Front facing attacks feel bad

[royal locust]

This has been talked about quite a bit but the attack that go off from the front of your character usually feel pretty bad. Most agree that toxic ink on platy feels fine but I think max level Pigepic with the super large area attack is alright as well (only mas though. Low level still feels bad). The slower and smaller projectiles feel bad as they don't happen often and are extremely easy to miss. I think Front facing attacks should either be beams like toxic or rapid fire projectiles. Upgrade could be extend the range/width/damage but things like sparkling bullet, water blade, and low level wind blade just feel bad as they are right now.

[worn zodiac]

If it’s even remotely possible, I’ve seen in other threads people suggesting that front facing attacks (the projectile ones) should be controlled with the secondary stick, to give some better control

Having to walk into enemies to attack them with a ranged projectile feels bad

[royal locust]

Ya i've seen that too but they may wish not to since they said it's not normal for the genre. I was giving a different view on something I think would work and explain why toxic works while others dont.

[worn zodiac]

Toxic ink definitely feels best because it’s tied to your character and doesn’t move independently

I also find that I tend to outrun my front facing attacks half the time, so I end up getting hit before damage goes through

[sinful terrace]

+1 on this, I'd love if front facing attacks were controlled separately from movement

[compact stratus]

In 20 Minutes Till Dawn, you can toggle auto-target or you can use a second controller.
In Vampire Survivors, it wouldn't make sense because there's lots of attacks and the attacks are always specific directions (not 360 degrees).
When targetted attacks are few like in Swarm, there's good reason to provide the option to control them.

[wintry blaze]

As someone who adores Pigepic's playstyle I have to disagree. I use the front facing attack as more of a front barrier and pair it with holster. I rely on boomerange as my back and side attack along with Ki shield for close protection and damage.

The only time I walk into enemies when attacking is when I have my ult going and I mow everything down in the few seconds I have.

Not saying there cant be other attacks that utilize this. I feel there are attack that would benefit from having this suggestion, just specifically not for pig.

[royal locust]

I said in my post that I think high level pig is actually not too bad. The projectiles are have a high fire rate, high cooldown and are quite large. Low level pig can be a bit annoying but high level is fine. It's things like sparkling bullet which have slow firing rates, slow cooldowns, and are quite small that feel bad imo.

[compact stratus]

yeah Innki suffers from it the most. I mean the limited thing about beta feedback is that most feedback will have been from earlier levels and unlocks so this may not be as much of a frustration with more unlocks

[spring lance]

^ but that's still good feedback in my opinion, later levels make the game easier so these issues aren't as noticeable but issues like this could definitely have an impact on player retention rate, causing more people to give up on the game before they reach those higher levels

[wintry blaze]

Yep I agree with this. If I wasnt part of testing and knew things were subject to change and what not, and this was the game I was presented with, I probably would have given up and stopped playing way long ago considering the confusion and difficulty in style and attacks that were presented in early game.

[vocal flint]

Played for the first time today and my immediate gut reaction was to not use toxic ink because it felt like id need to invest more into movement speed to effectively kite enemies and have enough space to turn around when the move is online. It doesnt help that it feels like the move is designed to be used with fluid barrier but the cooldowns are asynchronous which feels awkward.

[wintry blaze]

After the recent patch, Pigepic is/was over nerfed and I feel it is too worthless now so I guess I agree with everyone in here now.

[acoustic dagger]

I agree. Separating movement from aiming would be a plus. This seems to be less of an intentional gameplay choice and more that this was made with mobile/tablet gamers in mind primarily.
See: HoloCure - Save the World for ideas on how this can work.

[next hearth]

Adding aiming would feel very weird if it only works on some techniques. In survivors either everything is aimable (and you can toggle auto aim) or everything is not aimable.

Currently the fact that you can aim or not a technique, or if it is randomized in position, etc is heavily used in how the technique is balanced. For example Crystal Spikes which can trigger on an empty area does more damage that other techs that can only trigger over an enemy.

