Feedback on Astral Hearts, now with a bunch of new improvements

Astral Hearts, a mulitplayer Action RPG, is nearing completion! :tada:
We’ve recently released a new class for early access players, which will go live to the public in about a week. Until then, let me know if you guys think the following works pretty well:

  • Skill progression with skill points awarded on level up
  • Dialogue system when talking to NPCs
  • The overall scale of the map
  • Combat! (this is really important)

I’m planning to ship more content related things like more weapons, monsters, quests, and boss battles within the week, so let me know what you guys think of the game so far!

https://www.roblox.com/games/1090923299/REAPER-Astral-Hearts?refPageId=1bd8b9be-a1dd-42dd-a254-e0c4592dffb9

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Semi-hijacking to say that I’ve been following this game for up to two years now and I love Astral Hearts. It’s an upcoming RPG that incorporates a lot of inspiration both from within and from other works to form a promising experience on Roblox and I am excited to see where it is going even now.

For anyone who hasn’t tried it out yet, I would definitely recommend doing so. The developer has been updating a lot recently and there is definitely lots to come as per the plans for the game. For those of you who are in to anime, JRPGs or just trying out new RPGs in general, all the more reason to hop on board.

A lot of the fun that’d come from this game would be to experience it for yourself. I’ve personally enjoyed A:H lots over the course of its development and I look forward to new content as well as continuing to support its development and creators along the way.

Here are some screenshots that hopefully will entice you more into trying out the game. I won’t share much, as you should definitely check out this game yourself! Click to enlarge.

Please do not ask about my choice of character.

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Let me just say this right now, the intro is beyond amazing just by itself (I dunno why, I just like it lol) though I have a few problems with this game.

When starting off playing the game, you can “choose” two classes, the reaper and blade dance. The problem with this however is that the reaper is straight off avaliable by purchasing a gamepass. To me, this seems like it already heavily leans towards pay2win in seconds of just joining the game, this usually doesn’t really turn out well (COUGH, EA…) In all seriousness though, the UI design is pretty spot on.

When first joining the game, the camera sensitivity seemed really slow to me at first requiring me to change my settings but didn’t really bother me that much. When I tried pressing y at first, I though I was lagging but it was actually just input lag (might want to fix it up :man_shrugging:). It kinda seemed cool to me that they told you the directions rather than the player following a floating arrow or hexagon to the location.

After I got to the village, I got kinda lost a little to search around when I just realized it was the guy with grey hair, if possible, you might want to try adding a little name tag above when you get to a certain 50 studs near then have it poof when the talking prompt shows on them. It might also be nice for some players to get a “hand-tour” type of dealio where at the first part, you show them directly rather then telling directions, might also help with people who can’t read english.

The sounds of 500 slashes in the background constantly kinda annoyed me, even if I was 500 studs away :thinking:.

After getting the quest from the farmer near the gate, the guy said to kill frogs but then it told on the side to kill cabbers, a little bit of inconsistency you may want to fix. The combat is pretty good but a little broken, standing still makes you “invincible” to enemies.

Also, a problem happened with the viewport frames :pensive:
https://gyazo.com/0232134f76a6ebf11104418126650639

Heres the error message if you need it:
https://gyazo.com/c9034c869a16d1df0e594567723facb7

During combat, It might just be me but I barley used the dodging as it just caused more problems to actually fight, maybe allowing the player to move a little more after they land from dodging can give it a more spicier edge. The double jumping also seemed a little inconsisent at some moments with a slight delay issue.

Spamming tab while getting out the village allows you to bring the menu into the battle zone while also glitching yourself out like so (no bugs showed up in output for me saddly), allowed me to do wonky things tho…
https://gyazo.com/c06f4f08e8d80e8b1f9993be289c25a3

Having to do the same quest again after dying if you didn’t finish made me a little disappointed though but probably for the better :thinking: (Players just dying again and again to finish the quest lol).

I’ve also noticed that if a player kills an enemy (aka last hit) then they get the confirmed kill whereas you (even if you did alot of damage) wont, might want to make some sort of exp share type of deal.

I know this post may sound like I’m complaining alot but let me just say this, theres alot of potential for this game and Im waiting to see where this project goes, good luck! :+1:

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The world is beautiful to explore, however it was hard to navigate. Lacks visual language. Explicit instructions were hard to follow.

Thanks for the feedback! I’m glad you enjoyed the intro.

Regarding the class being locked behind a gamepass, we don’t plan on selling much because we’re actually more focused on the F2P aspect of the game. The class will be available to everyone this Friday.

Of the bugs you’ve listed, we’ve fixed a couple, namely the being locked in place and the dodging, and we’re continuing to make more improvements!

