I'll definitely play more of it later, but for now, have a rant about the menu:

The buttons are just badly designed. They're too short, too wide, the text touches the upper and lower boundary, the extra outline is unnecessary, and there's little colour contrast between the text and the background. All of this makes them hard to read (and the size makes them hard to press).

They would be okay with keyboard controls, but not for a mouse-based game. Personally, I'd recommend having a 2x2 button grid on the main screen with larger font and less complex button outline.

Character selection is slick (reminds me of DoTA2), but I challenge you to try and select the first character ability… 99% of the time, the mouse rolls over to the character on the left, but the selection box still ends up displayed… ugh.

I would seriously recommend squeezing all character ability descriptions in one place (a bit smaller font, maybe?) and lsit them together when you select a character. The reason I mention it is also because it would also be awesome to be able to display full descriptions in-game (in the Escape menu, for example - it's already there and it's a bit empty, and I actually pressed Escape to go back to the menu and read ability descriptions again…).

Final thing about the menu: the fire in the back is cool, but it's pointlessly distracting. Actually, I feel like the menu style looks out of place in this game, it has a dark/industrial feeling to it, unlike the actual game.

As for the gameplay - I see you've implemented some of my suggestions :D The abilities control much better now. I'm yet to seriously test out various characters. I got stuck in a tree once though :(

Edit: I just saw the "Meet Buckwheat" screen and it's pretty good. Now, if you could only integrate a display like that with character selection screen… that'd be perfect (apart from the button outlines and hard-to-read text ;)).

Thanks for that feedback Cesque, I always appreciate your well thought out criticism. It gives me a lot to work on and improve.

Edit: I tried a few different looks for the buttons, (including more square-sized) and wasn't feeling it aesthetically. However, I did take away the second outline and I darkened the boxes a bit. Now, they're much easier to read and click. Even the main news nav bar buttons are bigger!

I also made the little carousel hero selection menu more spaced out, as well as slower moving. The skill icons are much easier to hover over now, and no overlap!

I really like your idea to fit the hero ability descriptions in the pause menu. I'm running into a bit of a snag displaying it all, since the resolution is zoomed and the font I'm using is already super small, but of course appears big on screen. I'll figure it out.

I also improved tooltip functionality. They're much less wonky now. And they no longer go off the screen!

Didn't get to play for very long, but I'll comment on a few things I noticed:

- Dang there's a lot of heroes to choose from. I played as the snow fellow, the sand fellow, and the revolver fellow; they seemed balanced, though I had a bit more luck with the ranged characters.

- Enemies: there was a lot more variety here than I expected, and some of their behaviors (i.e. that one enemy that grabs lights and covers/moves them) made me almost sad that they got thrown at me so quickly and seemingly haphazardly.

- Menus: mostly what Cesque said. Though I should also mention I found the character select to be a bit finicky, mostly because it scrolls continuously based on mouse position (i.e. there's no dead zone where I can just let the mouse sit still to let me read things).

- Controls: I had no idea how to use the skills at first. I sort of remember things being mentioned in past blogs about having to double tap to select or something, and eventually was able to try out a couple of the skills by doing that I guess?? That's still confusing me actually. Plus there's that "Press key to do level up" message that pops up and begs the question wait which key. At which point much random button-pressing ensues.

- Another controls thing: possibility of making attacks full auto? Having to click LMB continuously was a bit tiring.

- Collisions: I got stuck around trees a lot, and that plus one or two enemies often meant getting cornered and dying.

- Readability: the graphics look nice, but trying to distinguish what's an enemy from what's a tree from what's a dismembered body part got rather difficult fast. And then those invisible guys come out at night and I would only realize they were there because I was getting bumped from whatever direction and losing health bleghh

- Sound effects? Would help with giving the player feedback on what's happening (ref.: previous sentence about invisible enemies).

Also, got this error when I died as Siku with the 3rd skill selected:

Overall, fairly fun pixelly chaos. This comment is far longer than I meant it to be so I am going to stop typing now. Yes. Good.

Thanks for that colseed. I'll fix that bug up right away.

I'm going to add that 'dead zone' you're talking about tonight–for sure that's just a no-brainer. I agree with the whole 'controls being confusing' thing. I think the game controls much better now than it used to, but there needs to be some kind of full tutorial detailing the controls and each enemy. That's another big item on my check-list.

I've considered actually doing the waves in a way where they are added progressively. So, for example, at wave one all you fight are basic melee barbarians and slimes. Then wave two, a new enemy is added for both day and night. Then another, and another, until they're all there. Thought on this?

And I'm finally about to sign a contract with a sound designer, so hopefully sound will be coming very soon.

That'd probably be good yeah - that way each of the different enemy types get to be showcased, and the player doesn't get blindsided by new types being introduced at random times. Makes progression more apparent, too, so there's more of a meter on how far players like me have to go before getting clothing becomes more than a distant possibility :p

Sound developments and control stuffs sound good too though yup.

BRACE YOURSELF FOR A WALL OF TEXT!