We don't really know what to do with these techniques, yet, but I think adding aiming wouldn't be the right solution in our case...

[spring lance]

I don't think Crystal Spikes is a technique that is suggested to have aiming, only abilities like Wind Blade that are aimed by the position of the character currently
Having to walk into enemies to make use of these abilities feels bad, letting them be controlled by the second stick / cursor location would make this feel much nicer

[next hearth]

I know I know, it was just an example of balance between techniques.

Water Blade is balanced in a different way than Wave because Water Blade only goes in front of you and Wave goes to the nearest enemy. If you were able to aim Water Blade then the balance would be totally diferent.

And like I said, being able to only aim a few amount of techniques would feel super weird and everyone would ask for full aim control in all techniques which would make it an entirely different game.

[spring lance]

I understand, I don't agree with "would feel super weird", I see them as just different categories of attacks with different strengths and weaknesses

One major difference is their damage output, you won't be clearing waves with targeted abilities, they're not strong enough - but being able to thin out the giant mob of monsters following you would be much nicer

This is what nearest targeting techniques do currently, I would also think that turning the front-facing techniques into nearest-targeting techniques would make them feel better

Btw: Wave is not nearest-targeting, it's random-targeting
This is an idea I had to make random-targeting abilities feel better and introduce an element of strategy around them

[next hearth]

Yep, one option to "fix" this would be to convert all aimed/frontfacing techniques into nearest/random.

But we would lose a lot of strategy making with that one.

[spring lance]

Yea agreed, you lose the ability for aggression then

[royal locust]

I figured you guys wouldn't want to add "aiming" which is why I made the suggestion to make moves more like how toxic ink works. People generally agree that toxic ink is the only front facing attack that feels good to use. Changing current abilities so they have faster firing rates making them more like "beams" that upgrade with more range/width might help with making them feel better to use. The ones that feel the most egregious are things like sparkling bullet which have a very low firing rate and cooldown making every "miss" feel extra bad.

[spring lance]

Yea +1 on Sparkling Bullet feeling especially bad, upgrading to Sparkling Bullet + felt much worse than other + upgrades
The added upgrade on Sparkling Bullet + I believe is that it explodes on impact - but it misses very often

[compact stratus]

What about visual indicator just a bit before they are cast?
E.g. with Sparkling Bullet, when I have multiple projectiles, as soon as I cast one, I turn around and target the others. I know there's a timer on each skill so it could be simply about minor visual indicators makin this a bit more visible

[royal locust]

I thought about that one as well. It could work but at the same time it might get confusing if you have four different forward-facing attacks

Especially if they All aren't synchronous with their fire rates and cooldowns

[next hearth]

yup we talked about this possibility too but as Zose said if you have 4 techniques it could get really confusing haha

[thick agate]

why not just split movement and where the character faces? you could be walking backwards while facing where you want, using left and right stick to do those 2. or am i missing something?

it doesn't take away anything from non frontal techniques as it doesn't matter which way you walk or face

[acoustic dagger]

i don't understand the confusion either

[royal locust]

They've talked about this before. They said that they don't want that to be the solution because it's not typical for the genre and would be weird for characters that don't have front facing attacks. It might be what they end up doing but it is not what they initially want to go with. Looking for other solutions first

[thick agate]

i've seen it in almost every survivor game

at least the ones i've played i guess

or at least allow to be either moving while turning, AND have a way to turn without moving, like a shift to hold

[royal locust]

It's a big thing in twin stick shooters (literally what the genre is about) But I've never played another bullet heaven game so I have no idea what the standard is.

[thick agate]

like any twin stick

[acoustic dagger]

i guess i don't understand the reluctance since because other games don't do it doesn't seem like a good reason. esp when it could be a toggle

[thick agate]

and they do

having to walk backwards to be able to get engouh distance to realign and miss the timing is a mess

[royal locust]

I think it's more about the genre they want the game to be in. Having an independent aiming control would put the game more in the twin stick shooter category then bullet heaven category which is what they are trying for

[thick agate]

especially when multiple projectiles are involved that do not shoot at the same time

[acoustic dagger]

would you consider holocure to be a twin stick shooter?

