I made it! 😃 🎉

This was a lot of fun! Great job!

If you ever would revisit the game or make a sequel. Here's some feedback.
The atmosphere is great! I do agree with @xyz comments about try to use colors a bit more. It took a while for me to understand the lights from the windows.

I would probably also put the camera at a slight angle. Just to give it some more depth, visual interest and also to make it easier to identify different world objects such as walls, etc. Like you did with some of the props, do something similar to walls, etc.

The towers you could climb, not sure what the benefit of that was.

I thought at first that I was supposed to use the first car you encounter 😅

And also perhaps Ultrawide screen support would be great.

But man, this gave me some serious SNES nostalgia vibes! Loved it!

    MikeCL Thanks for the feedback Mike, so happy that you had fun playing this 🙂

    I've taken on board ALL of the feedback in this thread, and I will attempt to implement and/or improve as suggested when I do pick this up again.

    RE Ultrawide screen support, did you try that? And did it produce odd results? I can imagine it would have.

    I started this game about three years ago, worked on it in my spare time, and took a year off of in the middle.

    It had 10 re-playable levels planned all with varied missions, you re-establish communications, rescue POWs and complete various other objectives while making your way to the border. The demo you played is more or less the first mission I had planned.

    I had realised after three years that there was still a huge amount of work ahead, I wasn't sure anyone would actually be interested in it and had doubts about continuing.

    So I decided not to work on any more features and to just polish up the first level and package it as a playable 'concept' demo. Then I could gauge interest and either stop or continue development.

    Now, What I think I may do is to use this demo as a starting point, create a dev-log on Itch and use the feedback so far to produce a second, updated demo. That may generate some more interest and thanks to all the great feedback here may catch a bit more attention! 🙂

    Oh, to answer your tower question... in this demo the only reason to climb towers is to stealth-kill guards. But I had planned to implement zip lines too!

    Thanks again!

    • xyz replied to this.

        _Stephen Now, What I think I may do is to use this demo as a starting point, create a dev-log on Itch and use the feedback so far to produce a second, updated demo. That may generate some more interest and thanks to all the great feedback here may catch a bit more attention! 🙂

        👍️

          _Stephen Finished the level. It's quite good. Below I'll just address possible improvements. I played with mouse/keyboard.

          • Movement feel in general and especially in respect to obstacles could be more glide-y. It'd be better if colliders for props are smaller than props so that the player overlaps them a bit rather than keeping distance from them. Because of this it's hard to tell where you can squeeze through. Some places look like you should be able to pass through but you can't (e.g. between a bush and a dumpster or between a building and a wall. Legs shouldn't be a problem here. You can draw their sprite underneath props or just have a smaller leg span.
          • Related to previous point, use rounded corner box colliders instead of plain boxes for chairs, tables, benches etc... so that player would slide around corners. Now it can sometimes look as if player is stuck on nothing when going around a prop, while it's just player's circular collider trying to push around an invisible sharp corner of an oversized box collider.
          • Camera movement could be smoother, more eased.
          • Switching to/from crouch mode should have better visual and audio feedback. Currently the only visual difference between modes is that small icon.
          • Visual feedback when a stealth kill is in range.
          • Containers could cease to be interactive once you search them, with better visual distinction between searched and unsearched containers.
          • Not sure but you may not need the walk mode. Only run (or swift walk) and sneak.
          • Grenades shouldn't be amongst primary weapons that are circulated with the mousewheel.

              xyz Fantastic xyz, more feedback!
              All valid points and noted for addition going forward 🙂

              When I replayed the game the other day to do the video (above), I was surprised at the camera movement. I don't remember it being like that. And I was using a controller, but also got snagged on lots things and initially struggled a bit.

              When you work on something for so long you become blind to a lot of small things that first-time players would encounter. Everyone's feedback here has been so valuable 🙂

              It sounds like you found the 'quick throw' for grenades then (middle mouse button) 🙂 I can show the number of grenades in the inventory seperately and keep it out of the primary weapon list, no problem.

