itch.io

Just one more thing:

I knew I’d be using this at some point from the moment I saw it. Finally just did that for a little side project using Quake 2 mapping tools: Kuromagi Jam. Top-tier texture pack, watch out Makkon.

Genuinely excellent set of models, perfect if you need some characters for a jam game. I used just a couple of the monsters for a side project: Kuromagi Jam

Absolutely keeping this on speeddial for smaller projects.

Really like this model. I made some modifications to scratch off the markings and move the magazine into the pistol grip and used it in a little side project. Great model to pick up and use.

Kuromagi Jam

Ouch, some of those deaths looked like wall punchers. I wanted to add a difficulty select that would make enemy reactions slower and get rid of their armor, but I prioritized prettying up the level. They do have some recoil imparted when you hit them but they recover just as fast as your recoil recovery so it’s really only the SMG and maybe the shotgun that can take full advantage.

It is intended that enemies win fair fights. They’re bigger and better protected than you and you need to use stealth to fight dirty. I wanted to add an armor item which would have helped survivability but didn’t have time. If you walk with Alt you stop making footsteps entirely and if you can get behind an enemy (even an alert one) you can do an instant silent takedown with the use key.

I think even with time I probably wouldn’t have explained all of that in the game as this isn’t the main project, but I might put in a tips screen or something if I come back to tinker with it.

I would suggest to exagerate a bit with the effects

The particles are based on the projectiles based damage and if I switch it to final modified damage instead that ought to do this without any special handling. I think I’ll do that.

at the moment the map is too monochromatic

I had such grand plans to fill it with flashing ads and storefronts but I just didn’t have enough time. As I’ve said elsewhere, this game is a diversionary side project to test out systems I hadn’t tried before and the main game will have a color palette more like the first map. In the second I was intentionally evoking the UI’s color scheme.

Overall my impression is good, I had fun but I rage quitted cause the demo was quite hard

You were incredibly close at the end! The last shrine was in the big room with the shotgun, just that you’d entered it from the bottom instead of the top.

That reaction to Strauss stuck in my head, and wanting more fanart for this demo day I decided I had to make it a reality.

Not enough fanart this DD

Game make PP hard.

Very nice art, and not just booba.

Tried out the Linux version and it seems to work fine except that the main menu music doesn’t loop.

Some of the main menu doesn’t quite match the rest of the game with these sleek gradients where everything else is more retro-esque pixel art.

I didn’t have my controller plugged in properly during the flight training so it’d be nice to have an option to do it again because I forgot what the bindings were supposed to be. Could consider instead just having them on screen somewhere as an option.

I’m definitely not good at this sort of thing, got an F rank on the first mission but I did get through it. You really have to abuse that slomo to dodge some of the bullets. Like the first stage of the boss is way harder than the second one because that stream of bullets coming out of the tail gun doesn’t give many gaps.

The dpad seems strangely unreliable in the upgrades menu, compared to the left stick. And after buying the secret there isn’t a way to dismiss the popup with the controller.

I think it works pretty well, from what little I know about the genre. Most of my complaints are little polish things but the core is solid.

Yeah, I had the problem right but the fix in v2.3 was kind of a hack and didn’t work for everyone.

The weapon stats are stored in text and if I use the regular function for reading them it works differently on different machines. I thought I could keep it consistent by forcing it to use US English but that doesn’t always work if the specific files that uses aren’t on your computer.

So now instead I’m reading in the numbers myself so it will work consistently everywhere.

Your art is kind stuck in the uncanny valley where I can’t decide if you should go higher detail or lower. The player character looks good, just making everything more like that would probably help. Adding some shadows and ambient occlusion would also be a big win. That and anything other than a black void for the background.

The way the camera leads your movement is fine but it’s really not fine that it snaps back so quickly when you stop again. I’d sooner not have the camera lead at all or do it based on the cursor like in Brigador and Hotline Miami. At the very least slowing down the return so it takes like 3-10 times longer would help.

The guide needs some UX, clicking on a scrollbar seems to screw it up and if you scroll down with the mousewheel and then change topics it keeps the same scroll level so now you have to scroll back to the top.

I like having the combo timer instead of time limits, that would put undue stress on the player in what’s supposed to be a cozy game.

