Okui Demo - Movement 1

Curated Projects Ōkui: Beat em up and Eat em up
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Hey, guys! I’m glad to announce we finally got something to show again!

  • This demo will primarily focus on the most basic movements of the character put to the test on an obstacle course. One of our main objectives in putting forth this demo is looking to get feedback from all of you guys.

  • You can play the game with both keyboard and controller :video_game:

  • Controls for the player will be found in-game

  • Don’t worry, these sprites are merely placeholders. They will look a lot better in future updates, lol

Some news that might bum most of you out is that this demo does not contain any sort of weight gain, vore, nor any other fetish content. We first want to hear your feedback and to make sure we have a strong foundation for the game before adding anything else. Sorry, but I guarantee it will pay off in the future!

Thanks for your patience and for standing by with us! :green_heart:

Download:

16 Likes
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Good to see new content about this game! As for the demo itself, moving around feels pretty good, considering wall-jumps can be quite tricky to make feel right. Once you understand that you “stick” to the wall and dont need to immediately jump makes it feel much smoother.

Playing on a keyboard, I had the most trouble with the vertical room with the two icy platforms. That last jump in the tight passageway is very particular compared to the jumps before it. Otherwise, the rest of the level felt good. It feels a little strange that you cannot reach “top speed” without doing a walljump first; it feels like you should be able to achieve that if you run far enough on the ground. Can’t wait to see more!

3 Likes
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Well the character somewhat resembles Smeargle from Pokemon so I doubt it would be that hard to get a huge fan base for the main character

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I think the base movement is pretty good.
I just feel like it is a little slow but that might just be because there is no enemies in the game.
I would like a button to detach from walls (I personally dislike sticky wall jumping but others seem to like it). holding away to dethatch when the wall is “sticky” never feels good to me because you have to hold it for x time when you want to get of the wall now

I do have some issues with the camera though.
first is that the processing mode is in idle. if it’s in idle instead of physics and camera smoothing is on then the character vibrates when you move on high refresh rate monitors.
the way that the camera pans so you can see more in front of you should have some space
you can move before it pans (video explaining it better). as it is now, if you try to do some small adjustments the camera moves around a lot making it awkward to do.
the camera also moves up a tiny bit when you jump. it’s to low to make it possible to see extra stuff but makes jumps feel a bit worse since the camera “shakes” a bit when you jump and land (it’s especially noticeable when jumping in 2 tile high spaces)

I did find a bug where if you stand on the edge of a moving platform then you can’t jump down through it

2 Likes
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Movement is alright, but Okui herself feels a bit slow when walking on the ground. You may want a sprint option.

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Wall jumping feels good overall. The delay of coming off the wall when holding the opposite direction gives enough frames to jump off the wall reliably, and I like the ability to hold down to slide faster. Only thing I’d recommend doing with the basic movement is to make the character loose their footing on the wall after a certain amount of time. Being able to just hang on the wall and jump back up it infinitely will probably be too powerful for the player.

Now, the other thing I want to say has to do with the layout of the demo. It might not appear in the final game, but I wanted to say this now just in case.

Screenshot 2021-03-06 205659
Screenshot 2021-03-06 205659756×397 5.63 KB

Don’t do this. Horizonal gaps the size of the player character are absolutely awful. Because of how janky they are, they don’t provide a fair challenge to the player. Rather than being a test of skill, it ends up being a crapshoot if you hit the arbitrary correct pixel to jump at. This goes for jumping from these gaps, and to these gaps.

7 Likes
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I was starting to worry that this project was dead!

The demo controls work pretty fine- only major complaint I have is wall jumping is a little finicky.

I second what LurkerNo.2106 says though- please don’t use these jumps.

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that is in for a specific reason (the game does have coyote time so jump late) those jumps will not be in the final game or if they are they wont be painful but I chose to put that one there to add some extra difficulty for a challenge, also with coyote time they do become skill based.

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I have fixed it and made it less sensitive in the Dev Version (so not in current download)

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That moving platform bug is going to be hard to fix due to it being a result of a much worse bug.

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At first I didn’t understand what you meant by “coyote time”, but now I think I do. You mean that a player is able to jump even when fully off the platform, correct? Personally, I’ve never heard it called that, but that doesn’t really mater. Just want to make sure we’re thinking the same thing.

Here’s the thing. I don’t think that “coyote time” is a bad thing to have in the game. However, you should not be relying on arbitrary assistance mechanics like that to create difficulty. Just because something can be done consistently by the player doesn’t mean it should be something asked of them.

This is mainly due to how unintuitive “coyote time” is. Players do not, and should not expect to be able to jump after running off the platform. It doesn’t make sense with the visuals they see on screen. As a result, allowing the player to do this is completely arbitrary, and isn’t based on the game’s visual design or an intuitive sense of movement from the player. You’re just cheating into making it possible. I don’t think asking players to memorize an arbitrary and unintuitive aspect of movement is a good, or fair test of skill, especially since players would have no good way of telling when the grace period wears off.