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It is a bit sparse at the moment, but we’re looking into making more visual improvements once we get some performance optimizations down.

lowkey, find a different game to play its been too long

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My feedback will be sort and sweet. I’m not going to focus on what I like, even though there is a lot. So what don’t I like? First off, there seems to be a hit detection problem for the basic attacks. For the blade dance, I believe it’s called, the 3 hit combo mouse click attack seems to only hit the enemy for 1 if not 0 of those 3 hits. Not being able to open your menu in the “wild” is kind of irritating, not much more to it. Finally, I think you need to add a stat display for the weapons. The only way to see if one weapon is better than the other is to equip it, then close the menu, and then re-open it so the stats refresh. You should honestly just be able to see the stats in a window when you click on the weapon. Oh, one more thing. I like how this game is leaning toward more skill based combat, except that the attack “previews” are not really previews because they happen at the same time the attack does so you don’t really get time to react. You could fix this by either showing the previews earlier or by making the monster’s animations better reflect that they are about to attack and hit you.

EDIT: Forgot to mention. I am someone who likes to thoroughly read through dialogue (if it is good, and it seems to be), yet if you sit stationary in dialogue to long it automatically closes! This is just awful. I repeatedly have had to go through the same dialogue multiple times.

EDIT 2: Guess it’s really not that “short and sweet.” One last thing, (I hope), there should be a way to display a quest that you haven’t completed. If you die, the quest requirements on the side of the screen disappear, which is a bug in its own right. But either way, you should be able to click like “Make Active” on a quest to see it on the right of the screen.

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The dialogue and hit detection should be fixed now! Thanks for letting me know :slight_smile:

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Played for about 45 minutes, some first impressions:

The thing that stuck out most was that walking to places felt sluggish. Despite having a variety of acrobatic abilities (double jumping, dashing, and that one skill where you spin around and do a billion damage), I didn’t have access to anything that let me traverse the map faster. Whenever I left combat, I felt like I was going from being this awesome blade-dancer into just some regular old joe.
I think the game definitely needs something to keep the energy going when I leave combat. Obviously it doesn’t have to be as intense, but something to be doing while I get to places.

The combat is stellar. Whenever I got hit I never felt like it was unfair, and whatever you did to the hit detection seems to have worked because that was pretty spot on. The ability to aggro large groups of weaker enemies to kill them faster was good, abilities felt risky but powerful, the blue bar thing was good.

Smaller nitpicks:

It wasn’t clear when my abilities were off cooldown. Unless I’m missing something, I could only tell by trying the ability and seeing if it worked.

It wasn’t initially clear that when the enemies’ blue bars deplete, they’re vulnerable. It’d be nice if the enemies gave some visual cue when they were vulnerable (exhausted?) to make it more obvious, and also to help when dealing with multiple enemies (which you can’t see all the blue bars of).

After I left combat, there didn’t seem to be any way to get my health back up without chugging a ton of health potions, or dying and walking back. Since I didn’t have many potions, I’d periodically die as enemies whittled me down, and I didn’t really feel like I could do anything about it.

I’m sure this will be fixed in time, but a lack of quests meant there wasn’t much direction. I was wandering the map, finding enemies and seeing if I could kill them. This was fun, though I think I’d have run out of enemies to try if I stayed around longer.

I tried levelling up a skill (my spinny attack), but it didn’t seem to improve it.
Whenever I levelled up my strength, I’d need to close and reopen the menu to see the effect it had on my attack.

It’s not made clear that you need to sheathe your weapon to open the menu. I like the mechanic (sheathing my weapon to take inventory feels immersive), though some indication as to why my furious TAB pressing isn’t working would be nice. Until I figured it out, I thought the menu was just broken.

I wasn’t paying much attention to the dialog in the opening quests, and I didn’t really know where I was going or who I was looking for. It didn’t take too long to find the town, and it only had three people in (making the second quest easy enough), though I did feel like the game would benefit from quest markers.

Speaking of quests, the farmer tells me he wants to kill a bunch of spikey frogs, and then the quest is to kill flying cabbages. Probably want to fix his dialog.

And finally, I experienced a bug that I needed to rejoin to fix. When speaking to the shopkeeper in the second quest, a speech box appeared without a “Continue” button, preventing me from continuing or exiting the dialog. There wasn’t any errors in the F9 log, though when I reset it was filled with this:

Error Log Screenshot

I still couldn’t speak to anyone until I rejoined.

Overall it was fairly fun, though I think a few changes could be made to perfect the game loop.

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Literally spent the last few hours looking into game psychology before committing to my own RPG.

Both glad that the RPG genre is getting a new addition, whilst also in dismay towards the added competition. Luckily, colbert’s screenshots shows that the theme for our ideas are completely different phew!

Will edit this with feedback either today or tomorrow, seeing as I’ll be going offline in a half hour, which isn’t enough time to give a detailed review.

The Japanese under Astral Hearts in the title screen is too small on my monitor that it resembles chicken scratch (and I learnt Japanese in the past!), though props to the fact that this useless-good-for-nothing-broken-laptop-substitution-excuse-of-a-netbook could even load in that fact, with a rate of 1 asset per 3 seconds (after 80 assets remaining)!

Giving off an SAO vibe with the clothing! :smiley:

EDIT:

Not much consistency with the shading (colour-wise) for the hairs. Great horns on one of them, though. Reminds me of the Loli demon lords from isekai genres. :stuck_out_tongue:

KONOSUBA!

NOTE: dying seems to remove the UI for the quests, whilst still having the game recognise that you have the quest. At least, this is the case for the first quest given to find the chief.