Keep it cooking. I think you could have something pretty good here but you’ll have to bring it together with art, I’d recommend that be your focus for now.

Yeh, I’ve uploaded v2.4 again with sorting entirely disabled on the first person renderbin as it really isn’t doing anything. But if that still doesn’t fix it then there must be something much weirder going on.

Really appreciate the different color schemes. I did that in my game for fun but when it’s after dark and I’ve only got low lights in my room its great to be able to use something like Amber.

Was a little disappointed in the CRT filter, it’s very harsh and kind of makes it hard to see. I’d prefer something more like the filter in Cyclopean.

It works fine on Linux with Proton, though it captures the mouse cursor so I have to dismiss it to another workspace to alt-tab out. Not a big deal honestly, a lot of games do that but it would be nice to just hide the cursor instead of completely locking it too. Controller also works but only the stick and not the dpad which isn’t ideal for this kind of game.

Is there a way to jump onto a ledge beneath you? I couldn’t figure it out so I had to skip a snail I would have otherwise beaten up.

I don’t have a lot of patience for platformers so I played on Easy. The little healing pillar thing was a must though, I haven’t figured out how to fight the wasps or snails without being hit at least once or using the butterflies.

I picked up a holy water but couldn’t figure out what to do with it. It looks like there’s a shop or something selling them in the screenshots but I couldn’t see a way to use them in-game.

I don’t think I got very far before giving up, up to the Zelda-like portion but kept losing health when you’d get teleported back to the platformer sections and just gave up. Neither genre is really my thing but I like how it’s a mashup of your last two games, I think that’s a good foundation.

Hell yeah, this guy gets it. Definitely nice to see a video where it just works.

Oooh, y’know I think I know what it might be. The first-person renderpass is flagged for sorting but I don’t think I’m setting any sort values for the commands so the order will be whatever the built in qsort defaults to for resolving draws.

I’m going upload a new build in a few minutes could you try it out and see if that’s fixed?

Couldn’t respawn with a key so I had to restart from the main menu.

I skipped this to save a little time, I didn’t think it was important enough. In the full game you’ll want to load a save anyway.

You could make it so that if you press the “Shoot” key when you are out of mag ammo but still have reserve ammo the player automatically reloads instead of dry firing

I had this in Ctesiphon but I always play without it. This being more of an imsim I’m going to resist adding this option to make shooting feel more deliberate and encourage other options.

When you run you could make the player pull her arm back a bit so there’s more of a difference in your viewport when running vs. not running.

She does already but it is pretty subtle. I tied it directly to velocity to keep it simple but pulling it too far can look janky if I don’t smooth it so I didn’t bother. Something for the full game.

Jumping while running feels off, like as if the velocity resets every time.

This actually started as bug but I’m probably going to end up keeping it. In mid-air you have your full sprinting acceleration but it’s counteracted by vertical velocity too and I boosted Mokoto’s sprint speed compared to when I first set this up in the engine and so it causes you to slow down. I have an idea for this in the full game though that different cyberlegs can affect how this mechanic works to unlock stuff like bhopping and strafe-jumping.

Items that aren’t guns, like food, clip into the walls if you get close enough which is weird since guns are exempt from this.

Could you share a screenshot of this? It doesn’t happen on my machine and they’re both rendered in the same code block, buffered into a renderpass that gets processed after a depth clear so there shouldn’t be any z-buffer interaction at all.

In “Level 1: Peaceful”

Yeah that level’s a mess, it’s a cut down version of my testing level for the collision system. It’s more a curiosity than an intentionally designed place. I might put in some time to polish it up later but it’s a very low priority.

I also noticed that enemies can hurt each other after one of them walked in front of another one that was attacking only for him to get instantly popped by his mate, pretty good.

They will absolutely kill each other after friendly fire even if the first shot doesn’t kill. Just don’t interrupt them after they start shooting each other or they’ll put aside their differences again, lol. I was going to add an extra trace to check for friendly fire before opening up but this was funnier. In the full game I’m going to make the behavior faction or character specific.

Thanks for trying it out, I got a good feeling about this one.

Did you try the newest update? v2.3 was meant to specifically solve that bug

I think for today’s modern audiences (fools like me) either changing jumps to not require crouching or explaining it somewhere may be helpful.