I'll start with the good:

The characters are varied and yet, from my experience, pretty balanced. Most importantly, melee characters and ranged characters are almost perfectly balanced! If there are any balancing issues, it mostly boils down to problems with individual skills, not characters as a whole (then again, I haven't played all of the characters yet).

I really applaud your creativity when it comes to character abilities. My favourites are:

- Chamber's dual revolvers

- Baqir's sand screen

- Grove Ranger's trip wires

- Boar Lord's war pig (everything about it)

That being said, I think you should still address some general problems before than adding more and more characters, because the holy rule of indie games is, no one will see your content if they get bored or annoyed in the first three minutes >_>

There are two basic issues I have with general gameplay:

General Issue 1: Scale and proportions

The game window is very small, and the game is very fast-based - plus, you can't really see anything behind you due to the way the view works. This basically means you can't plan your path ahead, and randomly die because you bump into enemies you didn't see while fighting the ones you did see.

I would suggest increasing the size of the window, increasing the size of the battlefield, keeping more distance between the trees, and reducing the impact of mouse direction on the view (i.e. the view centre being closer to the player, less difference between how much you see ahead and behind you).

Alternatively, maybe enemy AI could be changed to less Crimsonland-style enemies and more "local" enemies (but going on random patrols), which drop pursuit when you hide behind trees or something like that. I mean, some characters already almost feel like they're more of a "stealthy" type (like the Ranger).

In either case, there's a related problem, namely: Movement speed upgrades are useless. Actually, no… they're not so much useless as anti-useful. Speed boost is one of those things that sounds good on paper, but in practice, descends into randomly bumping into enemies and obstacles. Totems granting a movement speed boost are the top offenders (Ranger's fire place skill), because they're self-defeating (you move faster, so you randomly end up leaving the totem range). I'd say scratch movement speed power-ups and totem/skill bonuses or make them boost attack speed only, except for skills which grant temporary (or controllable) boost paired with other benefits (e.g. pig riding, slime trail and dodge moves are fine!).

General Issue 2: Collision detection

Basically, your collision detection sucks. This is a much bigger problem than the first one, because you get randomly stuck, get jerked between objects, and worst of all, enemies can get kicked out of level boundaries and can't be killed, then randomly crawl out and kill you or even shoot through the boundary (the same happens to your summons, they can get lost out of map).

The trees are the worst, it's hard to tell if a projectile goes through it or not, and if you come too close to them attacking the tree won't destroy it. This is basic stuff, but really important for a fast-paced game: collisions should be checked *before* displacing objects (or not), visible attack graphics should overlap with their collision masks, and melee attacks should include the centre of the player.

Also, there are stun attacks, but I think having simple "push enemies away" abilities would also be good and very useful (except this requires better collision detection ;)).

More specific complaints / comments / suggestions:

Ranged attack enemies need nerfing.

I don't see too much problem with melee enemies (though they can randomly swarm you), or even the casters that paralyse you, but enemy archers are ridiculously overpowered and hard to deal with. I think the fairest thing to do would be to drastically cut their health, so that they can die in one or two hits max. It would also be good to have sound cues for when they are ABOUT to shoot and when they ACTUALLY shoot, but of course this also means…

THIS GAME NEEDS SOUND!

Apart from the above, and apart from the obvious sound effects for attacks, getting hit, etc., adding sound effects for things like a level-up and "ability ready" could drastically improve general "player experience" and reduce the need for having to look around different parts of the screen to figure stuff out.

Abilities making use of objects (corpses, trees) should have broader range.

I'm talking about abilities like "eat tree", "eat corpse" and "tripwire". They're very useful… in theory, anyway, because with enemies around, most of the time it's impossible to use them. Ranger's tree-involving abilities are the worst, you pretty much have to step ON the tree in order to place tripwires. It'd be much better if the game simply recognised the nearest tree/corpse/etc. if you were somewhere in close range.

The paths that spawn enemies are confusing.

I see you've implemented a way for enemies to appear, but I think it does more harm than good (especially the invisible boundary). There's no indication you can't enter the routes around the level, and there's no indication enemies can shoot you from there… so it's pretty unfair on the player. At the very least, the blocked-off area should be marked with a different background or something like this, but I'd suggest somehow reworking it (maybe let the player walk down into those paths, but spawn enemies with temporary invincibility to prevent camping?).

Miscellaneous comments / suggestions

1. Get rid of numbers over the healthbar and use batter-style bars instead (or maybe hearts). The problem with the current healthbar is that whenever I peek at it, I automatically read the numbers (that's how the human mind works), but they're a bitch to read because they're so small, so I randomly take damage before I figure them out. Healthbar AND numbers over it are simply redundant, combining both into some intuitive display would be better…

2. It'd be great if enemies had some basic looping animation to make them easier to tell apart from the background (sometimes they're hard to see until it's too late - and I mean during daylight).

3. Instead of snarky comments about how much I suck (:<), why not display which enemy killed me? Sometimes I'd really like to know! (hell, you could even show a spinning model of the enemy, like some sort of 2d kill-cam…)

4. I initially thought getting stunned and not being able to attack OR move was just too brutal, but to be honest, I rarely actually died as a result of being stunned, so I wouldn't say it's really that imbalanced…

5. While there are descriptions for what passive abilities do, sometimes it's confusing what upgrading them does (see below on Chamber).

