whoa nice job firo, its clear to see you put alot of work into the game. Nice job so far.

During play its obvious that your bots arent using any tighter pathfinding like A*star or something, but this really isnt needed since your level build is small and reletivley open for them. However alot of times a bot would get stuck in that little broken down hut running into a wall, and many of the warriors would clump together in the middle of the map running into each other. Do you have some sort of short term steering behavior? Maybe that would eliminate some of the running into walls/other bots. Code the bots to throw a short range trace in front of them, and if it hits something, turn away.

I did like the walking line of golems, smacking warriors if they got too close, it added that "environmental hazard" like supersmash brothers or mortal kombat. Though at first it was a little jarring to be completley knocked out when they swung at you, and it broke the momentum of the run. But however, as I kept playing, I made an effort to watch out for the golems, and this actually worked out gameplay wise, as I was a bit more patient and cautious running around them, giving them more of a threat factor. Really cool.

I totally understand where you are coming from in terms of too many players on one keyboard, cause I tried making a 2 player game with a somewhat reasonable amount of key control, and it ended up freezing one players state when another player pressed too many keys. With that said, I dont know how your supposed to make it reasonable for that many players to play at once. The mouse turning was a little awkward, and even when I gave it time it still was a little touchy (especially when the "rotation" event happened, but we all know thats supposed to make us confused ). I wouldnt know any way to accomadate that many human players at once with as little conflict as possible, without an extra game pad or joystick (that still is fluid an intuitive)

Swinging the sword was nice, when you wanted to stay and bash another player into submission, but how about if you also include a running attack swing? Maybe this would decrease the dependency of a player set himself up before he attacks. Running around collecting crystals was great fun, but when I wanted to attack someone, I was forced to stand still, increasing my chances of getting pummeled by that golem, or hit in the back by another cpu. Of course a moving attack wouldnt break your game unless you overpower it, but maybe this could offer a little bit more fluidity and freedom to the chaos.

With the stamina bar, you could add an announcing animation to the bar that is big enough to see from the corner of your eye. When the stamina bar is full, throw off a big sprite on the player's bar that is the players color. That way while the player is concentrating on running and fighting, he could get a clue that he has full stamina without having to pull his eyes toward the bar.


What I liked:

I liked the color palette, it was pleasant and attractive, very much like a comic book. Lots of gstudio'ers think that since their game is cartoony, they can throw in some outlandish colors thinking it will match the palette, only making the player go blind.

The animations where smooth, especially with the transitions. Out of lazyness I usually just pop right into the next animation, but with animation blending it really adds alot.

Pretty much everything else

Good job so far firo, I really really like the game so far, hope to see it finished and maybe at the gamestop down the street