The full game will have a tutorial that goes over this, it wasn’t a given that people knew how to do it even back in the day.

if you’re going to have sprawling levels, some type of map/navigation/objective marker tool would help smooth things out.

My ambition could not be contained in this one map, because of how the PVS system works for occlusion I can make some disgustingly huge levels and I fully intend to. I might look into doing some sort of automap but it’s much more difficult in 3D and I may just fall back to using stills like in Deus Ex.

I’m curious what type of overall game design you are going to head in

The closest example would be The Nameless Mod, where it’s a bunch of sandbox levels that branch off of a hub area. I won’t necessarily have them directly connected like they are in that, I have some fun ideas involving public transport to encourage the player to not take all of their gear everywhere they go. Other than that, the full project is an unashamed Deus Ex 1 clone so it’s a safe bet to assume everything will work like it does in that.

Loving the aesthetics and keen to see what’s next!

I do love how this one turned out. I’d like to tinker with it a bit more but the whole thing has been a diversion to test out the conversation, decision-making, and pathfinding systems for the bigger game so this itself will stay as just these two levels though possibly a bit more fleshed out if I give it the time.

Love that you are using a custom engine

Likewise! 💪

it kind of felt like the camera and the rest of the game were running at different framerates making me think there’s maybe a bug or something with the interpolation

It’s all on the same delta time every frame so I can’t really say what the issue is.

I had fun exploring the level and finding all of the shrines.

Mission Accomplished

The enemy design was very basic and could have used some more variety and challenge.

I was going to make some variant dudes with helmets and SMGs or Shotguns but I ran out of time. Their equipment is hardcoded in this prototype but in the full game every NPC will use a similar equipment system to the player character so there will be much more variety.

The game looks awesome. It’s what Eidos Montreal wishes they could’ve made.

I’ve got to print this out and stick it on my wall, lol

However, I couldn’t get the combat to work in the second stage. Enemies can’t hurt me and I can’t hurt them back.

Ach! You’re the second person to report this so there must be a way for me to repro it. Could you try it again with -v as an argument, shoot a bunch of walls and dudes, get shot at, and then send me the log file over discord? It’s at ~/.local/share/StomyGame/Kuromagi/output.log on Linux and ~/AppData/Roaming/StomyGame/Kuromagi/output.log on Windows.

Very odd the options menu didn’t work but sounds like that was the worst of your problems so that’s not so bad. Yeah no restart prompt, I didn’t think it was important enough in the limited time I gave it.

hitting ENTER to submit red paper changed the fullscreen option

Playing v2.1 or later should have fixed this, or just hitting Alt again in game after you’ve alt-tabbed. Bit concerning if that didn’t fix it.

was the enemy damage being so high intentional? if so, i personally really liked it! it required me to be smart when choosing to shoot and when to be in cover.

Yes it was, to encourage exactly what you did!

every gun felt like it had a perfectly tuned time to kill, the SMG felt especially great to use. i really really like this game, the aesthetic and gameplay rock!

Music to my ears! This project is being mostly left as-is, perhaps with some tinkering later, but every gameplay element I’ve been testing and a lot of the visual style is being incorporated to my larger project and I’m hoping to bring that to demo day in either 72 or 73. My priority is getting it to look good for a steam page and not necessarily a fun demo just yet.

Better than Heartbound, lol. Looks like there’s quite a bit here, I had to stop at the point where you’re in the room with the poem.

I immediately thought Strauss was a Dunmer, lol. Imagined all of his dialogue in the gravelly Morrowind voice.

There’s something weird about how it fullscreens. It seems to want to based on the size of the window but every time I toggle it on the window manager it snaps back to windowed. Well I didn’t see an option for this in-game so I assume you just haven’t gotten around to it. Apart from that it appears to work on fine on Arch with Proton.

Controller mostly works fine except that it seems like the left stick is stuck in NASCAR mode and can’t go right.

You’ve got a few cases of mixels in there like with emotes and the pause menu, really compromises the SNES-like aesthetic.

I don’t like the whole feeding mechanic, I hope it’s tied to progression and not actual time because that goes against this kind of game where you kind of want the player to be engrossed and exploring.

