not standing out from the background, which will cause the problem with visibility in harder areas. Especially black bats are almost invisible. This can be addressed by adding option like - "simple background". Add an option to switch off screen shake.
I think it would be interesting if the bow had some extra utility, like shooting an arrow in the wall to use as a platform (rather than the standard wall jump and double jump abilities that's already in every other metroidvania), or shoot an arrow at the bottom of a moving platform to grab onto, stopping gears from turning etc.
Here's me, searching for devlogs to use as inspiration for one i might start soon, for my Metroidvania game based around archery-- Wait a minute XD yeah man, lol, i panicked when i saw this, like "omg someone already had this idea! 😭" But it's no biggie, I guess, my game will look and feel very different, specially combat wise ( since primarily the idea we had was a puzzle platformer, and now it will be like a puzzle Metroidvania, sort of ) But putting that aside- Gosh that looks really promising! I really loved the art and the flavor you put to combat feel was really good. Even the little bit of level design you showed caught my liking. I hope everything goes well! I am actually curious about the project but at the same time i think i should refrain from looking at it in the future to avoid, like, stealing your ideas or trying to do things differently from you for the sake of making our games less similar...
The world wouldn't mind if there are two archer metroidvanias, so just push on with your idea! We are constantly afraid of people saying that we are copy cats, but in reality the players love similarities between games.
@KnightOfInkGames haha, yeah. I got scared when I saw this video but soon I realized it doesn't matter aaaas much. I mean, our idea didn't come from this guy's xD
Well done with your progress so far, and thanks for sharing it! It's interesting hearing what you've learned from previous projects to be where you are now after one year of progress. Here's a thought dump from someone who's not dared put the time down to make a game themselves (so maybe take with a grain of salt): It's not easy to know what to do in what order in VG development. Just as you have learned to not do level design too early, I would avoid falling in love with the exact look of your game too early. AdamCYounis has some great vids on color and art style if you haven't seen them, even though he mostly does pixel art. Also, I'm very sure you're quite inspired by Hollow Knight visually, but it would be interesting to hear what other games you draw inspiration from. Do you draw inspiration from somewhere in the storytelling side of the game? For example. Looking forward to hear maybe what you think the scope of the game would be, and more of how it can differentiate itself from other games, how the bow shooting element should affect the rest of the game. Just a bunch of thoughts, might not make sense to consider them all at once. Good luck!
My fresh look: it is better not to adds windows /lights /plants everywhere in the tunnel, but to make places more unique: some places have lights, some have windows, some places with windows have plants, ... Is is important that main hero looks like fairy-tale alive garlic? If yes, why did he fights not against vampires?
Great so far! I think the player character gets lost in the colorful background sometimes. There isnt enough contrast between them and the environment. Especially since your game is ranged combat focused, you are often looking directly at the enemies instead of your character. Its sometimes hard to know exactly where the character is out of your peripheral vision. I could see losing track during intense combat or accidentally backpedaling off of a cliff while aiming at an enemy or something.
add a energy bar which fills over time while stretching the bow.The strength or range of your shot should scale with amount of energy loaded in the bar. Anyways this is only a suggestion!!
The ideia of using a bow to atack is a good ideia, maybe you should focus on building your world and mechanism around this core mechanic. Like forcing the playler to train their aim, or to use their bow to gain acess to a buttom, or diferente ways to use the arrows, like multiplo arrows or diferent affects, and interwined with ideas that reinforce the usage of the bow, something in your character that makes male combat a disadvantage, like low body armour, os slowness, because if your character don't have and advantage using the bow ,why couldn't he use anohter weapons?
nice work keep it up. Work a bit more on the cohesion of your world. Color/matching, why purple ? why green plants ? Dark blue and light pink seems to work like a charm with purple. Yellow is the complementary color. Because you use dark purple, you can use white shape, design to contrast. is it a haunted chastle where plants comes out of ruins or magic plants that grows everywhere ? Why bugs, why ladybugs ? are they gatekeeper ? haunted souls ? From a design perspective i would advice to either animate the eyes or remove them. Eyes that dont move feels very dead. (that's why most heros have helmet, hood, or no eyes like hollow knight). Can you move while shooting ? One of the fun that comes from sword fight is that you have to reposition yourself. With arrow you dont have so much so it might break a bit of the dyanmic. Keep that in mind. i think a slight sound of wind would accentuate the feeling of the fog. Dont forget that your environnement tells story about your world. What is the story of this place ? I think you can surcharge evenmore the foreground with "shadows of stuff". It seems less flat. Good luck for the next stuff ^^
The presentation is excellent-very well done! However, I’d recommend reserving the screen shake for more impactful moments. Having a bug trigger it feels a bit excessive and diminishes its effect.
You need to separate more things on different layers, the parallax feels too flat. Also, everything looks a bit to samey in terms of repeating objects and patterns. Animations also need work, and game feel stuff like landing animation or jump intro are missing. Keep it up!
