Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• Basically, City-Ship: Mercury is a reskin of a well-known python roguelike tutorial. It comes with some perks (reliability - it isn't the _best_ architecture, but it's proven to work well for small-to-medium projects). Unfortunately, it inherits all of tutorial's flaws... Main menu looks pretty nice with that cosmic-themed image, but the game itself is dull. Almost everything is blue-grey. The font used itself looks quite nice, but isn't very readable on the grid due to large blank areas between characters. Mechanically, it's python roguelike tutorial. It's really easy to become invincible (focus on agility) - if you are going to use deterministic combat mechanics, you need to revolve the whole gameplay about that idea. Otherwise, it doesn't work well. Other flaws are inherited from tutorial as well - like, targetting enemies is mouse-only, looking at items too, AI is exploitable, levels are big and lack interactive elements. There is one novelty, though. Story. As a player, you will find some datapads with lore scraps, and at the end of the game, you will need to make one, significant in terms of story, decision. The effect is a bit neglected because longer text are not easy to read - the space between letters is too big to allow smooth reading.
• City-Ship:Mercury is a highly competent, classic roguelike. There's not much in the way of innovation, as this feels as if a sci-fi theme was applied to the standard TCOD tutorial, but it is well-executed and feels fairly complete. I enjoyed the narrative framing, and the use of "data caches" to reveal bits of the story as you progress. Would've loved to see a few more of them -- in my winning playthrough I only saw two, I believe. My biggest complaint is that the combat is quite boring. The formula is a straightforward attack rating minus defense rating = damage, without any randomness, and you have so many hitpoints that you are never really in any danger. Especially if you follow the progression strategy of prioritizing defense so you are always one step ahead of the enemies' attacks. In this way, it's easy to maintain complete invulnerability to attacks. The gear progression is also very linear, with no surprise factor. I did enjoy the narrative choice at the end, though was a bit disappointed not to have one last boss battle. (Though understand quite well that there's only so much you can do in a week!) All told, this is a fine example of a classic roguelike, with a cool, well-written story layer. If the combat and loot systems are developed further, this could be a winner.