This definitely starts differently to the last time I played, in medias res rather than just strolling around an encampment.

I really like the way the near-side wall fades out as you approach underground. Though in combat it didn’t work properly, I was trying to get the fellas through a doorway but there was a soldier in there that I couldn’t see and that seemed to stop the fadeout from kicking in.

Am I missing something or are Alexander and YellowJacket equipped with each other’s headgear?

When opening up the trait menu, the text from last time persists even though the options have moved around. It also really needs a full border to tie it in properly, maybe even a drop shadow too.

Character cycling doesn’t work in the Skill menu.

I did exactly what Alexander suggested and ran back into the room with the witch broom to use the door as a choke. Really disappointed then that enemies ignore the walls and can just hit through them anyway, but then I just abused that to have Yellow Jacket constantly use the silver breath weapon all the time.

Really not a fan of the parrying/critical stuff, I hope it’s not crucial to beating the game. Especially as the damage numbers show up like a tenth of a second before the animation actually connects meaning the timing has to be picked up through trial and error instead of intuition.

The pathfinding on the enemies could use some work, and they sometimes heal when I swear they should be attacking. But I didn’t get any softlocks like I did last time. Only thing I would add would maybe be a way to change your facing after moving, either by holding down like R2 or just using the right stick.

Some of the UI styling could use another polish and juice pass. The way the Square menu just splits its border up to open submenus doesn’t look too appealing. I think you’d still want to leave a thinner border behind like it’s a piece of machinery moving along a track.

Bitching aside, I quite like it. Pleased that the showcase combat encounter is actually quite tough. The respawning enemies made me think it was a supposed to lose fight and I was surprised that they eventually stopped.

To answer Mosca’s query: I figured out the controls the first time and this time did some experimentation with what was in the act menus. I thought it made sense but I often massively overestimate how much players can figure out just from trying to play because I’m thinking of the hardcore sweats that know the game better than the dev does and not the average silent majority type that doesn’t post on the internet.

I also think the scenario is a perfectly good set up for a demo. More is always better but this gives a very good taste of what the game is about. I say do it.

I’ll be doing a whole lot more of them for the main game to add variety, but yeah both of the 9mm guns are pretty tight on this one. Especially the Type-88 to balance out its poor damage.

On account of it actually tilting the screen around, I hope more serious recoil doesn’t end up giving people motion sickness. If so I might end up having an option to kick the crosshair around the screen instead like how Counter Strike does it.

Now I can’t tell, but are projectiles registering against the world geometry? They should leave behind sparks, smoke, and impact decals and I didn’t see any of that in the clip.

Also, try going to the bottom floor and picking up the other two guns to see if they’re also broken. There’s an SMG on some crates in the middle and a shotgun in a multistorey block off one corner of the hex between the stairwell and the area with the ramp.

If all else fails I may just have to upload some sort of build with extra logging enabled to get a printout of what’s going on because your problem makes no sense.

Edit: I’ve added extra logging to the v2.2 update, but you have to launch the game with an extra -v argument from the command line to turn it on. The logs get written to AppData/Roaming/StomyGame/KuromagiJam/output.log. Send me that file through pastebin or twitter and maybe I can find out what’s really going on here.

In the real game I’ll have an actual tutorial, this was just goofing around with trying out some systems.

Cool game, I had a good time in Arcade mode.

I kind of like how deliberate everything feels. It reminds me of Soul Calibur making a big deal out of horizontal vs vertical cuts and stuff and it makes the game really easy to understand even if you’re not very good at this sort of thing. SC3 is like the only fighter I ever put a significant amount of time into because it’s just too hard for me to read what the other guy is gonna do in every other game.

Only complaint is that I couldn’t find a way to exit out of Arcade Mode, it just seemed to go on forever despite sensei in the back eliminating the two lowest after every bout. I tried Escape and Q and F10 and a couple of the other common exits and just had to kill the window to quit.

Works fine on Arch with Proton, didn’t see any problems.

So they are registering they’re just not actually causing any damage. And it’s not a consistent problem because I’ve seen other Windows users play it just fine. But if spatter and stuff is disappearing so fast then there could be something wrong with how I’m passing in delta time. Although that should also cause the whole game to run faster or slower which it doesn’t appear to.

