Loved most of it, your work is always great, aside from one giant set of complaints that it turns out is a bit of a nitpick all my complaints and suggestions are sort of nitpicks.
Also Swatbots scream "priority one" the exact right amount, the cacophony is great.
Myeah, the train stage needs quite a few adjustments. I can't help all of them tough, the camera going wanky is out of my control.
But an update should communicate escapes and have teleports more smoothly, hopefully.
1. Agreed. I just need to figure out what and how to do the opening narration, for now it's kinda empty indeed.
Altough I kinda like atmospheric silence before things go down. But yeah, it's not meant to be THIS quiet.
2. I don't entirely understand your point here? You want the Knothole cutscene take place right at the beginning of the level?
I'd agree the balance for when HUB ish area's appear in this pack is a bit off, sometimes 4 levels in a row without one, sometimes twice back to back, but I can hardly swap levels around without making the already basic story flow even more awkward.
3. Hmm, yeah, that Farm room needs some rethinking. Technically, killing the monkey is irrelevant, the point is that you jump down the mud from a great height, it's acting like the chemicals from techno hill zone and why the horse kicks you in earlier, to introduce that.
I should have added vertical rings there. Instead I tried to make it kinda scripted where the player is dragged into it, which was probably a dumb idea.
But agreed the room doesn't communicate it well, is too cramped, and I suppose the barndoors opening by themselves is confusing, since that's just a mercy shortcut for players failing at the mud so they don't have to climb over again.
4. Oh really? Sucks, I thought I introduced the tree branches earlier and usually with vertical rings above them before it gets more serious.
5. Yeah, the red rocks are a bit confusing, I was planning on making them instadeath but later changed my mind on the harshness and give players a fighting chance. I got to change the warning signs to reflect it. As for Blaze breaking them, so be it. I'm not going to worry about custom characters too much, it's impossible for me to plan out ways to contain all of them.
6. I understand the confusion. Reason why the player is often referred to as a "them" is to conceal their gender since it can potentially be any character you're playing as. Orbot screws up once referring to the player as him, guess that might require a retake from Mike. And I like the implication it's not really just "you" who's going trough the levels but you represent a group of freedom fighters at the same time, like an RPG party. Kinda ironic since this pack isn't designed for multiplayer, oops.
Having custom dialogue for other characters would be neat, but then I have to look into how that's done, I have no idea.
However, there's always going to be custom characters players pick that I can't account for, so for the most part I'll keep the vague way characters refer to you as a group.
I remember seeing a custom level have the player's HUD avatar presented within the level on a monitor, that was really cool. Wish I remember where that was, that'd make the "WANTED, DEAD OR ALIVE!!!" messages in the levels way cooler if it's the actual character you play as specifically called out.
7. Haha, okay then. Sadly I'm not sure if I can track down the original voice actress, her discord is deleted with most of the places I knew her from.
Always sucks when someone I worked with suddenly dissapears from the face of the earth, well, the face of the internet anyway. Took me a bit to track down who drew the Logo as well.