Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• An auto-battler where the only procedurally generated parts are the enemy and recruitment rosters - and even those are quite limited, especially at first. If Island 1 always has you fight a single monkey as an introduction, Island 2 is two slugs, two monkeys or sometimes a monkey and a slug. It's only by the time you get to Island 5 and beyond that the combat becomes engaging - coincidentally, that is also the time when buying units in addition to the two starting brigands becomes necessary - whereas not buying anyone before is actually optimal, due to the quirks of game's economy. You'll always get only one coin per defeated enemy, which severely limits your progression pathways - and means that buying starting-tier apes and slugs for 3 rounds, only to see them die next round while brigands are largely unharmed, is just a waste of coin. It also means that the hostile groups have a pure economic advantage later on, since while their group size is restricted by the island's number, they can have about as many expensive units as they want, and there's a point where starting position helps little against that. In particular, snails are practically OP with their defences, and fighting, say, a 3-snail + snake/brigand group is either a loss or a drain on your resources - especially since you would need to clear at least 2 islands to afford a snail of your own. Having said that, struggling against such odds is still unusually engaging for something you play little role in. The game would likely only benefit you did not have to put up with the first 3 islands and their foreordained outcomes first, and instead immediately started vs. a stronger group and with more money to spend to compensate. Being able to speed up combat animations and especially the currently unskippable level transition animations is also something that would help a lot.
• This is an interesting attempt at a twist on an auto-battler. It's called physics-based but I'm not sure what really I've done at any point to knock opponents off the edge. A small tutorial about how to do this would have gone a long way towards helping me appreciate the innovation the author seemed to be going for. The game itself wasn't really that much fun to me, I'm sorry to say, though the controls were intuitive enough. It also doesn't feel particularly balanced or roguelike/lite. While there's clearly some randomization by way of enemy formations and available units for purchase, the winnings you can get without understanding the physics aspect are so small that you might as well not have a choice (I'm not even sure why there's a shop after level 1.) There's random units and some tactics, but the actual possibility space isn't big enough for these alone to really shine through to a roguelike or -lite level for me. I think randomizing the platform arena itself and opening up the space of play and progression for more meaningful player choices could go a ways towards putting it more in those aesthetics of play. I would add that it would be nice if there were *less* of a transition time between levels. Probably could be about 1/4-1/2 the time it's taking now and lose little of the experience.
• I can absolutely see where this idea is going, and I like the idea. Autobattling your way through enemies and placing them in the right places is a great gameplay loop. But the lack of randomisation beyond the team composition really works it down for me. The graphics are cute, the gameplay is fun - the whole thing giving me real 10,000,000 and You Must Build A Boat vibes. but it doesn't feel roguelike enough.