I’ve got another machine I can set up that has specs more similar to yours, though it isn’t running Windows. I’ll see if its happening there too. I hate it when I run into these issues only on other people’s machines because often it’s a logic problem somewhere that should actually present everywhere but just randomly doesn’t on my dev computer.

EDIT: No luck, I tried on my ancient laptop too but it appears the GPU on that may finally be dead for real so that also didn’t get me anywhere.

It’s like the projectiles just aren’t registering, does it work if you limit the framerate to like 60 or so? There’s a slider for it in Video Settings.

That’s really weird, I haven’t seen that happen before. It’s clearly registering as them having hit you. I don’t know what’s going on there.

What kind of machine are you running on?

Do you take fall damage? And do you see blood spatter when they hit you? There’s an invulnerability switch for testing that disables both but it’s supposed to only be accessible in debug builds.

I’ll give a couple of tips after watching brim get schrecked on stream:

• This is not a fair fight, the blue guys are wearing armor and Mokoto isn’t. Do not just engage without getting the drop on them.
• Headshots have a 3x damage multiplier but are not instant-kills unless you hit in the back of the head at very close range.
• The X20 is an exception, it does so much damage that it can instant kill with a headshot even at longer range.
• Like in Counter Strike, any amount of movement adds random spread to your shots. You have to stop moving to be accurate.
• Crouching alone does not make you silent, you have to also hold the sneak key.
• Mokoto is immune to headshots but unlike the Grunts in Ctesiphon, the bad guys are not wearing helmets
• You can do a silent takedown by interacting with an enemy’s back. This will work even if the enemy is already alert but you need to have lost them for a few seconds so they don’t just track you.

I don’t think there’s anything I can do to prevent that without forking out cash for signing, you’re just going to have to turn off virus protection. Or use Linux.

Are you crouching in mid-air? Even when everything is working correctly, both of those need that.

You heard right! “Soon” is a strong word though, haha. It’s an ambitious project and I’m aiming for full release on Steam and Itch around halfway through 2028. I’ll have a demo available on both some time before that but not until next year.

Kuromagi Jam, my latest side project is running on the same engine and includes several prototypes of systems intended for Fiber Optic Pizza. I’m currently adding some combat mechanics to it and am looking to wrap it up in three weeks with an expanded release.

Used a couple of the spooky-looking monsters for a jam game: https://stomygame.itch.io/kuromagi-jam-riddle-of-the-machine

Excellent models, I’ll be keeping these in mind for future jams as well. I got them rigged and animated with just a few minutes of work:

• Turn them 90 degrees to face -Y instead of +X, matching Blender’s preference
• I used the Basic Humanoid Rig in rigify.
• Takes a couple of minutes to move the bones into position and you can speed it up by deleting either the .L or .R bones, setting up the remaining half, and then using Armature->Symmetrize
• I use a custom engine that only supports IQM which you need another blender plugin in order to support, but these models are an ideal fit for that format and I had no issues getting them in-game.

I’ve just had someone else with the problem get back to me that those solutions didn’t work, so I’ve uploaded a different “quickstart” build that let’s you launch the game without the menu. Just press Escape to bring up the prompt and then Space to start the game.

Is the settings window not cooperating for you either? I didn’t have time to do a proper menu so now CImgui is calling the shots.

• Try toggling fullscreen with Alt+Enter,
• There’s a config file at AppData/Roaming/StomyGame/Kuromagi/imgui.ini (~/.local/share/Kuromagi/imgui.ini on Linux). Try either deleting it and trying again, or explicitly make sure it has this in it somewhere:

You’re not doing anything wrong, this library isn’t meant to be for user-facing interfaces. I’m just surprised it’s this unreliable.

Really cool little game, I had to die once to figure out how the colors worked but that’s not so bad. After that it was easy and I got up to what I think was the end. I like the simply little combat system though Esc definitely wasn’t denying, I couldn’t figure out how to cancel an action and so just had to commit to every button press. Very neat graphics, both in combat and the dungeon. A+ for effort. This might be reading too much into it, but I’m going to assume the color-matching mechanic is supposed to be the riddle?

I didn’t even think to ask. I abhor AI but I’m going to have a whole page of attribution credits