              Also, I'm sure you noticed that the pop-up help text referred to a controller and not a keyboard. That's something else I will fix!

              My to-do list is growing, thank you so much everyone!

                xyz
                I was just thinking about the walk/sprint/crouch. Each one does have an intended use...

                Crouched movement is slow but is almost silent. Making it possible to sneak and to enable stealth kills.

                The walk is a bit noisier and faster, if you use this mode while enemies are close they'll hear you and become alarmed. But it allows you to cover distance at a decent pace and to exercise caution. So if you can see there are no enemies close, it's safe to walk while exploring, without making too much noise.

                Then the run mode is loud and will alert enemies from a wider area. Only really to be used when either running away or if you're engaged in a firefight and need to run to cover fast.

                The current loudness of your character is indicated in the HUD under the health bar, and is an important factor if you're trying to max out your stealth kills. The indicator shows the noise made when moving, and also when firing weapons. Each stance and each weapon has a different sound radius/loudness. I've also implemented player shotguns (very loud), pistols (quieter) and rocket launchers (very loud), but I didn't include them in the demo (first) level.

                I will have to think about whether to make changes to this system, or maybe I can try playing with walk disabled and see how it goes 🙂

                Thanks for the great suggestions, very much appreciated 🙂

                • xyz replied to this.

                    _Stephen My main gripe is with movement/collisions and overall environment interaction. I'd make polishing that a priority. This is basically your short term gameplay loop. If you manage to make this feel as smooth as butter, the player will perceive the game as super high quality within seconds of playing. Many small things contribute to it though and they should all be finetuned and orchestrated towards maximally smooth experience. You can safely drop some "realistic" things in favor of gameplay flow (e.g. the player must stand at the front side of a container to open it, and it happens only with some containers. This is clunky and inconsistent...)

                        xyz Thanks again xyz, I've actually been working on some of the suggestions in this thread and already the actions around containers have improved as a result. I've also just gone in and adjusted the interaction regions to make them a little larger, and as before, you don't have to be facing a container to open it.

                        I've also adjusted the collision shapes on all props/objects to round the corners and reduced them down.

                        The player's collision shape is also reduced so movement around objects now feels more natural (slide-y) as you can get closer to them, and you can now move between some areas/objects where you could not before. So if it looks like you can go through, you can.

                        For container interactions; There's was a small delay between pressing "open" on a container and it opening. If you leave a container's interaction area before this delay is complete the container won't open and the container search is cancelled. This might have caused some of the frustration with containers you had? The same applies to switches. If you were continuing to move while searching this may have made the search mechanic feel very clunky and unreliable. I've just disabled this delay to see how it feels.

                        I've also done the color correction and it's looking nice. Good progress 🙂

                        Thanks!

                          An updated version is now available on Itch with many of the suggestions made in this thread.

                          https://rokoddity.itch.io/mission-failed

                          A couple of things from this thread are still on the list for future updates, and I'm not quite happy with the image contrast. But I'll play with that for the next release 🙂

                          Devlog: https://rokoddity.itch.io/mission-failed/devlog/813009/mission-failed-devlog-1-the-first-big-update

                          Thanks again to Mike & xyz 🙂

                          • xyz replied to this.

                            xyz Ease the camera.

                            Thanks for taking another look xyz 🙂 Great to hear it's taken a few steps in the right direction, and thanks for very helpful suggestions!

                            In the new update the camera is simply using the built in system for following the player, with a slight smooth. A quick and slightly lazy fix.

                            Before the update, where the camera would jolt (and it was a lot worse than I remembered), I was trying to give the player a bit of extra view in the Y axis when moving up or down the map, by pushing the camera a bit in the (Y) direction of movement. Because of the aspect ratio I felt it was sometimes a bit unfair to the player not being able to see so much in the Y.

                            This seemed to go awry, but I will revisit it sometime to try and get the best of both worlds, a smooth camera and more map visibility for the player.

