Joey’s Slimeventure

For context, I’ve not done a super in-depth review here given your request was primarily for specific feedback on the boss fight. I’ll start by saying that there are definitely some well-developed aspects of Joey’s Slimeventure, even at this early stage. The first area has a lot of charm, the visuals are vibrant, Joey has some nice animation work and the movement itself feels smooth and responsive. Visually, parts of the opening area reminded me quite a lot of Sonic & Knuckles on the Mega Drive (most likely because of the vines), so while it was a new game, there was a level of vague familiarity to it.

Again, I’m noting that the context you provided was that the main focus of this test is the balancing of the mini boss. With that in mind, I’ve focused most of my feedback on that encounter and haven’t commented on many of the areas I normally would, particularly where you’ve already said they’re still a work in progress. As a disclaimer, I also don’t speak German, so I haven’t evaluated the dialogue or anything communicated exclusively through German text.

While I was enjoying the bit of exploration in the first level, I can quite categorically say that that enjoyment diminished pretty fast when facing the frog mini boss. I attempted the frog roughly 12–15 times (I didn’t record all of the attempts) and never got it below around 70% health. I started recognising several of its attack patterns, but I never reached the point where I understood how I was supposed to exploit them. After repeated deaths, I wasn’t thinking, “Great, I know what I did wrong, I’ll get it next time,” or recognising any real level of progression from how I did previously. Instead, I was becoming increasingly deflated because I didn’t feel like I was learning enough from each attempt, and every subsequent death felt almost inevitable.

As requested, the boss fight was the main focus of my testing and was most definitely a problem area for me. I’ll quickly caveat that I did make more attempts at beating the boss after I stopped recording.

The main problem for me was that I never really understood how I was supposed to exploit its attack patterns. I tried beating the boss around 12–15 times, and while I think I became a bit better at recognising what the frog was going to do, that knowledge wasn’t translating into me actually becoming better at fighting him.

I would describe the frog’s behaviour as random, but with recognisable attacks within that random selection. For example, he always seems to start with a spit/projectile attack. Then I had instances where he did a tongue attack, but others where he would do the jump attack and try to land on me. So, as far as I could tell, there isn’t a set pattern, but I recognised distinguishable attacks throughout.

All in all, I recall there being:

• Projectile/spit attack (I’m actually not sure if there are two separate versions of this or if it’s the same attack that just looks different depending on whether you’re at near/far range)
• Jump attack
• The dust cloud/ground impact damage that can hit you even if you avoid the jump itself
• The spawning of enemies and therefore their attacks
• Tongue attack

The additional enemies that spawn were fine for me. They can be tricky to deal with while trying to avoid the frog, but I wouldn’t suggest that they are contributing too much to the difficulty. Given that I had encountered them beforehand and seen a bit of their behaviour patterns, they were fine to manage. However, with regard to the mini boss, I felt like even though I could see what the frog was going to do, I just wasn’t learning how I was supposed to exploit what it was doing.

As you’ll see from the video, I tried approaching the fight in a few different ways. I tried being evasive, getting close for an attack and immediately backing away, and waiting for particular attacks before moving in. I suspected that after the frog landed and the impact smoke cleared I was being given an opportunity to attack, but I still seemed to take damage whenever I got close.

With the tongue attack, I felt like I was meant to duck under it. I checked the controls on the webpage you provided, and it said that S was to crouch, though as far as I can tell, it’s not possible to crouch. Maybe I wasn’t meant to crouch under it, but that’s what it felt like I should be doing. I will say that the fact you indicate that the tongue attack is coming with this placeholder highlighted in the screenshot above is very useful for anticipating it, but I still couldn't figure out how to best get to the frog and attack him while avoiding getting hit myself.

In terms of the frog’s power compared to my own, the frog seems to deal somewhere between 8 and 18 damage, while my attacks appeared to be doing relatively little damage back, which is fairly standard. I think my lack of damage dealt back likely felt a bit amplified simply because of how badly I was doing.

The jump attack caused me quite a few problems. I didn’t even notice the shadow initially, as it’s quite subtle. Even while aware of it, I still find it very subtle, and as it’s being used to telegraph an attack, I’m not sure of the reasoning behind making the telegraph subtle as opposed to obvious.

The spit attack was at least quite readable. As seen in the screenshot above, the spit ball goes out further toward the player, and the other parts are close range attacks. I could see that, have enough time to react, and then think about what to do next.

I would add that the fact the frog can do that jump attack from off screen, with the highlight on the landing area being so subtle, meant I was getting hit quite a few times by being jumped on from off screen.

I’ll also add that I found I couldn’t always rely on the accuracy of that highlighted landing zone shadow. The frog stays within certain bounds, so if you go far enough left or far enough right, the frog won’t actually be able to jump and land on you. However, he will still do the jump attack, with the shadow appearing over Joey, but the frog landing at the boundary, away from the shadow.

Briefly touching on that, there wasn’t any obvious marker showing me where that boundary was, but I’m assuming this is simply because it is a WIP. It’s hard to judge a boss fight when some key aspects of its attacks are not fully working correctly, specifically when I’m getting an indicator of an attack zone that isn’t actually accurate.

The fact I had to repeat the intro to the boss fight every time reduced my willingness to try again a little bit more each time. If you’re running another playtest, I would suggest making the checkpoint directly after you have turned from slime to human. Every time I died I had to retrigger the encounter and go through the dialogue and animation again, which is about 25 seconds each time. Across 15 or so attempts, that becomes quite frustrating as a player.