After my first death, I was no longer shown enemy animations, nor their UIs for health etc, just myself getting damaged (and the damage amount).

EDIT: So I killed through day 2 without being able to open the main Roblox website. Will see if I can make time tomorrow to re-play and make a review on it.

EDIT: Getting a new device today (click & collect) or tomorrow (delivery - 1st November) - will start a draft to compare gameplay between this crap laptop that lags whilst typing this message and one that can actually run games.

2 Likes

I’ve been following the game since its early stages and i’m happy with it since then, although i’d like to minimize the map size because there’s so much unnecessary spaces that has no mobs or objectives.

It’d be also a good thing to improve performance and make the UI animations a bit faster because the current animations are smooth but really slow in my opinion as it doesn’t very convenient.

Also, some mobs attempt just few attacks and break.

there’s more i’d talk about but i’ll just mention them and let you look into them:

  • Repeatable quest(the cabber’s quest in particular as it was the only quest available)
  • Shops
  • Adding a cooldown indicator for every ability(including dodging)
  • Camera Movements

On the bad device

So, I left it loading for 5 minutes whilst AFK, came back and there were still 80+ assets remaining. Probably due to how slow the device is. Then in the time it took to set this up, I lost connection… Assets loaded much faster second time, completed in under a minute.

So the fact that standing still and attacking propels you forward can be annoying in its own right, but walking and attacking slows you down. Feels annoying, though I can understand why you do it.

I’d personally prefer a stamina bar or some indication that I can use dodge again rather than trial and error or wait the approximately 5 second cooldown - when I play RPG games, I tend to plan out skill usages whilst taking in the cooldowns, i.e. launching a boost skill before another skill cooldown finishes, so that when the boost skill animation is over, I can go straight into the attack to maximise usage (which I imagine a bunch of others players do as well).

For the menu, you also need to have your weapon unequipped in order to open it, which I didn’t realise the first time I joined the server (30th October), and just assumed that it was a W.I.P./buggy feature (since I like to familiarise myself with movements & controls before UI). Also, you can just equip weapons after the menu is open, rendering this redundant, though you can’t fight with them. However, you can’t take the menu off when your weapon is out, which is also annoying. You can also just walk into a red zone with it out with no effects.

In menu → Quests → Completed, you keep the “drop quest” button, which I don’t particularly want to test till I get the better laptop and can trek back to the starting point to see how dialogue’s are affected by quest completion and drops.

I don’t know if your quest UI boxes are temporary or purposeful, however, while it looks fine whilst in the menu, when receiving the quests, to but it bluntly, I was completely thrown off the first time I saw it. Perhaps adding a background would help, or rounding off the edges?

It would also be nice to have explanations on what stats increase. I can guess that luck impacts drop chance (however, to what extent?) and that strength increases damage. As a starting player, I don’t know what types of weapons are there except swords (i.e. melee weapons). If there was magic and ranged weapons, I’d assume they’d be incremented (damage-wise) by intellect and dexterity, respectively.

There’s a delay with the UI for showing you’re able to interact with an NPC and showing how to interact (confirmed with multiple NPCs).

Diamond without text

image

Text without Diamond

image

Skill previews don’t do anything.

Should add an option to toggle quest objective completion on the screen. After rejoining or dying, you have to keep going into your menu to check. Good that it tells you when it gets completed though.

Both upon resetting and dying in combat didn’t break the enemies this time! :slight_smile:

Combat!

Standing in certain parts of the red area can still cause me to not take damage? Specifically with the Diamond golems and standing right at the edge (i.e. close as possible/inside) of the golems. This is give or take on when it happens. Intervals between attacks vary to up to 5+ seconds.

Some sort of healing feature outside of potions, such as over-time healing whilst in green areas, would be great.

After a while, my weapon stopped functioning… Unequipped and requipping didn’t fix it. Neglected to see if skills would work. Both animation &, damages didn’t happen. Resetting fixed it. The second time it stopped functioning was after I messed around with equipping a new weapon - don’t know if this was related. Skills could be activated and worked fine, however, even after and in between skills, I couldn’t attack normally.

Console errors

Got stuck in a fence where animations, attacks, skills, dodges etc didn’t do anything.

Got stuck in a fence


After equipping a new weapon, it’s a bit buggy with equipping a different weapon. Sometimes does it, sometimes doesn’t.

Going to post in case aforementioned bugs are addressed by time I re-open on the better device tomorrow. Couldn’t go to deep into combat due to lag (mainly because of my device).

On the better device

Will edit it when I get it on Friday 1st November.

Actual feedback

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Thanks for checking out the game and writing up some great feedback for it.

There should be a skip button that appears after a couple of seconds. Completely loading the assets isn’t required, and the game accomodates for that.

The current controls description doesn’t display properly, but we changed the conditions under which you can open your menu from only within safe zones to anywhere on the map as long as your weapon is sheathed. This is because we found that it was less confusing and more reliable, although I haven’t updated the controls UI yet.

I actually didn’t know this happened. Thanks for this!

There’s a lot of weird edge cases I still need to iron out with combat, so thank you for the feedback on it.