I'm just really struggling to understand why it's not ideal even if it would be borrowing from another genre

like the default could just be what it is now then if someone wants it to work with separate aiming, go for it - click a checkbox in the gameplay options

[thick agate]

or shift/stick press to stop movement

[acoustic dagger]

yeah it's kind of annoying since the 2 pals I've played didn't have an easy to see tell all the time

[thick agate]

when your character is equipped with a front facing attack, it'd also be nice to have some visual cue at all times as to where you are facing

in all this mess sometimes

[acoustic dagger]

also what are these other popular games that are defining what's typical of the genre?

[thick agate]

any game with "survivor" in the name xD

soulstone survivors definetly does that

vampire survivors doesn't, cause it's 2d srpites, they don't turn at all

[acoustic dagger]

it just seems like a flimsy reason to not do it if that was the reason

rather than saying something like "oh we don't want to trivialize the gameplay because projectiles and movement speed are balanced around snapping to shoot enemies"

[thick agate]

it's their choice, it's just a little offputing and i can see the "negative reviews" saying controls are weird, because of that alone

[acoustic dagger]

for sure, def their choice. It could turn out well because I think deeprock has one that doesn't have the manual aiming and that's doing great, but the reasoning didn't add up to me

as long as they stick to the typical price too of like <= $10 range then it might work out fine

[wintry blaze]

I think it can be fixed if theres more optins on attacks honestly. The more I play the more I just wish I had access to other builds and such. By itself it can suck, and the pool of moves is super limited so that hurts it as well. You have to unlock the skill tree and unlock a ton of kudos which makes the start of the game REALLY REALLY painful tbh. Later you at least get more cards in your hand, but after the patch I seem to roll the same 4 things every time evne with my luck skill up.

If they had more options for things that maybe spin around the character after a cool down, more projectile options, more homing missle like options, etc it might balance out rather than adding twin stick option.

[royal locust]

This is only a beta. Our choices are extremely limited. I think that the character select screen shows a total of 17 characters we will be able to play as plus every character we do have doesn't have their full moveset for us to test. Proof of that is in the oree skill tree which has a perk to buff wind attacks despite not having a single wind move in the beta.

[wintry blaze]

Makes sense. I suppose the skills then, besides making adjustments to damage output and such, really isnt on grounds for testing then at this time. Hard to test properly when so much is missing when it comes to character viability and builds.

[little totem]

Just playing with platypet so far, I don’t mind the front facing toxic ink ability. It’s actually pretty useful to clear tems in front of you and encourages you to quickly spin around to clear the ones around you which I also don’t mind doing. It’s fairly easy to spin around with the mouse controls if it’s centered on the tem you control.
I see you already talked about/don’t mind platys toxic ink so not sure how helpful my feedback may be.

[autumn temple]

Personally I think that maybe making the cast times of abilities more obvious/pronounced.
I had several moments where I wanted to time the cast with turning around (maybe it was the size of my monitor or something else) but in doing so I got hit by an enemy or enemy projectile because I had to look away from the center.

So a suggestion would be to put an option for extra ability cast timers near the tem itself that accurately display when you cast the ability.

But If we’re talking about how to make the front ones feel more useful than maybe tinker with homing instead of aiming, it also doesn’t have to be very aggressive just a little bit so that you hit those near misses that would save you some dmg

[plush hawk]

I just want to point out the argument that it doesnt "fit" the genre is a poor reason. Tons of reverse bullet hells use direction input now, including the listed holocure/soulstone survivor/mobmania/etc. These are all considered reverse bullet hells, not twin stick shooters. Vampire survivor may have been the first to start the genre, but its not the one to revolutionize all progenation down the line. In fact if anything newer styles of games in this genre tried to innovate.