Overall, I found the frog extremely unforgiving, but I want to make a distinction between that and simply saying it is too difficult. If your intention is for Joey’s Slimeventure to be a difficult game, this boss most certainly fits that bill, and I wouldn’t necessarily reduce the difficulty just because I struggled with it.

I would be curious to see how others got on with it, both with regard to how difficult they found it and how fun they found it. I personally did not find this boss battle fun, but again, that is not to say others won’t.

By my later attempts, I felt that I could anticipate several of the frog’s attacks, but I still hadn’t discovered a reliable way of dealing damage back without trading damage myself. I’m fine dying repeatedly if each attempt makes me feel like I’m improving or learning something I can use on the next attempt, but in this instance, I felt like I was picking up on aspects of the frog’s behaviour without learning how to then exploit that behaviour.

That was ultimately what made the fight frustrating for me. Rather than dying and thinking I know what I did wrong and what I’m going to try next, every subsequent death started to feel almost inevitable.

Outside of the boss fight, the controls generally felt smooth and responsive. I had no real issue moving around, jumping or navigating that first level

I looked at the controls you listed on the website (shown above), and it lists the secondary attack as being right click, which it wasn’t. As a result, I did my whole run unable to throw an item. It was only after I stopped recording, having died many times over, that I jumped and tried to glide and found out that W actually throws the projectiles.

I’d make sure the listed controls match the current build before getting too much more balance feedback on the frog, in case others also end up essentially only having a standard attack at their disposal.

Again, I’m not going to comment deeply on this given you said it’s a WIP, but I’ll just say that I don’t think I would have realised that I needed to do something with the two hearts before entering the portal without the instructions you provided.

They don’t look visually prominent, and there is no indicator that I need to interact with them. There may be German text explaining some or all of this, which I haven’t evaluated, so I can only comment on what I understood visually and mechanically.

I generally liked the visuals in the first level. There is quite a vibrant presence to the game already and parts of it reminded me of Sonic & Knuckles. I think the vines in particular contributed to that impression, so there was an element of nostalgia to this. It’s almost as if you combined some elements of Sonic & Knuckles, Kirby and actually a bit of Ristar.

The slime (I’m not sure if Joey is both the slime and the human) also has some nice sprite work. In particular, I liked the jumping animation and the animation where he’s up against a wall after you jump into it. The little squish animation is very nice. The attack animations with the sword (as seen above), felt quite polished.

In terms of the visuals of the mini boss, I found that the frog itself could do with being a bit more visually prominent during his introduction when he’s sitting on the throne/statue. I barely noticed it initially because it felt quite subdued against the surrounding environment. Given that it is the focus of the encounter, I think it could stand out from the environment a little more.

A very minor point, but the parallax effect when approaching the frog also felt like it could move more. The lack of movement in the foreground layer combined with the super slow movement of the background layer made it feel a bit off for me.

Health IS 0/100 on Load 00:13:44:46
If you load the game, you start with 0 health.

Restart Screen 00:13:46:12
When you die against the boss, you can spawn back in and face him while RESTARTis still on screen.

Invisible Climbable Object 00:17:12:27
You can end up climbing an invisible climbable object. 00:17:01:48

I found that boss brutally difficult. That is not to say it’s too difficult, and I’d urge you to gather more feedback. I found it very difficult to understand how I was meant to beat him. The selection of attacks seemed random, but you have choreographed them in such a way that they are recognizable, I just simply dont know how to exploit each attack without resulting in just getting hit myself. The selection of frog attacks is quite good. You;ve done a good job adding variety, and I have nothing negative to say about the number of individual attacks, or the range of attack types covered (eg close range, long range projectile, aerial attack, spawning other enemies). I suspect that even removing the other enemies spawning could potentially be be the turning point on the difficulty.

In terms of my player experience, I didn’t have fun playing against the frog, that I can say definitively. If I was a player, I’m not sure I would come back to the game if this was the level of difficulty I was going to encounter throughout. There will be others that relish the challenge Im sure. I think you can retain most of the difficulty you’re aiming for, but as a player I’d want each failed attempt to leave me feeling like I had learned something useful to encourage me to try again. That sense of progression was the main thing missing for me during the fight.

Again, I would highly suggest getting more feedback on this so you can properly map how difficult a selection of players found it. There were nice snippets of polish in other areas for sure, I just found that boss quite difficult.

1. 00:00:00:00Comment

   Intro and player starting position comments

2. 00:00:32:58Comment

   First combat comments

3. 00:00:50:53Comment

   Positive movement and animation comments

4. 00:01:21:59Comment

   Comments on conveying impact during combat

5. 00:04:35:00Comment

   Comments on the visual presentation

6. 00:07:53:36Comment

   Frog boss introduction

7. 00:08:17:28Comment

   Comments on the frogs visibility during the dialogue sequence

8. 00:08:42:14Comment

   Visibility of the frogs landing area during the jump attack

9. 00:09:46:33Comment

   Unaware of sprint being an option

10. 00:10:30:23Comment

    Comments on the light/glow and its purpose

11. 00:11:01:36Comment

    Testing the bounds of the frogs movement

12. 00:13:44:46Bug

    Loading the game results in the player starting with 0 health

13. 00:15:57:03Bug

    Player can die and respawn without clicking RESTART

14. 00:17:01:48Bug

    Joey seems to try to climb an invisible object (seen at approximately 00:17:12:27)

15. 00:17:35:46Comment

    Closing thoughts on the boss fight