Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• The game has basic royale mechanics, which provides some enjoyable and frantic movement and shooting. Restricting the healing potions with a cooldown is a good idea. Sound effects are good, movement is smooth. There are a number of different guns, which helps. I like that there are different environments as well. I won a few games and lost a bunch. I wish that my health was displayed in a bar instead of as a number-- in the heat of frantic battle it is tough to look over at my character and read the number, instead of seeing a bar go down in the corner of your eye. The experience is also very even-- if there were rare superweapons or maps that are very dense in trees or something to make some games different than other games, it would give you a reason to keep playing. The main issue that I have with Rogue Royale is that it doesn't fulfill any requirement for being a roguelike in a meaningful way, and isn't really appropriate for this game jam. I also felt that the game copies mechanics from other battle royale games without adding anything new-- some new twist to the genre would have made it a more interesting experience. It's a solid game, and other than the known bugs it seems to work well.
• This game is essentially the singleplayer version of .io battle royales like surviv.io or zombsroyale.io (not to mention the games that inspired both of those) Nevertheless, it's remarkably good at emulating the style for something done in 7 days, as there's a considerable variety of distinct weapons (from swords and axes, to two shotgun types to revolvers, tommy guns, LMGs and bows) and three different map biomes: grassland, desert and snow, all of which also have nighttime versions. It replicates the feel pretty well too, as the best strategy is typically to let the others fight each other out, but the constantly shrinking area makes this difficult and you are often prone to run into a fresh hostile while in the process of dodging a different one. It happens to have more detailed graphics than most .io games as well, although this comes at the expense of performance, with fullscreen version feeling particularly slow. Over-dramatic music seemingly sourced from Incompetetech or the like adds to the charm. There are definitely flaws, be it the hostiles' inability to pick up healing potions and their tendency to get stuck on level geometry while in pursuit (though winning would have been so much harder than it is already if they didn't), to endgame screen simply listing the number of remaining hostiles (or announcing your victory), and being sparse on any other stats, like the number of kills. Nevertheless, it's a more expansive work than what is usually seen this contest, and though not very original, it's an interesting example of what can be done in 7 days.
• This is a decent twin stick shooter jam game with nice sound and graphics. However, it is not even slightly a roguelike.