Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• Kingdom of Ekulera is more of a 4x game than a roguelike, but does have a single avatar to try and recapture the roguelike feel.

  Completeness: While there is no direct bugs per se, the general lack of polish results in considerable pain points.  For example, Esc insta-quits the game, something that should never live outside of debug builds.  When you die, your hero does a death animation.  But while it is teleported to the castle, it is drawn walking there and the camera is left in the wrong spot for a move or two.  And then in your first move back alive, your character dies again ??  The same oddity is seen in the enemies.

  Aesthetics: 45 degree isometric is a fine projection, but NEVER USE WITH ARROW KEYS.  This is a huge pain point of trying to map 4-way arrows with the diagonal grid, there is absolutely no preferred way to do this, so it is a constant exercise in mis-clicks, deadly in a turn based game.  A unique colour should be used for your border, sometimes enemies have the same border colour making it difficult to tell.   The welcome screen fades in/out slowly with no way to bypass with a key.  The first few times it is too fast to read comfortably, later games it is too slow to get to the game.  Feedback for 'a' and 'w' are completely missing, you have to carefully watch stat bars to see anything happened. Worse, if you are missing a precondition nothing happens and there is no message saying why nothing happened (like not enough gold to upgrade?) There is a strange strip of minmap cut off at the bottom of the screen.  There are strange rules for forced-combat which makes it frustrating as you can't disengage.  But sometimes you are forced to actively attack, I guess this allows 'a', but it feels like the game freezes until you deduce it is forcing you to "choose" to attack.  On death there should be a key hit before transitioning to the minimap, it is sudden and abrupt at the moment.

  Fun: There is a good game in here, but very poor feedback makes it hard to find.  I'm also still not convinced the enemies play by the same rules.  The moral rules limit me to 5 battles, but I kill them over and over a gain and they keep coming?  They also can run across their entire domains while I'm attacking, but they seem to instantly grab my territory on occasion?

  Innovation:  First person 4x is an interesting combat.  I also like the hundred kingdom idea.

  Scope: A good scope for 7 days.

  Roguelike: Controlling a single character does not make it a roguelike IMHO.  This is a 4x

• It's very hard to judge this one. At first it feels awkward - no tutorial, no help menu, no readme file... Kingdoms of Ekulera are not very roguelike-ish and it's not trivial to figure out controls and game rules. And it's where that game loses audience - with large amount of 7DRL entries, it's easy to skip to the next game. It's a shame, because KoE is pretty good game (not very roguelike-ish, though).  I really like UI style, also 3D models are nice, but  terrain background tiles are just bad, looking like upscaled 16x16px sprites.