I am surprised to see another metroidvania with an onion looking main character. Layers Deep also has that. It's not that I mind it, it's just an interesting choice
Wishlist Cloverskar on Steam!
store.steampowered.com/app/3420870/Cloverskar/
That looks absolutely stunning, well done. Looking forward to seeing more of this project.
A few design ideas/questions that ocurred to me:
Seeing the backgrounds and the bat enemies, and that you play as garlic, I imagine you're going for a vampire slayer setting? But then I saw the ladybugs and butterflies and got slightly perplexed by the theming. What do you have in mind for the world?
And in the same way, the gliding with bat wings weird. One could argue you're stealing the wings of a vampire and using it, which would be raw, but I think the gimmicks should weaponize your mcs defining elements, the garlic and bow and arrow. A hook arrow for platforming comes to mind quickly, but a glider has many possible interpretations. It could be a garlic shaped hot air baloon like (using a flaming arrow as your fire) or a cape of garlic leaves.
Lol I know I'm way too late but maybe he has a plan to take the bat wing ability later from a boss or something. It would make sense as its a metroidvania
I normally don't watch devlog #1's cause 9 times out of 10 the project never goes anywhere. But seeing that yours has 1 year of development and looks promising is inspiring.
One suggestion. Maybe give some slight animation or movement to the environment. Slight sways to the plants or flickering of the lights. The world looks eerily still atm.
I notices that the green plants do have some sway to them, but maybe adding that to the vines would help liven it up as you say. And a little flicker to pulse on the lamps might be nice.
Looks good! I think the camera shake may be a little to much. Also, the hitstop imo should only apply to the participants in the interaction. If it were a melee attack, yes te player should freeze too, but it being a ranged attack, only the enemy that has been hit should freeze. What do u think?
Thanks! Yeah, that makes sense, I will definitely play around with those things a bit more. Thanks for the feedback!
I think the hitstop affecting everything should be kept. That's usually how hitstop works in games. If it only affected the enemy, it would be really unnoticeable, I think. And it might even look like a hiccup on the knock back animation
Looks very cool, the art is amazing. Looking forward to following the journey and good luck!
Looks great!
Perhaps have the arrows stick into surfaces and enemies and on the killing blow have the enemies body then fall to the ground (think a ragdoll). Would look super cool to have the bodies of bosses have dozens of arrows sticking to them.
That was sooooo satisfying to watch!! And I learned a lot of things! Thank u
Thank you! Glad you enjoyed it!
Looks awesome and learned some cool stuff from this video. look forward to following the journey.
Wow, hey, this is a really nicely done video with clear explanations, definitely a hidden gem. Looking forward to more updates! I hope you channel catches the wind of the algorithm so more people can see your progress.
Thanks! I'm looking forward to posting more updates too
i like this video ahahehah One Year of Making a Metroidvania - Devlog #1
That looks amazing! Thank you for letting us Part of the development. Keep going!
Thank you!
The game looks really awesome! The art and arrow mechanics are verrrrry nice. I'd like to give the demo a try sometime in the future.
This looks really cool, thanks for showing your progress!
I thought I'd just mention that something about the gravity doesn't seem right. Maybe the player accelerates downward too quickly? It makes the jumping seem a little odd.
Keep up the great work!
Wishlisted
looks amazing, can't wait for more
Thanks!
Looks really cool in my opinion. Pls go on.
The game definitely gives off a very polished high-quality vibe that peeks my curiosity. Really interesting art and game feel so far. I would definitely purchase this game because it looks superior in quality compared to other games. What you showed has a potential to be a 10/10 game.
Looks amazing!
The camera doesn't need to move up with every part of the jump. In this way after 5min of playing we will get nausea. Camera should move up only when the character will be about 3/4 at the top of the screen.
Also enemies are not standing out from the background, which will cause the problem with visibility in harder areas. Especially black bats are almost invisible.
This can be addressed by adding option like - "simple background". Add an option to switch off screen shake.
I think it would be interesting if the bow had some extra utility, like shooting an arrow in the wall to use as a platform (rather than the standard wall jump and double jump abilities that's already in every other metroidvania), or shoot an arrow at the bottom of a moving platform to grab onto, stopping gears from turning etc.
Yeah, that's something I will definitely consider. It's always nice when weapons have a purpose outside of combat
Here's me, searching for devlogs to use as inspiration for one i might start soon, for my Metroidvania game based around archery-- Wait a minute
XD yeah man, lol, i panicked when i saw this, like "omg someone already had this idea! 😭"
But it's no biggie, I guess, my game will look and feel very different, specially combat wise ( since primarily the idea we had was a puzzle platformer, and now it will be like a puzzle Metroidvania, sort of )
But putting that aside- Gosh that looks really promising! I really loved the art and the flavor you put to combat feel was really good. Even the little bit of level design you showed caught my liking. I hope everything goes well!