                            I may also/instead try some kind of 'satellite view' feature that would let the player pull the camera right out to see a larger area, allowing them to see enemy patrols etc and plan their movements.

                            Anyway, thank you so much (again). I'd basically given up on the project until I got the feedback here. I now plan to keep developing it in tandem with a new project 🙂

                              _Stephen changed the title to Mission Failed .

                              Tried it again, I liked a lot of the improvements you made.

                              I do, however, have an issue with the color grading. The style is nice, but it's way too washed over the entire screen giving pretty much everything a yellow tint to it. This results in that there's not much contract between dark areas and light hitting those areas.

                              Hope you don't mind, but I took the liberty to do a quick and dirty color grading to illustrate what I mean.

                              Here's how it looks currenty:

                              As you can see, the light is barely visible.

                              Here's how you can separate things more using color values:


                              Now you more get a sense it takes place more during night time, perhaps the dark areas lit by the moonlight. And the lights placed and from the buildings become clear. This could also be use to strenghten the gameplay, making the player harder to spot by the enemies in the dark for example.

                              So basically, what I did was,
                              Dark areas: desaturate, make it a little bit darker, and give it a blueish tint.
                              Lit areas: Make it a little bit brighter, saturate it a bit more, and give it a slight yellow tint.

                              This gives both contrast in color and brightness value, making the illustrated environment clear to the player.

                              This way, you have a good base to color grade further if you want to use an overall color scheme to give it a unique look, but making the contrast stick better.

                                MikeCL Not easily doable by using only built in color correction. It'd require reworking the assets and/or viewport compositing.

                                    MikeCL Thanks for the example and tips Mike, it does make the lights stand out, and looks great 🙂 Funny thing is, I didn't really think of it being a proper night mission. The lights were always just to add some variety really.

                                    But making it a proper night mission and working on the color correction might make it pop! I would want to do some night missions at some point anyway 🙂 My only worry would be the amount of change and additions needed to fully implement a shadow-stealth system.

                                    For the color correction I'm only using the built in 'WorldEnvironment/Adjustments' (in GD3.6) and this week is the first time I've ever used it, so I'm going to have to see what I can get out of it. I had a hard time getting it to look as it is, and even then I was having issues balancing the brightness, saturation & contrast without making it look too washed out or too dark... at the moment it is a bit too washed out, but I decided to leave it as it is right now and to mention it in the devlog. So I'll definitely be revisiting this 🙂

                                    Lots for me to think on for the next release there, thank you so much for the feedback!

                                        _Stephen I mentioned color correction as a quick way to "unify" the chroma of the final image. Since game assets in small productions are often made individually without much concern of how they work together in a scene, using color correction can "glue" the scene together as a sort of ambient light. Especially usefult for 2d games where the scene is basically a collection of cutouts. It can also nudge the atmosphere/mood to a certain degree. It can't do much for the functional luma in the final picture though. And luma (value) structure is what ultimately dictates the clarity of perception, or the functional side of the final picture if you will. But we're now moving into visual design territory which may be overwhelming at this point.

                                          xyz Ah yeah, no. I wouldn't do that with color correction. Don't think the assets need to be reworked, more about working with the lights in the scene. Simple approach would be

                                          1. Create a canvasModulate node to set the base color temperature and values
                                          2. let the light brighten up the spots.
                                          3. WorldEnvironment/Adjustment to set the overall look and color grading as a final touch.

                                          _Stephen This is of course up to your vision for the game 😛

                                          Either way, fun game. And if you release more content for it, I'll definitely play it more 😉

                                              Thank you for the kind words, support and feedback @MikeCL & @xyz . Not only have you helped me polish up the game so far, you've given me a lot to consider and a renewed enthusiasm for pushing it forward!

                                              19 days later

                                              Congrats on getting double featured! 🎉🙌

                                                MikeCL Amazing 😃 thanks to everyone that voted! Wonderful stuff 😎 🎉