itch.io

Don't put ai slop out there like you're trying to make a business or even a good impression out of it. You've done two terrible things and one very foolish thing:

1. Your art--all of it--looks like it was made with AI. Gamers hate AI. We don't want it encroaching on our everyday lives, our work, or our games. The fact that you used it for everything indicates that you do not have a sincere idea for a game. It's one thing if you needed a placeholder for some UI or couldn't afford a translator. Your whole art direction is coming from a computer-generated slurry of stolen art. 
2. In addition to using all-AI art, you said your game is inspired by Hollow Knight and are dressing up your characters like Hollow Knight archetypes--characters from an infinitely better, complete, highly regarded franchise. NEVER remind your players of a better game unless at least part of your own game has unique, interesting, and fun ideas in it! If you don't do this, players will sour harder on your game! Your demo has none of these things.
3. Finally, the foolish part: Your game is incompetently put together. It's not ready to show anybody yet. You didn't polish any of the systems. For example, if you jump into an attacking enemy, you bounce straight up and down on that enemy until you die. Enemies get stuck in attack loops. The movement is slow and lumbering. Attacks don't consistently connect (poor hitbox/hitbox detection). The UI is incomplete. Why would you want to show random people this game in such an incomplete state? What do you think we're gonna say? "Moving feels bad," "Attacks don't always land," "I'm stuck in a death loop every time I jump into this enemy," "The UI isn't finished," "This just looks like a test room for a Newgrounds platformer."

Get an original idea. Write those ideas down. Forget about making art assets for a while. Finalize the high-level scope of your game. Finish designing the systems and make sure they work. THEN you can put some energy into recruiting actual artists for your game. You will have to win them over with level design sketches, blockouts, and a proof of concept demo of your character moving gracefully through a test room. This is the least you should do. It sounds like a lot, but anything less is a joke. You won't be able to recruit and hold onto a good artist (who you will probably try to make work for free) unless you can prove that your game will probably be finished and deserves to be released.

AI Slop (incompetently designed systems, interactions, ui, general gameplay too)

Scorsese movies are infamously bloated nowadays. You should actually be trying to cut as much content as you can to have a coherent story and making what's left as polished as you can make it. That's how you make a good impression.

I can tell you that I've never finished episodic video-games and each instalment felt like it lacked the coherence and dramatic hook to stand on its own. You should be wary of this as I am specifically thinking of Song of Horror, which was trying to be the next Silent Hill 2-4. It had its own specific gameplay problems, but I had no idea what was going on or why I should care three very separate chapters into the game. Don't let that happen to your game.

Again, I strongly advise you against episodic releases and encourage you to narrow your vision.

ditto. It seems to fuck up the map. Not sure if it's immediate or you have to die or sleep for the bug to happen.

I love the game, but it started getting buggy at the start of the third night. The rooms being displayed stopped matching the game's internal logic. This is probably from activating the switch that rotates one of the rooms. I think you have to sleep for this bug to begin happening. I couldn't pass through doors and could pass through walls because the game seemed to think I was in another location. Also, when I put my sword in the stone to open the sword door, when I died, I would seemingly spawn without the sword? I could get it if I interacted with the stone again. But it's possible that it was just sheathed and I needed to press down arrow to get it out again. This isn't explained in the game. Also, when the game started getting buggy, talking to the NPC at the entrance shows that the number of gold we need to collect is "1", but I had 24 gold (even though I collected much more than that) and I couldn't hand it over.

I think the game is very engrossing but you need to work out the bugs.

...unless you have a Playstation controller

The game doesn't work with my PS4 controller and I do not think there is a way to enable it since DS4 Windows is gone now

I am very late to this party but I've known about it for a while. Now I have finally played the demo, and to completion. Here are my thoughts:

I love the visuals. The environments are beautiful and the enemies are very imaginative and well-animated. Great job!

1) I recognize that possibly ALL of these issues have been addressed at this point.

2) I use my PS4 controller with DS4Windows to play emulated games, so I know that it works. I didn't change any key mappings before playing Another Crusade, but when I tried to navigate the menu with the digital pad, it didn't work. The buttons are mixed up in battle also. My gamepad buttons were displayed in different places (in fact, your game thought some of them were XBOX buttons!) I guess it's still possible something went wrong on my end before playing, but I can't imagine what. I had to use my keyboard to play your game.

3) The placement of the buttons were different in the demo (for me) from their actual positions on my gamepad. For example, the X (confirm) button is on the bottom of the PS4 controller, but your demo mapped it to the left. Very weird, not very intuitive. Again, this could have been a messup with DS4Windows but the game wouldn't recognize the controller without it so I don't know....

4) Minor translation issues. "Demon King Arc" should be "Arch Demon King" because in English we put adjectives BEFORE nouns. There was at least one other thing but I can't remember, so it must not have been a big deal. Americans love to tell people how they should do things and we aren't hard to find in and around Mexico, so if you ever have a translation or dialect question, please ask us on Discord! Or if you want to keep it more secret, Cross the US-Mexico border, go to the curb outside Starbucks, and hire one of the many homeless Americans looking for gigs! You can pay us in pesos or OxyContin! :P

5) I agree with the other reviewers that the timed-hit system is WAY too unforgiving right now. I saw a comment about "principles of animation" (zeesh!) but the real problem is you don't have sound effect signals to que the player into when they need to press the button. Doing that will go a long way to solving this problem. However, I will also remind you that SMRPG allows players to mash the button almost as much as they want before the timed-hit pass/fail frames open up. Consider doing this:
    i) Create unique sound effects for the moment when players should press the button for ALL enemies.
    ii) Double (?) the number of frames allotted for "Great!" and "Perfect!" timed hits.
    iii) ALLOW players you mash buttons all they want up until a few frames BEFORE the "Great!" frames open. The reason for this is that players commonly press keys by accident while they are learning, and sometimes long after they know better. There isn't any feedback when a player fails the timed-hit test anyway, so it is a better to restrict failure to just the few frames before correct input would be accepted.

Also, part of the issue at the start of the game is that Rai attacks very quickly with his sword but other enemies attack very slowly. I am not just talking about slow windups, either. The delivering blows are also significantly slower. It throws players off. At least synchronize the blows between the player character and the enemies in the first area.

6) The music in the forest hurt my ears, I'm sorry.

7) I love how the characters look like they might have been carved. I think Niro's mouth could have a little more fidelity though.

8) Area 2 boss: The current strategy forces players to throw away turns attacking an enemy who can't be hurt until Niro's magic meter fills again. There isn't a strategy that avoids it because atacking is the only way to refill it. Consider updating the strategy if you haven't already. You might look to Chrono Cross (whose battle system was VERY flawed), as they allowed defensive maneuvers to refill the Tech bar the same way attacking does.

9) Please get LOTS of playtester feedback for EVERY AREA before you release. I can already see there will need to be a lot of fine-tuning to get the timed hits to a place where some players don't get so frustrated they quit in the first area. Some encounters will take a long time to feel balanced. This is the game I have been waiting decades for, but I want everyone to enjoy it.


Thank you so much for letting us play this demo! I can't wait to see more!