E3 Demo Feedback for the developer's team

Really enjoyed the demo! , only a minor thing but my controller is a little used so the thumbstick can get stuck slightly to the left which normally has no effect on most games but it reads it as a normal input for this game, so I can get stuck moving left unintentionally. Would it be possible to adjust the sensitivity of the input detection on the thumbstick? or maybe be able to adjust it as an option?
I know people would say get a new controller but if its possible it would be really handy.

You don't seem very familiar with Iga's past work. I hope the developers know which suggestions to ignore.

The demo looked great, but there was one thing visually that I thought could be improved. Chests right now seems kind of bland; just having the item you receive appear as text doesn't give the excitement it should. The easiest solution I could think of is the Order of Ecclesia chests which show the item hovering above the chests after you receive the item.

Has anyone noticed when Miriam is running and you come to a sudden stop or change directions, there's a missing animation to transition into her default stance. It's hard to explain in words :/

On the contrary, I have played plenty of Iga's games. Hence why I said there were a few things that always bugged me that I was hoping we might be able to tweak this time. It's constructive criticism. "I always liked your games but these small things have been bugging em for a while."

Boss color palette is a complete nonsense. The design itself is dull but I would be satisfied if just its colors are changed.

Btw, it would be so nice if some weapons had hidden tricks like in SotN.
For example, kung fu shoes could do a flurry of kicks or a dash kick if you make QCF + Attack (typical hadouken).

Loved the demo, everything felt very fluid and controlled nicely. The only thing I was disappointed in was resolution options. Please add native 2560x1440 and higher Resolutions. Cant wait for next beta and full release. Thank you for this demo.

Love it so far, even for an alpha it's showing an immense amount of care. Let's jot down the things that stood out for me in particular:



I really like how responsive the backdash is. Most games with something similar to that have an immediate period of not being able to attack(or move in some cases) that makes the backdash really situational and irritating. I've gotten in the habit of never using the feature in games that have it, due to that. This one flows very cleanly, thankfully. I can understand why people don't like the idea of everyone backdashing everywhere because it's faster though, maybe have a fatigue thing going where you can backdash like it is now three times, but then after that Miriam becomes winded and has a wind-down after each backdash until you stop doing it for a few seconds.



The jumping seems like it could just the tiniest smidgen more height. I only say this because of the room transitions where you jump up and on the next screen land on a drop-through platform, but if you don't hold the button all the way through to get what's currently the max height you fall a bit short and plop back down the previous screen. Or instead, change those transitions to lower the thing you land on bit, or put Miriam into a state where she automatically pops up just high enough to land on them when you travel upwards if you're not holding the button at the time. Other than that it's on point.



If you want to go the extra mile with directional attacks, add a toggle mode for them. Mode 1 could be what it is now, using the right stick to aim anywhere in a 360 degree circle, and mode 2 would be binding it instead to the dpad/left stick. In the case of the dpad, you'd only have the option of firing in eight directions, and lose the ability to move one way while firing another, but I know I'd rather control it like that personally.



I kinda agree with others that the monsters were on the easy side, but on the other hand this is just an alpha build and a very basic demo of what would more or less be the intro stage, so it's not as if things should be particularly dangerous in the first place. For the boss, I'd suggest not binding its tentacle HP to its overall HP. On a couple of the runs I've done I was able to kill it hitting the arms on the deck. For more of a sense of directness, I think it would be better if they simply had their own HP, maybe slowly inched towards the middle taking away your room to move, and you needed to take them out to get back to hitting the main body. I also liked how colorful the boss was, heh. I figure it's actually fitting considering the theme of demonic crystal glass in multiple colors, and if you look at the crystal growths on the boss it's not a stretch to imagine that she used to be human before becoming consumed and turning into that.  I also simply like a lot of well-defined color in games, swathes of washed-out pastels or the ever-famous Brown and Bloom aren't my style.



Speaking of the crystals, the animation/cutscene that Miriam does when you pick up a new power kicks ass.


Another cool thing I noticed was that the dullahammers have a blind spot in front of them where they won't hit you with their swing.  I thought that was a nice touch, and hope to find more critters with opportunities like that.


I don't know what all controls will be present in the finished game, but if one or two buttons out of L1/L2/R1/R2 aren't used for anything else it would be handy to let us assign them as quick-use slots for consumable items.



Will that stillframe of Miriam on the status screen change when you change equipment in a later build? If not, it might look a bit cleaner to use a drawing of her in that pose instead, but if it's going to be dynamic the 3D version there now makes perfect sense.



On the more technical side, I've launched the game and run through the whole demo several times now with no crashes. I do operate with Aero disabled though, so I ran into the mentioned slowdown in some of the larger rooms(the two large cargo holds towards the end, and the first outside deck area where you fight the dullahammer in particular). Hopefully that's just an early problem that'll get ironed out as the game becomes more optimized.   The game doesn't remember last window position either, looks like it's defaulting to a spot that centers the game window according to the default resolution(if you increased it to 1920x1080 for example, you have to drag it a bit to get it all onto the screen again the next time you launch the game).  Speaking of dragging it, the mouse cursor goes AWOL while you're playing entirely, forcing you to alt+tab to see it and then snag the top bar for moving.  Might also consider making the game's first launch be in windowed mode instead of fullscreen too, since a lot of the more robust antivirus/firewalls/etc will block new applications from doing stuff until you ok them.  For some of those, if the game has already gone fullscreen it can prevent you from seeing the popup and possibly force you to sit and wait for it to time out before you can do anything.

The game also isn't utilizing xinput dlls the way they typically would be. Using replacement dlls like the ones generated with x360ce, they simply have to be in the same directory as the executable you're running for them to be used, but Bloodstained isn't picking them up at all. I don't know if that's something in particular with UE4(or build options set for the demo), or if the two obvious executables for the game aren't the ones I should have been targeting. For anyone using an XBox controller of some flavor it won't matter, but for everyone else using an input wrapper to get other brands of controllers to be treated like the XBox ones it'll be frustrating. At least in my case, I think the dpad on the XBone/360 sucks and insist on a PS controller for 2D gaming.

Upon further testing, I realized I was using 32 bit versions of xinput, while the game is 64 bit.  Derp.  I'm not used to anything but utility apps bothering to ship as 64 bit, so I didn't even think about it until today.  (Appropriate)Replacement xinput dlls work absolutely perfectly.