Rite of Tephra

Thanks for your support and feedback! Off-screen indicators are a great idea! I can extend our existing targeting indicator system to include indicators for all nearby hostile enemies. In the next patch cycle, we will unleash the inventory system, procedural weapons, and (eventually) new enemies. As such, you can expect a lot of balance changes, including your suggestion. Along those lines, was there anything specific about the flying enemies that make them difficult? I could adjust their AI and flight behaviors to make them easier to fight. Cheers!

Cavernous Clusterf*ck, I love it! Thank you so much for your video review! 

I didn't think about skipping the tutorial in the middle of it based on following the instructions... Which is honestly just embarrassing. The whole info dump was meant as an interim thing for the early access while I can sort things out with a tutorial level. 

Combat is definitely a work in progress, obviously. I'll get to work on changing the dodge functionality, since double tapping annoys me, as well. However, target lock is in there, but requires you to press the middle mouse button with a target selected. Similarly, grappling enemies requires targeting them. From your video, I also just noticed that you don't take damage while rag-dolled... So yeah, clunky is probably an apt description.

I'll forward your comments about the sound design to Paul (he does the audio and sfx). While the sounds themselves are out of my hands, I agree that the enemy attacks could use more obvious "tells" aside from the animation wind ups. Using sound to do so is an excellent suggestion. I may also use enemy lighting effects to indicate attacks (e.g. the glowing pattern on the pillbugs will pulse brightly prior to an attack). That type of indication is already implemented on the fireflies, but is easy to get lost when sh*t hits the fan and a million enemies pour out of the woodwork. Adding more sounds to the mix would certainly help.

Speaking of a million enemies. Balance... yeah. It's incredibly useful for me to see how other people play the game, so I can't thank you enough for posting a video. As the one who developed the character controller, combat systems, and enemy ai, it's good to know what is and isn't working from someone without bias or hundreds of hours of play testing. Your comments about the single enemy focus stands out to me for that reason. For the time being, I may have to simply turn down the number of enemies while I tackle the rest of the issues. 

The performance issues are something that I haven't had many chances to get real feedback on, beyond what I can self-inflict. Along those lines, it would be helpful for me to know (generally) what your PC specs are so that I can at least use that as a benchmark for the performance issues. One thing that I've noticed is that some of the post processing effects we use can lead to pretty poor fps. There are some in-game sliders to adjust or disable those effects, but I may disable them by default based on your input. In my experience, screen space reflections and motion blur lead to the biggest performance hit. However, toning down the number of enemies will certainly also help with performance. You didn't even get to the really big caves, which is a little concerning. 

In any event, thank you so much for the criticisms (you're our first review!), and we'll do our best to improve Rite of Tephra using your input. Cheers!