The fact of the matter is direction input is a QOL that'd improve gameplay and control. If you're that adamant on not adding it, at least fix the hitboxes to be center of your char instead of a miles off and copy what vampire survivor does with static directional attack which is make them feel stronger/bigger/better early on. The main complaint in the end is they feel awful, and theres more then 1 way to fix it if you strongly don't want to add direction control

I don't mean to be a sore thumb or rude about this, and mean this in honest criticism and feedback. Last time we stuck to "genre" too tightly it burned us. I'd hate to see the same mistake repeated

[brisk grotto]

Just reading through a lot of this I'd like to say to keep front facing attacks if possible, it's one of the few forms of skill expression in the game where being able to dash-dance moves like Sparkling Bullet are really fun to pull off

[misty kite]

Id prefer to aim with mouse

[dense portal]

agree with this sentiment. having to run face first into enemies with half the attacks is not fun.

[hollow grove]

Damn it my Discord freaking restarted for some reason when I was writing my comment and for some reason it did not get saved.

But basically I was replying this one comment highlighting LoL Swarm gamemode as an example.

All 9 Champions had 5 Skill slots, the first one being reserved for their initial unique Skill that worked like any other Skill (kinda like Temtem Swarm ones, Wave, Data Burst...), these Standard Skills could all be aimed with the mouse (except for Riven´s I think) and not a single other skill could, they were either position specific, closest enemy, random positions, Summons and a few others, so it was pretty balanced in a way that you needed to both move and shot with your mouse (Auto-Target was an available toggle) these Attacks and some Champion dependant Skills/Ultimate.

Wanted to also mention the case of Brawl Stars (Supercell MOBA Mobile Game). Another game that played VERY differently from your usual game, but not in a good manner, it was absurdly weird and clunky, you could only aim your Super/Ultimate, to move you needed to tap on the map for the character to walk to the clicked position and to attack you needed to like swipe the screen for the shot to come out. And it was vertical.

They were very firm about not changing the mechanics because they didn´t wanted to be repetitive and rather preffered a unique gameplay.

Short story: They went horizontal and went away with their absurd and stupid gameplay and added a stick to both movement and aiming, so basically they went for the standard gameplay.

The result: The game has it´s high´s and low´s but overall the quality of the gameplay only went up from there, no wonder. They wanted a Standard Moba but without the Standard controls and only ended up making an awful gameplay that didn´t lasted long for that same reason, which is why they gave up and decided to stick to the Standard controls like they should have from the very beginning.

[hollow grove]

The point I wanted to make with these 2 comments is:

Do you REALLY need to keep that clunky feeling of not being able to aim a basic attack/skill to the game when you can stick to the standard, expected, or easy way out?, a friend was with me today and I showed him the game, and I did point out that you could not aim Skills at all which bothered me, he played LoL Swarm like many other friends did, if they miraculously happen to have any interest in this game they would inmediately back out and call it bad the moment they learn that they cannot aim a shot like LoL Swarm.

You could always change what the starting skill is for some or what they do (Oree can aim Data Burst but the one with the Slow rather than front-facing the shot it aims to the closest enemy, same for Platypet Water Blade and Wave) or:

You could always make it so the starting Skill for each Temtem can be different or changed, like instead of Wave/Water Blade, select it so Platypet starts with Venomous Claws instead, and make that end in a different gamestyle based on necesities (different role) or preffered options (like, if you ask a bunch of people what would they choose between a Magical Gun or a Magical Sword, or an offensive squishy/defensive tank for a videogame like this, both choices would have their fans).

[vestal zealot]

Short message to say that I think that front skills should be aimable two. Like in League of Legnds swarm it felt better. It's the only thing that feel weird in the game (having to turn back to the monsters to aim at them).

