Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• A Delver and her Dog is a great game, although it comes with its own pack of frustrations :) Most of the scores for me were somewhere between 3 and 4, so I ended up rounding some up and some down: Completeness (3): there are some small issues here and there, plus the fact that there was a bugfix (although minor, judging by the devlog), which account for this. The issues I noticed with 1.1 were: -Sometimes I can still move into enemies. Happened to the girl when the dog was out cold and we were in a closed space with two enemies beside. -When I was coming back up, nothing could really hurt me (was about level 9 on both characters) - feels a bit unbalanced -Enter is supposed to bring up instructions at any point, but doesn't do so in Look mode Aesthetics (3): I liked the art and the look, but waiting for animations, along with non-queued input, was rather tiring Fun (2): The game is certainly fun, but in the current version doesn't seem very challenging, and coupled with the input queueing thing I found it a bit tedious to play. Innovation (3): Nice unusual mechanics, but not quite groundbreaking. Scope (4): Compared to most games I've rated, this one achieved quite a lot, and I want to round this one up to acknowledge it!
• This is a very nicely-done game, with tons of charm and aesthetic polish. It's also got a nice, innovative concept -- the main character can't engage in combat directly, she is dependent on her dog to protect her, and participates by giving encouragement of various forms (which are like spells, and use SPs), and by occasionally flinging a rock or a shock mushroom (? don't recall if that's what the item was called.) For the most part it works well, though once I discovered the ability to switch control and take over the dog directly, gameplay felt quite a bit more traditional. The music, freebies taken from opengameart.org, was really great too, and rounded out the overall package. Just a couple of nits with the game.... One, the controls felt quite sluggish, making movement around the map kind of laborious. Second, as currently constituted (and I should note that I played the 1.1 bugfix version), it's far too easy. There was just no challenge at all, and I cruised to a win without having to use any items at all after the first level or so. I also think the return to the surface once you've found the prize ore is unnecessary and anti-climactic. I was hoping there might be some tough monsters that stepped in to try to stop me from escaping, but it was just the same old toothless geezers. That's really mostly a balancing issue, and I totally understand how balancing falls by the wayside under a time constraint like this, so I won't judge it too harshly for that. Oh, one more postive -- the minimap ("M") works really well. It's an element that so many games get wrong, but in this case, especially since the main view is rather zoomed in, the minimap is very useful and nicely rendered for readability. Nice work, excited to see this continue developing!
• I really liked the twist on the fighting/exploring gameplay loop of having two swappable characters with separate responsibilities.