Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• Escape the hazards of the frozen mountain passes to get home!  Since there is no particular benefit to killing enemies, this is more of a survival roguelike.  It's quite challenging, I did not manage to make it home in the hour I tried, but navigated many an abominable-snowman infested cave trying.  Quite fun, even if your most dangerous enemy is attempting to navigate with skis! 
  

  It is quite well scoped and featured for a 7DRL.  The map is revealed with proper line of sight mechanics (obstructed by trees and walls).   FOV and pathing is in, which is great.   There is full inventory support for using bandages.  The only real omission I feel the game has is that using items takes no time, which would have introduced a bit more tactical depth to choosing when to use them (especially when moving under speed).   All that white in the tileset lead to an aura migraine in protracted pay, but that's more of a minor usability note that would only apply in specific situations.

  • Completeness - 4.  Has every basic thing a roguelike needs, plus a unique theme, but some minor bugs.
  • Aesthetics - 3.  Effective but simple graphical tiles, transparent GUI overlay does its job, but overall no frills.
  • Fun - 4.  It came together well, quite challenging, has a nice variation of level hazards and enemies, and a unique movement type besides!  I will say that the skis were a little frustrating to get around in.
  • Innovative - 3.  The skis movement is definitely in the category of providing a unique twist.
  • Scope - 4.  Accomplished quite a lot for 7 days!  Different level types, including additional later level features (such as snowstorms) help pull it above an average scope.
  • Roguelike - 4.  Procedural tile-based maps, FOV, pathing, inventory system.  The works!  But there's little RPG mechanics or progression, and so on, so it's not utterly roguelike.

• "Skiing roguelike", heavily inspired by the well known SkiFree game that used to be packaged on Windows computers.  I played through all levels and eventually got a win.  There is no ending screen, which the developer notes as a known issue.  The game feels feature-complete but does have a few bugs (nothing game-breaking during my playtime).  Charming hand-drawn art which looks great and fits the game well.  Controls are mostly intuitive but take getting used to.  You damage monsters by skiing into them with your momentum bonus, but most monsters come in backs and being stopped by running into one to attack it can be very punishing.  It's often better to run away.  There's a full set of levels which get progressively more difficult, each has its own new challenges and themes, and the game does have an ending.  Overall the scope feels appropriate for a 7DRL.  The game is turnbased, procedurally generated, has items and inventory, but does not play quite like your typical roguelike due to the movement and combat mechanics.

  Overall a fun game that is worth playing, but I probably won't be returning to it for multiple playthroughs.

• The UI needs to be polished because the text is obscured but the graphics underneath, even just changing the font colour to yellow would make it more visible. The aesthetics are okay but it would be great if the player could move in diagonals and have more visual feedback about how far their next move will be. It's an innovative twist on the usual mechanics but crashing all the time is frustrating instead of fun or compelling. I think more polish on this idea could make it more fun. At the time of writing this feels more like tech demo than a full game and more like a roguelike-like. Please keep working at it cause it'll be interesting.