Thanks for playing the game and giving feedback!

I like the fast pace of the game but the sliding into spikes on landing is a bit frustrating and the minimal aerial control makes the flying enemies a pain to deal with in conjunction with trying to avoid shots/spikes. Also a way to do the spinning slash faster after jumping off the ground rather than having to tap twice would make the controls feel less restricting. Other than that the game seems like a fun way to pour some time into. Good work 

What exactly do you dislike about the spikes? They are your average run-of-the-mill platformer spikes I think. I also don't quite agree with minimal aerial control - or are you talking about the fact that I put the double jump mechanic in as opposed to the, technically, more 'controllable' hold-the-button longer to jump higher mechanic? In general, I should maybe have emphasized the fact that this is supposed to be a very tricky and challenging platformer, think Super Meat Boy and then some. It's supposed to be borderline frustrating, yet fair and ultimately very, very rewarding when you beat a stage and/or the game. The controls suggestion was made frequently and, to a certain degree I can relate. Of course it would be nice to have a simple 'macro' button assigned to just that attack! But on the same token, it would be nice to have a button you can press in Street Fighter that simply throws a Hadouken for you instead of needing to do a quartercircle forward and punch! What I'm trying to say is that sometimes it's better to have key combos in a game that a player first needs to learn a bit until they can pull them off. In this case, the spin attack is notoriously strong (and usually is in all platformers that support it, just think back to Super Star Wars on SNES or even the original Ninja Gaiden on NES) - so I want to counterbalance this strength a bit by making it slightly trickier to pull off! Thanks for playing and please do elaborate on some of your points you made, I'm glad you seemed to at least partially enjoy your time with the game!

Given that it's called "The Art of Dying", why isn't it a roguelike?

On a more serious note, I would have appreciated some notice that this is Windows-only, so that I could have not bothered to download it.

(it doesn't appear to work fully in WINE. When I go to start a new run, it pops up an error dialog talking about a 'scripting error', giving the following info (paraphrased since I couldn't take a screenshot):

Code: [Select]

LevelSelect.asc line 61
Room1.asc line 201
Room1.asc line 413
Room1.asc line 851

String.Truncate : invalid length.

Nice animation in the menu screen though
)

Ah, sorry, I guess I should have. The thing is, this is written in Adventure Game Studio, it's not my own engine so I didn't really think about cross-platform issues. But yeah, running AGS games on anything non-Windows is tricky at best! From the error you're getting, it seems that there is an issue locating a level file - no idea if that helps you!

Thanks again for trying the game out! Any further feedback is much appreciated!

Thanks! I'm happy you liked my videos!

This whole dev diary thing was an experiment, really. It takes a LOT of time to do (and that's time you could be working on the game itself), but it's also really fun and allows you to create a bit of interest - that's the goal at least. It's a trade-off but if you feel like doing the same for your game, I'll be watching!

And here's a third video. This time focusing on how I design enemies. I also present a couple ones in greater detail:


Please take a look and let me know what you think! I'm planning to show off the level editor in the next video, so stay tuned for that!

The flash is programming, no reason to waste memory on a simple white tint (which actually is not as simple to do as one might think in AGS as it doesn't support bright color tints - so I have to create a white square with correct dimensions, then grab the transparency mask from the original, untinted sprite and apply that to the white square).

You can not hit while dashing but dashing itself is an attack so there is no need to! But you can of course break out of the dash at any point by jumping, then you can do whatever you want to. Jump again and go right into a spin attack for example!

You are not ever invincible in the game. I was considering it for the spin attack but then that'd just make it EVEN better and more useful.

You make a good point with the normal attacks not being very useful. The spin and dash attacks are what you want to use 99% of the time. I thought about this and I'd rather have it be this way then somehow make these really fun and fluent moves worse in some way. The normal attacks are just in there because it'd be goofy not to be able to use a sword while running. Although there are some very rare cases in which the normal attack is useful (when you can't jump and can't slide because of lava/spikes being too close for example).

Right now, you get hit once and die. I've been thinking about putting in a health system but I honestly think a die-often-with-a-lot-checkpoints thing is more fitting. The game's called The Art of Dying for a reason after all!

More and more infos will be revealed. I plan to make the next video about enemy variety, then one about the editor etc.