AshenLight

I noticed that sometimes the sprite would be facing the wrong way. Dash felt pretty good, I like the jumping ninjas. I had one standing on my head as I killed his ninja friend. 

The dash feels good and the enemies feel somewhat balanced. I feel that i can take on at least three. I would like to see some enemies that are bigger and take more hits to take out, like bosses. also, a jump mechanic for the character.

1. The dash feels pretty good, but after a while it seemed like the dash stopped moving and just had you kneel down. I'm not sure if that was intentional for heavily injured players or a bug.

2. The enemies feel good. I think facing 3+ would be a challenge, but not impossible.

3. Personally, it felt like the stamina ran out too fast. I would do a few moves, then have to back off and wait, or I would not realize I was out of stamina and just get hit over and over by the enemies. Some of that I'm  sure is my fault, but a bit of a buff to the stamina might go a long way.   

1. The dash feels pretty good. It seems natural and I think the distance the player travels is good. I think it does make the gameplay a bit easy because you can just dash through enemies and ignore them. During my first play through I just dashed through all of the enemies until I couldn't go any further. Either having smarter enemies or a limit to how often you can dash might help with this. Alternatively you could have a class of enemies that you can't dash through which might force the player to have different strategies depending on the enemy (like in Crash Bandicoot) or allow the enemies to "block" you from dashing through. 

2. The enemies feel very static and aren't too difficult to kill/evade. I feel like having more enemies that are more difficult would make the game more fun. The health for the enemies is a good amount if they are going to heal. If the player can't heal then it might feel unfair that the enemies heal though. Having multiple enemies on the same level felt like a good amount but they felt very lifeless so it wasn't hard to dash through them or kill them. Having abilities or different actions/behaviors for the enemies might help with increasing difficulty. I think if it is challenging to pass a certain level then it will be more important to have to learn skills like parry/block/heavy attacks and timing them properly. Currently I just spammed the mouse and didn't bother blocking or using the parry or heavy attack. 

3. I think overall the game is balanced in the way the player moves and deals damage. I think the enemies are well balanced too regarding their health and speed. To make the game more challenging and to be more fun, it might be worthwhile looking into having a key or something that the player needs to collect on each level before they can advance. This could force the player to have to actually fight enemies (if the key is a droppable item) or destroy the boxes in the level. Otherwise there isn't really a need to fight the enemies. Alternatively increasing the difficulty and the amount of each enemy can make the game feel more like a run-and-gun where the player can choose to stay and fight or try to just keep going without dying. 

Overall, great job! Everything is coming together really nicely and it feels like a solid game. I really liked the way the player travels between levels. Since the backgrounds are the same it doesn't feel like you went to a new level though. This could possibly be fixed by having the level be a different tint/color or having an indicator on screen to show which level you are on (especially since you can go back down to other levels). As a side note, the transitions for the door didn't cover the entire screen and it was just a rectangle over the door (I played on a very wide monitor). I look forward to seeing the final product!

-Breanna Flickinger

The controls are really good, moving around and attacking is fun. The dash is fun to use.

The enemies are fun to fight, I think it would be interesting if they had a chance to parry or block an attack.

I like the feel of the combat it's definitely my speed. I do think the character dashes a little too far, and there's some frames at the end of the dash where I feel a little stuck and feel like I should be able to move the character. I could definitely handle three enemies at once maybe even more. My suggestion though is to not add more enemies or give enemies more health, but instead to make them hit much harder. This will make dashing and blocking/parrying more important for the player to learn. I like the timing you have to take with attacks it really make you have to play methodically. I'm getting a sort of souls-like vibe from the game. Is the inevitability that you will be beaten? I can't wait to see this game finished.

   1. How does the dash feel, does the player dash too far, how easy does the it make the gameplay, does the dash give you too many iframes?

The dash feels good and makes sense.  Not too far and helps to speed up movement a little.  The ifames seemed appropriate.

2. How do the enemies feel? Do you think you could handle 3+ enemies at once?

The enemies feel good.  I think that they have the right amount of health and their attacks aren't too devastating.  It is easy to fight just one but I think more enemies would make the game more challenging.  I found it odd that the enemy could jump but not the character.  

3.    What are some other general balancing suggestions you have?

Maybe adding a jump to the character and disabling movement while using parry.  It seems weird to slide around while the character is parrying.  Maybe scale up amount of enemies as well.  I died the first play through but had no problem the second run through. 

The dash feels pretty good, though usually I found myself dashing backwards away from the enemy instead of towards them so the i frames weren't really a concern for me. 

The enemies feel ok, however I think the players attacks are a little weird. The fast attack feels really slow, and the slow attack is glacial, so I pretty much never even used it. Also, I'm not 100% sure but it felt like the parry also gave the player recoil frames, and because the attacks are so slow, you couldn't really do anything after a successful parry which kind of ruins the sense of accomplishment you are supposed to get after doing one. If there were 3+ enemies I imagined they'd all just pile up on each other while you dash backwards and slowly chip away at them, which could get tedious. 

My suggestion for balancing would be to make everything faster, especially if you are planning to have healing after killing enemies, that reminds me of bloodborne where you would want to encourage a faster play style to regain health. 

(I used keyboard so maybe it does feel better with a controller fyi)

1.) I think the dash feels good.  I didn't realize it gave iframes (I probably should have), so I mainly used it to back up away from enemies quickly.

2.) The enemies feel decently easy as a one-on-one, but I imagine more than that would be difficult.

3.) I'd like to see a jump.  I realize this means you'll likely be needing to add jump attacks, but it feels weird to me that the game mostly takes place on a one dimensional line.  There's the one enemy that can jump, but since the player can't jump it acts more like an "invincibility state" than a jump, at least in terms of design.  I totally get if you don't want to add something like that, but as I was playing I kept thinking "Man, I wish I could jump"

I liked the dashing amount in the game.

I noticed that if I hold block and a enemy attacks me I still lose health.

In the game description it said to use W and S near doors, however a door was never shown in the game.

Overall I liked the player mechanics and the animations on the player feel really smooth!