Wow, great feedback you gave him, Gerald, I'm definitely going to ask you to test my game ;-)
I just played it, here are my impressions:
- music is perfect, don't know where you got it, but if you made the music yourself, kudos
- you really need to destroy bullets after a safe distance, got a lot of cheap deaths because of it
- I know you're channeling the ever-awesome "Rambo"/'Nam thing, but the "coolie hats" on the enemies might be considered insensitive, just saying
- when moving diagonally, you should allow the player to "skim" along walls, it feels odd to come to a complete stop, especially since the walls don't offer any protection
- totally agree that the player should be in the lower quadrant (or at least third) of the bottom of the screen... the first tank was killed off-screen, which kind of was a let-down as I wanted to see if I was actually hitting it and wanted to watch it die. Fighting in the open with the tank wasn't a possibility given the constraint of the level design and sheer fire power of the tank!
- LOVE the truck that picks you up at the end, can you make it drive away after it picks you up?
- many enemies come flying in so fast that it's a twich reflex to kill them, but 90% of the time even though you can be quick enough to kill them, their bullet kills you, too.
- after "Game Over" (love that the picture of "dead dad" also has the cigarette dangling out of his mouth) how do you continue and play again?
Anyway, super-fast, addictive in that "gotta try it one more time" vein, really fun!
Hey man
Your feedback is very much appreciated as well. It's honestly so much fun to have people caring enough about something you made to take time off their day and comment on it. Also supervaluable from a dev standpoint, especially when the feedback is on point like yours.
- So the music is made by Moose (@moose_tunes on twitter) which I've had onboard for the project since fall 2016. He's super talented and have been in line with the vision of the game from day one, so big up to Moose!
- Your point about bullets are 100% true and definitely on my to-do-list. So the last change I did to them was despawning them after death due to Gerald's feedback, but the fact that their range has no limits is a problem I'm aware of.
- Okay so let's talk about the "touchy subject" of the Vietcong-style hats. I'd like to get it out there that while at times borrowing heavily, this game doesn't aim to represent a real life conflict, and to the extent that it does it's seen through the glasses of a stereotypical, hostile, Americanized view. There was a real tendency in video games and culture more generally during the cold war to frame certain conflicts in a simplified and, looking back on it, a very grotesque way. I've drawn inspiration from old school shooters that has these issues in their core (NAM-1975 for example), and while I respect many of these games in a strict gameplay sense they are completely lobotomized culturally.
My intention has been to take the brutal undertones of these early NES and Neo Geo military shooters and put them in overdrive to highlight how crazy they are from a human standpoint. Death Brigade puts you in this very chauvinistic and ultraviolent setting typical for these games, and then amps it up throughout the missions to the point where you start questioning WTF you're being told to do in it. That's my initial intention at least. I want to stress that I'm not glorifying the cultural content of these games but trying (maybe failing) to deliver a satiric retrospect on this genre of games.
- I'll look into the possibility of moving diagonally while near a wall. Really good point!
- Hah, I'll have to try and satisfy your need to watch things die. No, but I agree that the camera is off currently and displays things you don't need on-screen while not showing the things you want to see. Being worked on!
- Thanks man
The truck is definitely WIP with regards to sound, and also movement.
- So my best tip on this would be to constantly move, the bullet moves to where you were when it was fired. So landing that twitch kill while instantly dodging in a direction is a decently secure way to avoid the deadly deaths of Death Brigade! *sigh..
- Currently you have to shut down the client after a game over and then boot the game up anew. It's not optimal and you can rest assured that a restart button is being added
As a temporary fix you can use the F1-F4 keys to swap between levels, which I'm using for dev purposes. Pressing F1(for the tutorial stage) or F2(for the first stage) would let you do a hacky restart atm.
Thanks for taking your time to write this. Really helps me get a fresh perspective on the game