Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• A cute prototype built around the idea of multiple rival deities which all regularly intervene in the world around the player depending on the amount of favor with them - a concept most prominently featured in Powder. Yet, while alignment with Powder's deity largely acted as a substitute of classic D & D classes, and favors/curses were often little more than occasional inconveniences, appawiad's deities are procedurally generated and possess a random selection of favored/disfavored aspects. What stays the same is that there are always four, one per role: an obsessed deity only aligned with a single trait: a vengeful deity most likely to punish those it disfavors and help those it dislikes: a sleeping deity which does not intervene often (and does not care about your prayers or sacrifices); and a chaotic/trickster deity with a set of favored traits, but which randomly increases/reduces favor. The effects these deities have upon the world are paramount: so much so, that in the current version, there's essentially only one way to last for any real length of time, and that is to be a paladin and align yourself with whichever god is associated with health, since that is the only way you'll ever get to heal. On the contrary, atheists will quickly find themselves burnt to a crisp, since the deities can respond to negative favor in double digits by setting the player on fire: when favor is negative for all the deities, you are likely to be burnt twice in a row and die around floor 2 at most. Priests can try that too, but it's less reliable for them. On the other hand, once you have that sorted, dying is almost impossible, as the few monster types (spiders, pigs, goblins and skeletons) do not care enough about the player to bother chasing them, and given that there's no EXP, and how little loot there is in the dungeon (just light/medium/heavy armor and basic swords/axes/spears, both of which are soon superceded by divine-granted weapons), you should just head first towards the altar, and then towards the exit. Of course, the floors never really change, and the game does not even bother to count your depth, implying it goes on indefinitely. Though even if you do not get killed, it is at times possible to get a walled in as you enter the level. appawiad still feels like an extremely early stage of a rather ambitious game. Deities have quite a lot of interactions even now (those associated with death reduce favor for destroying skeletons and their curses make all the skeletons move to your location, deities of the forests are pissed off if you attack trees, while the chaotic ones may randomly set those trees on fire (along with random enemies), etc.) It might conceivably become a worthwhile standalone game in the future with a lot of effort: but as a jam submission, its value is exhausted after you figure out the interactions between deities and the world.
• This game is presented by its author more like a toy than a complete game. Unfortunately I kind of agree; the game runs but there's no real difficulty curve or noticeable progress towards an ending or endgame. It's more of a mechanical sandbox for playing around with absurd diety conducts, some of which conflict each other. There are some bugs, most noticeably that one occasionally starts a new floor inside a wall and has to leave it. There's some amount of depth to the conducts you're trying to manage. However, unlike a Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup style thing, you can't opt out of gods with mostly random conduct if they're given, so you cannot opt out of "serving" dieties who punish you for no reason. All in all it's an interesting idea, whether it's worth your time depends on how the idea of proc-gen religious conducts grabs you.
• I liked the concept and I enjoyed reading about how the different deities might interact. The game looks nice and is easy to figure out. Good job for a 7DRL! I will admit I never got very far after about 10 runs because I couldn't figure out how to heal, or how to determine whether I should try to fight an enemy or run from it, because I couldn't see it's defense stat in advance. I also found it too hard to keep gods pleased unless they happen to like attacking, killing, and defending. It felt pretty bad to try to please a god who likes attacking and hates defending because any given fight will just give you net zero favor. Perhaps a wider variety of god characteristics and some constraints on which characteristics go together would help with the balance issues.