Lost Call Demo 2

love this demo!!!! havent 100%ed it yet but i am having such a good time with it. gonna leave some feedback based on my first playthrough (where i got to both towers).

THINGS I LIKED
1) originality!! i looooved all the different abilities you had, they felt so unique from any zelda-like/metroidvania i've played while still being easy to pick up.

2) music! i liked how seamlessly the transitions were between areas and the use of different sound fonts

3) differentiating areas using colour and sound was very cool, i like that concept a lot.

4) challenging enough to keep me playing for way longer than i anticipated, plus left me excited about all the other stuff i could explore. ik ppl have been saying that the pink circle boss was really tricky but i found it to be a great level of difficulty. currently stuck on the boss in the well :P

THINGS THAT COULD BE IMPROVED
1) diagonal rolls, or maybe being able to cancel a roll early. the rolling mechanic was fun but it felt too limiting at times

2) adding a way to give u a boost on the skateboard without getting off and on it again. maybe there's a mechanic for that but if so i've not been able to figure it out

3) more of a robust map, with markers and clearer visuals as to where you are. which ik will come with time so i'm not super fussed about it rn lol

4) more people, or at least more dialogue options. still havent unlocked all the cassettes but id like it if the old dog in the pink town when u first meet had more things to say.

overall, really loved this demo :) super fun and rewarding! would recommend

Super fun and creative! The skateboarding and raft mechanics were definite highlights for me. The bosses were hard but generally felt fair, with the exception being the circular one since the shockwaves are spaced really awkwardly for the roll length. In general the most frustrating parts for me were trying to roll across obstacles - maybe I just suck but I spent a lot of time falling off edges lol. I know it's a demo but a more detailed map would have definitely helped me know where I hadn't been yet, I ended up doing a lot of backtracking and walking in circles. 

A few minor notes:

- The characters are cute but all look pretty similar

- The seamless music transitions were really cool!

- I love being able to access the boss in the well almost immediately, I wasn't able to beat it until I had a bunch more hearts and the megaphone but it's cool that if you're good you could get its reward early

- Make it more noticeable when you get hit? Especially at the beginning I wasn't noticing when I was losing health...

- Being able to walk/roll diagonally would make the combat less frustrating

- I somehow walked right past the skateboard and spent way too long in that area trying to figure out where to go before backtracking and eventually finding it. Again maybe I'm just dumb lol but could it be easier to spot?

Overall this game is super cute and fun with creative items and an awesome interconnected map!

A warping system would improve the flow so you can go back places easier. A map would help a lot too. 

add a frog that hurt your feelings  

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the game!

I could not 100% it since I didn't know where else to go, but I got like 90% of the stuff. I really liked the raft mechanic. Someone mentioned that it was hard to control on pc, but I had no problem, you just have to hold down the blow drier button as you switch directions. The reward for the hardest raft ride being a salad was a bit disappointing tho xD

I had no big problem with any of the enemies. Except for maybe the fight in the sewer where you get swarmed, that one was a bit tough, but I still figured out a strategy. Maybe you're supposed to have the megaphone for that fight? Also it's possible to cheese the final fight by jumping off. Maybe just put walls around it?

It was not very obvious who you needed to talk to with the tapes. I thought I had to find an item to play them.

Just finished playing and 100%ing the demo and I have to say it was overall enjoyable, but this one section with 3 windmills and a boat for a salad. Jezz that one was quite frustrating.

I think my biggest gripe is with how you operate on the boat (I played on keyboard, maybe it's different on a controller). To change directions you have to move a bit and many a time you just fall off the raft. Especially in a section which requires so much precision and fast movement already (I think it took me like 20-30 minutes).

An idea to consider would be adding a mount functionality. When you are on a raft you can click a button and you will be glued to the raft and can change directions without fear of falling off. It would also get rid of the bug I had:

Sometimes when I was on the leftmost side of the raft facing the left I would use the dryer to move my raft and I think it's when it hits the wall sometimes my character just falls off to the water.

I did some testing and I found out that when this hollow pixel (marked with red circle) is not filled with any amount of the brighter inner texture of the raft, then consistently my character falls into water either after a short time of sailing or after hitting a wall.

I added examples of positions after which my character fell.

For example in this instance, my character didn't fall (image with "didn't fall" caption):

Also I think a checkpoint here isn't really what most players would want (maybeNoCheckpoint.png).

Also I had quite a trouble with the enemies which made the circle attack. I don't think I managed to beat any without taking damage. Maybe time between attacks could be higher or the attack itself could be faster so as after rolling you had more time to position yourself and deal damage. Just a food for thought.

Also during the last bossfight you can dodge some of the attacks with jumping into water which is quite funny but I count it as a feature not a bug (especially cuz you don't get invincibility frames after respawning back, so you still have to be careful)

Forgot to mention, I really like the music, great work with that. And the art direction is pleasant. And it's so cool that moving with dash makes travel fast, makes looking for secrets not drag.

I hope you found some of it useful and not annoying. Can't wait to see the game finished ^^

P.S. Thanks for VODs, always got something chill to watch and new games to discover

I played a lot of the demo version because there are so many things you can do with it.

