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Chaos Dynasty Honey (SAGE '21 Demo)

High Points:
+Controls work properly, and more often than not you have the tools to save your bacon in a pinch~
+Very Sonic the Fighters, in art style, which gives the game a 'Sega Saturn' type low-poly feel~ It's beautiful~
+It feels nice to explore the level aimlessly~ I mean, there is a task to do, but I spent a good amount of time just... wandering and vibin'~

Tripping Poins:
-It very quickly devolved into a 'Where the Heck Do I Go' type experience. Maybe I just get lost easily, but I found myself looping back to the same few areas over and over again: the waterfall, the central platforms with the 4 snakeys and the Ring Monitor, the start of the level. If the goal is to create open levels to explore, there might need to be a way to signal the Player where to go, such as a vague ping or radar or a scenery element that might tell you where the keys are. Full blunt: I gave up looking after twenty minutes and only finding ONE of the two keys, and by sheer happenstance!
-Some of the rocks around one of the waterfalls... don't function as solid terrain? Mind you, it was at the edge of the play area, but that by itself is deceptive.

Mixed Nuts:
=...why is Jump the top face button? It's kinda awkward to use it in tandem with the Dash, being the bottom button.
=At that, the lack of a Pause button, let alone a way to exit the game outside Alt-Tab, is jarring. Not unworkable, as you aren't timed that I can see and there are several safe spaces around, but it still presents a problem.
I like Honey so had to try this out, movement is really fun but there's no sense of direction in this stage to me at least, then again it is called "Chaos" Dynasty. Y being mapped to jump is a little odd but it kinda works once you get used to it. Quite a solid base so far though!
It was a little difficult to get the hang of but I had a fun time with this one. I think making Sonic fangames about lesser-known or rarely-playable characters is a really cool idea. Running around the level and attacking enemies is fun and satisfying and the graphics have a nice style. The level design was a little rough, though; there were a couple instances of jumps being harder to pull off than they looked and the whole level kind of lacked a satisfying flow and progression. Also, having both a dash move and a sprint move feels a little redundant to me. The dash is faster, but the fact that it had a cooldown and the button assigned to it on my Dualshock 4 wasn't close enough to the jump and attack buttons for me to comfortably hit made me rarely use it.

Overall, this is a promising demo and I look forward to seeing how this fangame develops!
Sternosaur
Sternosaur
Can we just appreciate the fact that Honey from Sonic the Fighters
got enough love to get her own fan game, bravo!
flashcap777
flashcap777
Thank you so much for the feedback! The control mapping is definitely something I've heard about, and moving forward it will be reworked for sure. To be completely honest, I meant to get around to it earlier, but I got caught up in other features- these have been the controls since I first finished writing the framework, they're very outdated haha