Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• Completeness - 3. Aesthetics - 3. Fun - 3. Innovative - 2.5. Scope - 3. Roguelike - 4.

  Overall I was pretty happy to tackle this one. I'm a huge sucker for anything remotely resembling the old Ultima series.

  While I'd suggest a slight modification to the input keys (ie. find a way to not use shift or ctrl) and perhaps allow a help key when you're in-game, it's a good adventure! I went through the existing comments reporting crashes, but I didn't experience any on win10. (yay!)

  If you can (or want), I'd definitely urge you to keep plugging away at this work. 

  Kudos for the entry, and congratulations on getting it to the successful state!

• It feels like the original design for this game was very ambitious. It has layers of nested random locations, which correspond to different terrain types and enemy varieties. There are crystals with magic abilities and a seemingly robust inventory interface. But it doesn't feel like all the content that was planned made it into the framework. Because of this, this version of the game is a little too repetitive. While each location has a different layout and artwork, the layout doesn't ever seem to make a difference in the strategy of how you navigate them. There's a huge variety of enemies, but it seemed to me like they only differed in name and strength, and all had the same semi-random behavior. Therefore, it's possible to start out at the easy locations and move toward the harder ones, but the strategy you take in each location is the same -- walk at the enemy until it dies, pick up crystals.

  The presentation of the game is still very very charming, and I would love to see a more full game made with this art and interface. The menus are clear, everything is very well labeled. I liked the colors (though I did find it hard to distinguish between what was open space and what was an obstruction in many maps).  It feels like the author wanted to have more weapons and items in the game, given the robust inventory menu, and that would be a cool direction to take this in, populating different parts of the island with different types of items.

• Loading from a save seems to break the game in various ways.  I had to complete the game in one session.

  Exploring the island is an interesting concept but the execution is a bit grindy.  My character always seemed overly fragile in latter areas while at the same time one-shotting everything.