6. General issue with totems: they're almost useless at level 1 because of no range, they're completely overpowered at level 4. My suggestion is to increase their range at level 1, reduce (or eliminate) range upgrades with level and instead only give more totems to place per upgrade.

Character-specific comments

Chamber: I think he's my favourite guy, the dual pistol ability is really well thought-out. Didn't really invest in evade (moving back in this game is DANGEROUS). The abilities involving silver bullets are confusing, in particular, his fourth skill. I never saw any visual indication of focus mode (maybe I actually didn't kill 6 enemies in the right window of time?) and it's unclear what upgrading the ability does (extend its duration?). I also coulsdn't really see when I was shooting silver bullets instead of regular ones…

Princess: Two problems. One, the arrow displaying corpses on the HUD isn't particularly useful. Seeing the direction the corpse is in isn't a problem, seeing THE CORPSE ITSELF is a problem (they're dark and easily blend in). Perhaps the ability should highlight corpses (say, make the closest corpse temporarily flash red or something). The second problem is that the Rage ability is outright pointless IMHO. 3 health is a lot, and the result is increased speed (which does more harm than good, see above), immunity to stun (which isn't a big deal) and increased attack speed (which still depends on your mouse-clicking skill, and to be honest, if you have full health, you don't NEED attack bonuses). My suggestion: change it to temporary invincibility (with movement and attack speed increase) at the cost of half your health, or maybe even reducing your health to 1 (and you can't use it when you're health is already at this level). Then it could work as a desperation attack.

Grove Ranger: I already mentioned some problem-causing issues with tripwires and eating trees (range). His abilities are all quite interesting and balanced EXCEPT for the fireplace totem, which is rather pointless. The Ranger must move around to attack, getting stuck in one place is pretty much death. In one of your earlier blogs you mentioned having an extra stun trap instead of that, maybe go back to this? It feels more "in character" for this guy. Alternatively, change the totem to increasing attack speed and attack damage only (and see my comment on totem range).

Korak: I didn't really find too much use in grappling, but that's because my top priority was putting as many points into the healing totem as possible. Because, you know, having three healing totems with giant range around you pretty much overshadows everything else :p Oddly enough, it still didn't make me overpowered, and I still died random dumb deaths. So yeah.

Mire: A very interesting character, but his clone ability is very confusing. At first I thought it lets you swap places with the clone when you get hit. Because, you see, shooting a projectile at a temporary clone to swap places with it has absolutely zero combat use. It sounds like an escape route, but it has zero-reliability, so I think something closer to my concept would make more sense…

That's enough for now I think…

Aight, I wouldn't say it's perfect, but it's definitely better ;)

Alright, we'll see when you released a new version :}

Cesque, thanks again. A lot for me to work on there. I actually really like how much 'give' the mouse has as far as the aiming goes–I kind of liked the idea that it restricts your vision behind you. However, and I fought this for a long time, but I'm going to increase the resolution slightly and make the game window larger as you suggested. I'm playing with it right now and although it messed up the shading on the text (not a big deal) I do think it makes things easier to visualize fully, and lets you see much more of what's on the screen.

Here's what it looked like before:

And now: (easier to see the difference with images opened in new tab)

Game window is 800x600 now (up from 640x480). This also gives me much more room on the pause screen to display ability descriptions.

You're right, the collisions blow. I just now put something in to make them a little better… I'm still not sure it's perfect, but the hero will 'slide' off of things easier now.

And–I'm excited to announce that I just finished signing the contract and Bryan Ploof (www.bryanploof.com) will be the sound designer for hack&/.

Edited over the course of the day:

Also, as you suggested, I increased the range for both Princess's Consume Body ability and Grove Ranger's Consume Tree and Wire Trap. I also added a red outline to show which tree/body is being targeted. This also works for Princess's Bloat ability (which helps a TON).

I also really like your suggested rework of Princess's Rage ability–granting immunity and lowering her health to 1 sounds great. I've went ahead and made that change. I also took your advice on Korak's Totem ability–you can now place 4 (1 on level 1, 2 on level 2, etc.) but they all have a small AOE. I think it made things interesting with him, now–you have to decide to clump your totems up and play tanky or space them out and utilize Grapple Vine to be mobile. I've also lowered ranged enemy health, and I'm currently testing that change.

@colseed: I added your suggestions on wave progression. Now, the player starts out facing only melee barbarians and slimes. Each new day, two new (random) enemy types are added.

Also, I'm now considering changing the Speed Rune to the God Rune… Temporary invulnerability.

Quick update.

Lots of work being put into version 2.2. Tons of quality-of-life stuff and a ton of technical annoyances have been fixed. Online high scores have been added!

The Wardrobe has been getting a lot of attention this patch, too.

And a host of new items have been added as well!

Bryan Ploof has also been hard at work creating sound effects for the game–hopefully I can add a few in for the next patch!