Hey All,
I was super excited to see the release hit during my lunch hour. I wanted to run through a bunch of tests real quick to see if I could provide any feedback. Overall, for a first release alpha TVGM is kind of amazing. First and foremost, I want to list out some things I think really need to be added from a usability standpoint, some items that would be great from a quality of life standpoint, and actual bugs I encountered.
If in the future these are better to list separately, let me know and I'll not make omnibus threads.
- Functionality items (Important to have)
- Needs undo/redo buttons/keys - Cannot stress this one enough. Even just a 5-10 action history would be an amazing improvement.
- Some keys not shown on the tooltips (Del = Erase. Z = Zoom out). There should either be a full keymap (maybe shift+F1?) or a way to see/rebind keys.
- Allow changing of hero sprite after selection. As the hero sprite selection only shows their icon, and not their actual sprite, you run into situations where you end up wanting to change your selection. Having to restart your entire project can really kill momentum.
- Quality of Life changes (Nice to have):
- Change sprite palette colors. Probably not free form painting, but you can pull up the palette the sprite is using and change those colors to something else. This would probably be good for people who are not artists (e.g. Me) but would like to tweak the theming.
- Ability to customize title screen would be great.
- Search through all objects/gizmos/tiles/etc. (Remember the name of an object or a description, but not where it was? Searching all available items would be amazing)
- Full screen games (no black bars on left/right side), or the ability for us to move UI to that location?
- UI tweaking. (Not necessarily full UI customization, but recolor or border styles would be great, and the ability to move UI elements)
- Object tweaking (You have multiple behaviors set up which cover a lot of options, but they are locked to individual objects. It'd be great if we could use an object with any available behavior. Like I'd love to have the sushi be a healing item in an Ninja-themed game)
- As we've mention elsewhere, an inventory system. You're like 90% of the way there with how you handle weapons at this point.
Bugs:
- Sprite collision/transparency issues (see examples below). These tend to flicker/disappear if the sprites move, but reappear depending on their location.
- Ladders don't seem to work as intended in all games (in Aliens 'N cats, you get stuck at the top of ladders unless you jump)
- Alt-F4 while in edit mode locked up/froze TVGM rather than exit.
Hope this helps. Overall I'm really liking what I see so far. Great work.