If you want to put this sort of thing in and make it fair to the player, I would suggest putting in a more clear and intuitive mechanic that makes this sort of thing not only fair to the player, but also more visible. Something like a corner jump, where the character balances on the corner of the wall for a moment, could work. Otherwise, it’s just bad design to do something like that.

Also, this doesn’t address the issues with asking a player to jump in to these gaps. That’s a whole other can of worms.

Keep in mind I’m not trying to heckle you or anything. I’m overall impressed with the work you’ve done so far, and think this could turn out to be a solid little platformer. The core of the game is solid, and I think the movement overall is pretty well implemented. I’d just like to see the game take the best form it can be, so I’m bringing up issues where I see them. That’s all.

Good luck on the game, and feel free to reply back and discuss it more. Always happy to talk about this stuff.

2 Likes
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I disagree with Lurker about the coyote time, it’s a common enough mechanic nowadays that many would complain about it feeling unintuitive if it were removed. However, I do think the implementation of it in this demo was bad, due to the level design issues brought up earlier by Lurker. It’s very nice when making jumps that look strict, but needing it because there’s a character-height ceiling extending the entire length of your platform feels pretty awful. Hopefully future levels won’t have jumps like that.

The controls were good in the more open areas, it’s very much like a Ninja Gaiden, but this game feels clunky really quickly when moving through areas that are the height or width of the character. Especially when you drop down a platform near a wall and instantly magnetize to it, it was always unexpected and never what I was intending to do, the player should at least need to push into the wall.

Overall though, it was promising to see the different movement tech available in the game. I hope to see more open level designs, which is where the controls feel fluid and intuitive.

2 Likes
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  • Camera movement is increadibly distracting. Please keep the camera centered on the player constantly.
  • The movement feels really slow. I don’t know if that’s because of the animations or the actual speed though.
  • Wall jumps feel really weird - Please tell the player that jumping from the wall only requires pressing spacebar
  • You jump further when pressing a directional key, making it easy to overshoot blocks
  • Please let us adjust the window size and the controls.
  • The character slides somewhat when landing or moving. I think an animation would be necessary here otherwise it looks weird.

Also no idea what to do in the ice room. I can get up to the second platform where you can go up the shaft, bu I have no idea what to do now.

2 Likes
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i have removed all “bonk” jumps from the map for the next version of the movement demo

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the camera will have several options in the final version of the game but due to “centered” not having any tweaking needed it won’t exist till the menus are added.

Window size will be looked into.

controls will not be changeable but are not yet final.

You jump back across the ice you used to get there to get on to the ledge you couldn’t wall jump to.

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Decided to give it a little more thorough test and see how things held up when trying to go quickly. The movement overall feels snappy and fast since you can maintain speed from the walljump by bunnyhopping, although a slightly longer grace period before you start to lose speed would be nice. Also, I think there’s a bug where you’ll get a full height jump even though you tapped, I kept getting it after jumping over the first pillars. But overall, it’s enjoyable to move around, which is the most important thing. Here’s a video of a run through the demo, with some more of my thoughts on a few sections after a bunch of runs.

https://streamable.com/9tdtrb

In the first pillar room, you can get some unexpected behavior with the wallcling on the small blocks, where the game just kicks you off of them without a clear indication for why it happened. This may be due to sliding off of the bottom? I feel like, along with not immediately sliding up a wall you’re jumping near, if you’re moving upward and push into the wall, a short window of staying put would be more intuitive. That way, in situations where you’re timing your jump to hit a particular spot on the wall, you’re able to cling to the position you want, rather than slide up the full height of your jump or wait for the descent to get close to the wall. The latter situation happened a lot in the first ice room at the top (at the last blue indicator), you land next to the wall, but need to walljump low, so your options are to turn around and try to aim your descent for the right position or to slide up the wall and hold down to slowly get to where you want to be.

I feel like the character sprite sits too far in front of your hitbox, I kept having issues with jumping into ceilings or dropping down the platforms too early.

2 Likes
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That is good feedback.

How did you corner the bonk jump? 0.0

If the grace period was longer it would make the character feel too slippery and would slide off single blocks. Sadly.

Wow that video was cool.

I do want to implement the positional freeze you suggested for wall jumping.

The wall grab is odd on small blocks but I will be fixing that and I will see about the sprites and fixing them it is a very hard to get this character to fit the collision box for most things.

That would make climbing up the wall not feel broken If you snapped and stayed connected to the wall

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The issue is when the camera is on Physical it has a single pixel from the bottom of the sprite show up at the top making lines that ruin the look of the game.

If you have a good answer to this problem please let me know. (my monitor is locked at 60 which is what a prefer {yes I do prefer a lower refresh rate})

Could you possibly make a video so that I can see the effect of the camera.

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These jumps are easy.

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if the looping pixel is what I think it is you can fix it by either re-importing it with the repeat flag set to disabled or by adding a one pixel transparent border around the sprite image itself

okui.zip (1.8 MB) (it’s in a zip file to avoid quality loss when uploading to a video hosting site)
it’s not as noticeable in the video as it is when playing but if you compare how laggy the character looks compared with the ground you notice a difference