Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• Very ambitous attempt, alot was achieved, including a huge amount of code written, however as eluded to, timescales may have been a bit ambitous.
• This is a solid game and something you should be proud of making. I just wanted to give some feedback on specific things: 1. In the game there were no real instructions on what I was meant to do, or to control my character. This doesn't need to be a massive story explaining the world, just something as simple as - explore the world, find dungeons, kill bad guys. Just something so that people know what they're doing and what their goa is. 2. Random world generation is a very tricky thing to do. If done right it can give a game endless hours of enjoyment, if not balanced correctly it can overwhelm one person and underwhelm another. In my first playthrough I only had 1 dungeon, in the next playthrough I had 3 that all spawned next to each other. It would be good to give a world a minimum number of dungeons and a minimum placement to each other (or spawned in corners) and then tweaked and balanced to try and give everyone the same experience. However this can take time, and I understand you wouldn't have had this in this project. Just something to be mindful of. 3. From what I could tell, the AI just seemed to randomly pick moves? You can sometimes get away with this, but you'd need to weight each of the moves so that they don't all have an equal chance of being used. