Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• A clever idea for sure! The idea of managing two competing boards is immediately a draw and gives the game a nice hook and big potential. The idea of using two different art styles between the boards is interesting, and I like the outer world sprites. Unfortunately the current implementation doesn't click in a meaningful way. For the Outer World, things start pretty well, but without enemy scaling eventually you will trivialize the enemies, letting you clear the levels without worrying too much about your hp. Losing actions due to the Inner Demons is neat, but in practice it seems like it's random per attempt to act whether or not the demons prevent an action. That meant that once you have aggravated insecurities you just need to sort of brute force your way into taking an action and rarely did that hindrance have lasting consequences compared to more often just moving away from enemies for a turn. Fireball gives a nice option in the outer world, but without a little more there it's not really giving much variety to the combat. So mostly in the outer world I would manage parity, bump enemies, fireball when I can, and move away if I couldn't. The inner world by comparison has the opposite problem. The enemies scale dramatically to the point where they will one shot your inner avatar (my record was taking 2500 mp damage) and take many hits to kill a demon. Pretty quickly I realized I just needed to sacrifice the inner world to the demons, use my mana for the turn that the inner avatar respawned to fireball enemies, and just work through the insecurities interrupting my actions. This made for my longest run when made it to floor 11 or so before the game crashed (presumably from having filling the inner world with demons). If you do try to manage the inner world, the first time your inner avatar dies the inner world feels pretty lost, and it will be very difficult to get things there back under control (all the insecurities repaired & demons defeated). This also combines with the general difficulty of controlling the inner world, even besides the damage scaling. Because demons will focus your insecurities, the lack of a range attack in the inner world, and the insecurities moving every turn, it takes a lot of time to defeat a demon. The end result is by time you can get a demon adjacent to you at the start of a turn and attack it the timer has ticked down enough the next demon is right around the corner. Similarly for repairing insecurities, though the repair spell helps a lot. Trying to bump repair an insecurity takes many many turns, you need to bump them, spend a few turns getting them adjacent again, then bump them again for the next bit of repair. So overall the winning strategy seems to be just push the outer world, level up past the threats, and then ignore the inner world. That said I think with just a bit of work you could get everything to click well. I'd potentially recommend smaller inner/outer worlds to condense the experience and tension, if you've played any of the Brough games (Cinco Paus, Hack-868, Imbroglio) that would give you a good sense of the size of level that could work great here. This would also make it easier to reach/chase inner demons. You could then also consider adding more spells or options to manage the game state, especially for the inner world (freezing units, teleporting, etc.). Once the inner world is more manageable the outer world could become more impacted by the inner world beyond just missing actions, or otherwise have more difficulty as you level up.
• An interesting premise with unusual visual decisions (real, Outer World uses 2D graphics, while the Inner World has depressing 3D polygonal graphics), but which is destroyed by broken scaling. While the idea of making use of the downtime when not immediately fighting the real monsters to confront the ones in your head is intuitive at first, it soon devolves into an annoying game where your character slices through monsters like butter, yet still constantly feels so weak, unfit and overwhelmed that he cannot do anything until you trick the game into finally giving you a passable roll on an action. Whereas the monsters in the real world soon become so unthreatening that being surrounded by them is no big deal, and actually a little more efficient given the game's quirks (when you try to move or attack in a direction with insecurities aggravated, a roll is taken once, and if failed, it'll block you from acting in that direction until you try any other action, which resets the "roll memory", meaning that being surrounded and just trying to bump in all four directions can at times be the fastest way to one-shot something), the demons in player's head eventually get HP in the thousands and one-shot him, let alone the insecurities. It soon becomes more efficient to just focus entirely on the real world and only think of the mental part as a way to get a heal or a fireball every 5 turns: since Inner World runs on MP, and deaths there simply drain your mana bar, and Inner World respawns likewise provide you with just enough MP to cast a spell before the Inner You is one-shotted again. It does not help that eventually, the game just crashes from integer overflow. Next to these issues, the others, like very limited variety, are of little importance. All in all, this game requires a lot more development time to do justice to its premise, and is a poor option relative to so many other submissions.