[candid yew]

Reading the feedback, I do think attacks could be balanced between aimed, random target, and closest. You could add a toggle to "lock aim to front" if that's the preferred style of playing.

[flint topaz]

I think controlling Sparkling bullet independently would be overpowered.

As i mostly get to lvl 30 in a Run with innki and got Ton of Upgrades i end Up with Sparkling bullet having the Most Out of all of my skills die to its Areal Explosion.

Geting more Control on that Skill would Kind of ruin the difficulty of the Game for me personaly.

[stuck wraith]

as someone who plays/played vs a lot, i don't think frontal facing skills are inherently bad - but there's a lotta work that can be done to them that doesn't involve just adding another thumbstick to face elsewhere

• I expect our current beta movepool is limited compared to a full launch, but going by what we have right now there's a few too many such moves... in the case of platypet and pigepic specifically it's almost half of those tem's movepools - thats kinda crazy... It's egregious for pigepic too because his skills outside of the front facing ones feel very mediocre - is boomerang REALLY supposed to stop at the first target hit and come back to you? even with +piercing? even with +boomerang? (for comparison, only 1 of VS' starting weapons were front facing, and your character can hold up to 6)

• The long cooldowns and small hitboxes don't help. I know this has been said already, but anything over 3s of cooldown and frontfacing feels awkward to use. The dagger on VS doesn't have this problem as it starts out as a very short and steady cooldown, and basically becomes a beam after evolving.

• Adding to the point above, the weird way +projectiles work in this game reeally doesn't help them either. We don't get a spread pattern for more coverage or a tight fan for more damage potential, we instead getting extra delayed shots. This feels pretty bad with front facing attacks because that means you basically gotta standstill for much longer - which most of the time is just not possible, you're gonna have to reposition and thus miss most of those shots. I know pigepic is meant to be played a little more aggressively with his kit, but not only is that not at all possible with a base pigepic, they're also not the only one with front facing attacks.

• Lastly, a way to alleviate the issue would probably have some more specific aim types that aren't random/autotarget/front facing, think whip or axe for instance

[vestal zealot]

I also think that being able to take aim will make a lot more people around me want to play the game. The fact that you can't aim means that you have to move around a lot, which feels pointless or even painful. These movements aren't even complicated to make and don't add any difficulty to the game, they're just painful. It's true that in most games of this genre there are few, if any, controllable attacks. I'm thinking of Deep Rock Galatic Survivor, where nothing is controllable. However, in this game that's counterbalanced by the multiple objectives that aren't linked to the enemies. In fact, you have to go and collect ore, pick up flowers, etc. Being able to aim while having to mine would perhaps add too much complexity. On the other hand, games such as Swarm from League of Legends have implemented attacks aimed at a survivor in a game where the main goal is to kill enemies, and for me this adds a huge plus to the game's fluidity and ease of use.

Conclusion: Most survivors don't offer the option of aiming, and this is justifiable, especially in games where there are a lot of objectives that don't require you to kill enemies. However, being able to aim makes the game a lot less tedious in terms of gameplay (using a keyboard, mouse or joystick makes for a very enjoyable experience) and would attract more people in my opinion in fact I think that many more of my friend would buy a league of legends swarm game if this was possible than a vampire survivor or deep rock galatic survivor game. That's why I think an option to be able to either aim or leave attacks in front of the character would be a great improvement for the game.

[north fern]

The first feedback I saw before testing the demo were about aiming skills.

After finally being able to play (for several consecutive games and many hours because it's so much fun), I've felt that aiming isn't necessarily a plus. I feel attention is sufficiently spread between reaching event zones, dealing with the enemy waves and looting boxes while kiting as much as posible with your current game techniques and passives. Being able to aim would give the player more control in expense of part of the concepts mentioned.

I think the same about changing front facing attacks. I see an interesting point to just stop running when the time is right and blast all your predators you managed to bottleneck with the terrain. Or using a water barrier or invulnerability to barrel across the waves.

