E3 Demo Feedback for the developer's team

It's 2 am but I can't forget to try this after work "tomorrow". Mana look

Q affects how early you can press the jump or attack buttons and it will still register the action.

e.g. In the E3 demo, if you press the attack button once while you're already doing an attack animation, nothing will happen after the current animation ends. The same when you try to press the jump button while you're doing in the jump recovery animation; you don't jump after the animation. Basically, you can't chain inputs. You can only trigger attack and jump button presses if Miriam is in her idle animation. And because of the extra transition animations Miriam has, it makes it hard to do frame-perfect timings with your actions since the animation feels like it has a one/two-frame delay.

I think it certainly makes a difference once it's been pointed out to me. If it can be tweaked, I like genemag's version.

That's such a cool little demo! I love the Miriam sprites you've done. Your has become a defining characteristic of these forums since it's early days. Thanks for being so cool!

I was curious myself since I love some game mechanics. I tried to test like a speed runner would, you may be able to see the difference in the short clip I made if you cant feel it yourself. I couldn't bdc as well but movement while jump attacking seems much smoother



Also.... I'm sorry I broke it. I really liked the demonstration of the differences even though I felt like the back step didn't feel the same.

Impressive demonstration.

As far as tweaking the gameplay mechanics from what the demo presents, I am of the firm opinion that the devs need only use Symphony of the Night as their guide.  Anything the demo is potentially doing wrong is a case where they need to scrutinize SotN for guidance.  A good case in point from your original post:

Indeed it is so (for magic and kicks, at least), and this needs to be fixed.  (To clarify: The attack-to-idle animation needs to be made interruptible, but the attack animation itself does not.)  However, this:

obviously doesn't exist in SotN.  I also feel, based on the demo you helpfully provided, that it cheapens the mechanics, and even feels like ghost inputs, such as when buffering a jump after an attack.  If a feature like this were to be implemented, I would hope for no more than one frame, or two at most, and for it to affect attacks only.  My preference would be for it not to be used, for reasons stated.

This is identical to SotN.  It feels less of an issue because nobody playing SotN is going to be using the slowest weapons available once they have something better, and/or the weapon they're using animates independently of the player character, as many do.  Meanwhile, it is a mechanic that simply requires the player to adjust to the speed of the attack, which is of course going to be highly variable across the dozens of available weapons.

This is, in my opinion, the primary gameplay mark that the demo misses.  In SotN, the backslide can be interrupted by attacks, jumping, or any movement on the controller except specifically in the direction opposite to the backslide, until of course 0.25 seconds later.  In Bloodstained, the backslide is a backhop, which makes it a little less practical to simply interrupt with anything, but this still needs to be addressed.  By far the most important change that needs to be enabled for the player is the ability to attack in the direction of the control pad during the backhop.  Whether or not this would entail actually interrupting the backhop is a separate consideration, but I would hope they invent a way to make it happen.  (Edit: I remembered that attacks can interrupt the backhop at any time as long as the backhop was not itself interrupting an attack.  This interruption doesn't look as unnatural as I was expecting, so it probably would be practical to allow the backhop to be interrupted by all the same actions which can interrupt a backstep in SotN.)

Again, I think the problem here may primarily be down to the comparatively long windup of the weapons we are given in the demo, especially if compared to what we get early on in SotN.  Alucard's Sword, the Short Sword and Red Rust all have a one-frame windup state on the ground, and all but Red Rust have that windup completely eliminated in the air (although there is a one-frame, no-animation delay).  The windups for kick and Iron Sword are many frames - something like 6 for the sword and 5-6 for the kick.  There exists the unsettling chance that every weapon in the game will also fail to have the near-instantaneous attack of the weapons in SotN due to this being a design choice.  It would be unfortunate, but still preferable, in my opinion, to an enemy getting visibly hit from no physical contact from the weapon.  Castlevania's whips certainly never let the player hit an enemy on the first frame of the windup.

As far as the perception that SotN has a frontal hitbox on the first attack frame, well, it may seem so, but I went ahead and tested this.  Red Rust is an early weapon that doesn't lose its one-frame windup in the air, and it is very definitely possible to pull out that windup by itself before landing.  Any enemy in front of Alucard in such a scenario does not get hit.

In short, I think that as long as weapons beyond the (pre-castle) galleon end up having, on the whole, the near-nonexistent windup of many SotN weapons, this is nothing of great concern, since weapons whose timing the player must adjust for are part of the traditional formula.  It would still, definitely, be good to let the dev team know that we'd expect the Iron Sword's long windup to be more the exception than the rule, in case they were planning to use it as the standard to base future weapons on.

I've been meaning to mention this for a while.  Or maybe just agree with what others have said, since a few already pointed it out, weeks ago.  If a new round of feedback is about to be forwarded, then I can't overlook this opportunity:

Miriam's model needs physics, starting with her hair.

I actually more or less expect this to happen in the final product, but I'm still putting in my vote, just in case there was any chance that the devs would assume the positive reaction to the demo was a full endorsement of everything in it.  Miriam's body / dress are hand-animated based on the given animation.  It sort of works, in the same sense that it sort of works when it's 2d sprites.  In any event, the hair can't remain completely static. 

---

Edit: While I'm at it, I wanted to reiterate that I think it would be a good idea to increase the rarity scaling, which I suspect is currently designed to cap at 1/100 (such as with Amy's shard).  If something's truly meant to be rare, 1/100 isn't good enough, because it could still be gotten in a few minutes of farming.

Really simple criticism.

Can the backdash have a more present sound effect? You can barely hear the current one.