I am actually curious about the project but at the same time i think i should refrain from looking at it in the future to avoid, like, stealing your ideas or trying to do things differently from you for the sake of making our games less similar...
The world wouldn't mind if there are two archer metroidvanias, so just push on with your idea! We are constantly afraid of people saying that we are copy cats, but in reality the players love similarities between games.
@KnightOfInkGames haha, yeah. I got scared when I saw this video but soon I realized it doesn't matter aaaas much.
I mean, our idea didn't come from this guy's xD
Well done with your progress so far, and thanks for sharing it! It's interesting hearing what you've learned from previous projects to be where you are now after one year of progress. Here's a thought dump from someone who's not dared put the time down to make a game themselves (so maybe take with a grain of salt):
It's not easy to know what to do in what order in VG development. Just as you have learned to not do level design too early, I would avoid falling in love with the exact look of your game too early. AdamCYounis has some great vids on color and art style if you haven't seen them, even though he mostly does pixel art. Also, I'm very sure you're quite inspired by Hollow Knight visually, but it would be interesting to hear what other games you draw inspiration from. Do you draw inspiration from somewhere in the storytelling side of the game? For example. Looking forward to hear maybe what you think the scope of the game would be, and more of how it can differentiate itself from other games, how the bow shooting element should affect the rest of the game.
Just a bunch of thoughts, might not make sense to consider them all at once. Good luck!
lovely
this game looks awesome, you won me
You explained really well. Good game 🎯
You need a music writer? I would love to do it
My fresh look: it is better not to adds windows /lights /plants everywhere in the tunnel, but to make places more unique: some places have lights, some have windows, some places with windows have plants, ...
Is is important that main hero looks like fairy-tale alive garlic? If yes, why did he fights not against vampires?
Great so far! I think the player character gets lost in the colorful background sometimes. There isnt enough contrast between them and the environment. Especially since your game is ranged combat focused, you are often looking directly at the enemies instead of your character. Its sometimes hard to know exactly where the character is out of your peripheral vision. I could see losing track during intense combat or accidentally backpedaling off of a cliff while aiming at an enemy or something.
The orange of the lights is too intense, but very nice decorations
add a energy bar which fills over time while stretching the bow.The strength or range of your shot should scale with amount of energy loaded in the bar.
Anyways this is only a suggestion!!
maybe a "perfect shot" if u hit it just right
The ideia of using a bow to atack is a good ideia, maybe you should focus on building your world and mechanism around this core mechanic. Like forcing the playler to train their aim, or to use their bow to gain acess to a buttom, or diferente ways to use the arrows, like multiplo arrows or diferent affects, and interwined with ideas that reinforce the usage of the bow, something in your character that makes male combat a disadvantage, like low body armour, os slowness, because if your character don't have and advantage using the bow ,why couldn't he use anohter weapons?
nice work keep it up. Work a bit more on the cohesion of your world. Color/matching, why purple ? why green plants ? Dark blue and light pink seems to work like a charm with purple. Yellow is the complementary color. Because you use dark purple, you can use white shape, design to contrast. is it a haunted chastle where plants comes out of ruins or magic plants that grows everywhere ? Why bugs, why ladybugs ? are they gatekeeper ? haunted souls ? From a design perspective i would advice to either animate the eyes or remove them. Eyes that dont move feels very dead. (that's why most heros have helmet, hood, or no eyes like hollow knight). Can you move while shooting ? One of the fun that comes from sword fight is that you have to reposition yourself. With arrow you dont have so much so it might break a bit of the dyanmic. Keep that in mind. i think a slight sound of wind would accentuate the feeling of the fog. Dont forget that your environnement tells story about your world. What is the story of this place ? I think you can surcharge evenmore the foreground with "shadows of stuff". It seems less flat. Good luck for the next stuff ^^
The presentation is excellent-very well done! However, I’d recommend reserving the screen shake for more impactful moments. Having a bug trigger it feels a bit excessive and diminishes its effect.
Thanks for the feedback! Yeah, I see what you mean, makes sense
You need to separate more things on different layers, the parallax feels too flat. Also, everything looks a bit to samey in terms of repeating objects and patterns. Animations also need work, and game feel stuff like landing animation or jump intro are missing.
Keep it up!
I am surprised to see another metroidvania with an onion looking main character. Layers Deep also has that. It's not that I mind it, it's just an interesting choice
hi alekX, Do you create the assets yourself, or you hire an artist to do it?
suggestion: make the glide not be wings but have it be a clover that sprouts from the characters head and spins
The game is looking insane
Id love to do the music for it
Is there any place I could contact you at?
Is it already wishlistable on steam?
Steampage?
Steam page coming soon! Waiting to be approved
Try an auto aiming, which will speed up the combat a bit\
bow and arrow? Minecraft clone