What I like about it is that although it is a Zelda-like game, all the items are full of originality, so it is not just a Zelda copy game. The hair dryer in particular was interesting because it had many uses.

I also loved how the music seamlessly changed tone when you entered a building, and the smiling sprites of the old man in town!

And the last scene was really nice. It was a great view.

In the cave just south of the big slime boss, falling off the edges respawns you in the area where you fell instead of on land, allowing the player to leave the map or potentially get stuck. When I tried purchasing the salad, Frank said I didn't have enough money even though I had 49 dollars and it says it only costs 30. I think it would be nice if the megaphone did extra damage or knockback to enemies compared to the phone because otherwise there is no reason to use it in combat. A map would be nice since it was fairly easy to get lost and all of the tools prompt you to backtrack to get stuff. The skateboard is a little unruly to control because of how much faster diagonal movement is than going straight, but other than that, the movement felt fine. Overall, it was fun and I enjoyed playing it a lot

This game is so, so, so much fun (even tho I didn't 100% it), this game was still a blast especially for being in very early development.

And for all the people who actually managed to 100% this game I think your all cheaters >:(

I was somehow able to glitch past the final boss just by falling into the void but im not complaining lol that thing is HARD

Had a tonne of fun with this, got 100% after just over 3 hours but a lot of the end of it was trying to find something that I don't think is actually accessible lol. 

There were a few little bugs here and there which I don't think much of since they're the kind of things you'd expect early on in game development. The only major bug i ran into was in the large open raft section, where at the bottom there was a certain cliff you could clip through, allowing you to raft OOB. I ended up losing the raft by getting it lost down a hole but remained OOB and had to get back inside by letting the turret guys kill me from a certain spot. Really excited to see where this goes, I loved the npc interactions and bits of story we got, and the game overall was incredibly charming. 

I also felt a lot of improvement throughout, both with the movement mechanics and the combat, which was super satisfying, like when i figured out you could cancel the roll with the phone to do short rolls to avoid shock waves on the final boss. i also found the exploration really cool, and was super surprised with how much there was even after watching the dev streams. 

Good luck in the future with this Skurry, you've done a great job so far :))

my mincrsoft defender says that have a trojan virus

Bugs I've found so far: (I left a more thorough comment on the youtube post before realizing this here would probably the better place for that, sorry ^^)

If you die over the water in the boss fight (for example by rolling into a shockwave) and jump down again after respawning, you will be placed at the edge you died at, which lets you bypass the boss completely. Works both for the northern and southern gate.

Deflecting the ranged attacks while standing right next to the boss will make them phase through it with no effect.

Falling into the northern-most chasm directly right of the two high bridges by the area with the shockwave enemies will respawn you right where you fell, instead of at an edge. This lets you move further in that chasm and even to the area between the bridges by either walking or rolling (and immediately falling, respawning right where you fell, repeat)

Falling with the skateboard shows the skateboard being equipped upon respawning, despite that not being the case.

The phone reappears in the starting house after exiting and re-entering.

If you lure a scorpion up to the east edge or north wall by the bench just south of the village, they will flicker between left-and rightfacing sprites.

When the slime(?) boss explodes into smaller enemies, I had one of them spawn on the wall, not the platform we were on.

The other benches I found to be solid, but the one in the icy area, I can walk through.

(It doesn't let me post screenshots for some reason)

The movement and exploration feel great and I liked the bosses. The combat with the regular enemies feels a bit clunky on the other hand, it felt pretty easy to get caught up in an enemy and get chain hit.

Also having keyboard customisation would be nice, since not everybody has the standard QWERTY style keyboard, and the preset controls don't align with how my QWERTZ style keyboard is.

Had a lot of fun playing this demo! Exploration was enjoyable and had plenty of "ah-ha, I'm actually over here!" type reactions when finding new paths. Each new utility added a fun mechanic, and I like how several items had multiple uses.

I feel like I had almost completed it and was working on the raft challenge found just behind the starting home, when I somehow got the perfect combo of crashing the raft on the exact edge of the water and ended up immune to killboxes. Enemies could still hurt me, but water and pits had no effect.

Unfortunately when I walked through a room transition door, I became locked in place and was unable to move.

This was a lot of fun, especially since it was just a first demo. Looking forward to playing again as you continue to update it!

i seem to be in quite the predicament 

You need to do your own playthrough skurry. And make a video on like the kind of development

Found two softlocks so far (actually one of them might be closer to a hardlock? Not sure about the terminology): First, I knocked myself off a cliff with the megaphone as a scorpion was charging me, so the scorpion ended up occupying the place where I would've respawned and I ended up constantly respawning in the pit and immediately falling. Second, after reaching the area with the salad in the area where you get the blowdryer, I sailed away, fell into the water, and respawned at the area where the salad was with no way to get the boat back.

Since the demo doesn't seem to have a save function yet, I had to replay the demo from the start after the first softlock and I'll presumably have to replay it from the start again whenever I get back to playing this after the second.

The game's cool (and I haven't even finished the demo yet, or at least I don't think I've found everything), I just thought I should let you know about these softlocks.