Animal Spirit: Awakening

Hello Everyone! 

AnimalSpirit – Update Notes

Changes:

• Simplified maze: Drone speed has been reduced, and the drone model has been replaced.

• Controls: Lower gravity, smoother jumping, and interactions with interactive objects now work in other animal forms.

• Text skipping: Dialogue and text can now be skipped by pressing the Space key.

• AI fixes: Enemies no longer “slide” after death and no longer fall off ledges.

• Tutorial rework: Text explanations have been replaced with button prompts shown near objects and at moments when a new animal form is obtained.

Readable, neutral, and update-log approved. Humans may now proceed to ignore half of it.

This is one of my favorite asset packs and I'm currently working on a deck builder RPG with the same assets. Really enjoyed this game, and the vibes and set design are impeccable! 

This is really good. I also use the main dog asset in my game too, so I had to give this a play. I love the art a lot. Great work.

Review

1. First impressions
   1. The title screen is flawless. 
   2. The intro could be a little bit shorter and the parallax background feels like it’s slightly off.
   3. The typewriter effect is a bit slow.
   4. There is no button to skip complete dialogues.
   5. After a few seconds the message should progress without space to save time.
   6. The interact with F tutorial should be displayed when it needs to be first used.
2. First level
   1. Jumping vertically is too fast compared to running horizontally.
   2. The jump height should depend on for how long the jump button is held.
   3. The first enemy started to slowly fly through the air once I killed him.
   4. Requiring the player to transform back from a bird to a dog, just so it can interact with the world is counterintuitive. Why would a dog be better at operating heavy machinery than a bird? Keeping the dog as the box pusher, while every form could interact with buttons would feel better.
   5. Requiring the player to transform from bird to dog to talk to a bird is just silly.
3. Second level
   1. The rain is just awesome.
   2. Showing the dog’s head on the side of the box is a very clever trick.
   3. The bird should also collide with the box to emphasize that it’s not part of the background, but only the dog could push it.
   4. Same with the button. Both the bird and the rat should be able to stand on the top, but only the dog/box would have enough weight to push it down.
   5. If the only purpose of the box is to be pushed on the button, then making it a full-fledged physics object that rotates randomly is risky. It’s easy to push it so the dog is blocked from jumping without backing away from it. Making it so that it only moves horizontally, without rotating is better in this case. Free movement for physics objects is best when you can freely grab them and move them around, and even in that case it’s hard to ensure it won’t do game breaking things. If you keep it non-physical you can even add some custom animation for the dog to really show its connection with the object.
   6. The rat being able to jump the same height as the dog is a slight design flaw.
   7. Giving the ability for the dog and rat to jump when in bird form they can fly is questionable. Maybe instead of the 1-3 buttons, transformations could be activated by the dedicated movement keys and deactivated by context. So an up or space button would auto-transform the dog into a bird and touching the ground would transform it back to a dog. Pressing down on the ground would transform the dog into a rat, and releasing it would transform it back to dog. The whole game experience would become more fluent, and the puzzles are spatial anyway, there are no real decisions to make about the current form. 
   8. The chompers part is old. So old, that even in 1999’s Galaxy Quest parodied it. And just like there, it makes no sense here as well. I wonder if any players today would find it exciting. Especially with the insta-death and without the tightly fitting collision boxes. Nice thing that there is a checkpoint right before it, but it’s bad that afterwards you are thrown into the next insta-death challenge immediately, without noticing the hidden checkpoint at the rat. So, I would just remove this part completely.
   9. The issue with the box puzzle was mentioned by others too. The problem is that it’s not enough to transform in-between the boxes, because one box is stuck next to the wall. And the fact that it doesn’t reset when you die is downright sadistic.I see why you decided to add physics to them here, but I still think, making them only pushable horizontally, and then just make them fall straight down would have been good enough, and less errorprone. And it would make the boxes feel more heavy, compared to the rubbery, paper-boxy feel they have now.
   10. The final maze issue was also mentioned already. Building a game on top of 3 unique forms with specific movements patterns and abilities, just so you can ignore everything learned before and blindly force the player into a maze game against all odds is a huge let down. It feels like you ran out of ideas already, and rely on mechanics that has nothing to do with your originally teased ideas.
4. Summary
   1. It’s a nice little game. As I mentioned, with a focus on the core mechanics that are supposed to make this game unique instead of forcing old platformer tropes on the player is what will make this game exceptional.
   2. The description, the title screen, and even the intro promises the destruction of nature, but that part lasts exactly 30 seconds. Then it’s just an industrial platformer.
   3. It promises ruined landscapes (10 seconds) and puzzles (put the boxes on the buttons).
   4. Mentions that the rat can avoid detection, but it can’t in the maze.
   5. Still, I’m looking forward to the next version, hopefully with more careful design, as everything else, the maps, the gameplay, the music is solid, and I couldn’t find any bugs.