Risk and reward, playing with these things into account, feels really enjoyable to me.

You don't move the same way with every character or map and that variety adds to the game IMO.

[candid yew]

I'm really enjoying the way the patch addressed front attacks. Thanks!

[burnt viper]

we're actually making a huge change to this

The team sat down with all the feedback on aiming that we've gathered during the Demo.
Following it, we'll be making a huge change in the game's controls and aiming, to a degree we're almost stepping into a different genre of game: we're adding manual aiming to the right joystick, so Temtem: Swarm becomes what most people would consider a twin-stick shooter.
We're also keeping the option to maintain the auto-aim for Techniques, for players who prefer this way of gameplay, but we're improving most Techniques' internal targetting, to make things even more enjoyable. This change has been borne entirely from feedback we've read across our communication channels.

These changes will be applied once Temtem: Swarm launches into its Early Access version, since we don't have time to code them while the demo lasts.
We've also made the decision to revert the changes made on patch 0.4.9.5 in a future patch (probably tomorrow), so nobody gets attached to these changes and we can focus fully on the new aiming/moving system.

Thanks for your feedback! Please keep it coming (although we're covered on this specific area, we'd love to get more feedback on everything else!)

[burnt viper]

I'm sorry!!! we love that you enjoyed it, but it's getting reverted for the sake of the future We've also made the decision to revert the changes made on patch 0.4.9.5 in a future patch (probably tomorrow), so nobody gets attached to these changes and we can focus fully on the new aiming/moving system.

[candid yew]

Thanks for the update! For what it is worth, I don't think you are changing genres. You chose to have attacks aimed based on character direction instead of map direction, but you didn't have a good way to change character direction without changing position. You could rotate with the mouse, but (for me anyways) my cursor could leave the game screen making this an unreliable and dangerous option. You could spin with a rotation of wasd, but that was getting really exhausting on my hand and I couldn't stop at the angle I wanted. I think the twin stick aim and improved auto targeting will let you achieve the bullet heaven genre feel that you wanted.

[stiff cove]

Completely agree that it wouldn't really be changing genres because of all the 30-40+ bullet heavens I've played, I can count on one hand how many didn't have the option of aiming (WASD to move, mouse to aim or twin stick if controller)
Just as a suggestion, adding auto-aim closest target would also be a nice setting for chill playthroughs (most bullet heavens that have manual aim have this as a toggleable option too since not everyone wants to tryhard aim their abilities)
I do think these are steps in the right direction though, and it will be a great way to attract and retain veterans of the genre who may have otherwise been alienated by the lack of manual aim

[fiery yoke]

I was about to write that I dislike the change to frontal facing attacks; while being forced to pick some of them I think generally they are okay to have in a game, if there's alternatives.
but i much prefer the "double stick" aiming method

[burnt viper]

auto-aim closest target is the planned improvement to auto-aim, although not all techniques will benefit from it!

[serene bone]

trying the demo right now and it feels a bit clunky with a controller because of not being able to aim and move at the same time, makes managing enemies way more difficult.. hope this is adressed !

i see now that it wont be changed while the demo is out which is a shame but i really like the game aside from that

[scarlet reef]

so will this just affect only the frontal bullet attacks water blade, data coruption, sparking bullet, and wind blade. cause these are the problem i would hate if every other attack had to be aimed too

[idle eagle]

To be specific it effects the bullet attacks in general. Because there are more then that post demo lol. But yeh, def needed(though..i will still set to closest enemy..)

[exotic nebula]

I think the forward facing attack could benefit from having a 90 to 180 degree angle auto aim. It would make it a lot easier to use them.

[royal locust]

They are going to be adding right stick aiming with the launch of early access

[scarlet reef]

no wait the twin stick aiming different moves could have different deggres of aiming

[slow warren]

Completely agree with this.

[royal locust]

That's already coming in the early access build of the game.

[slow warren]

that's epic news! this demo has already blew my mind.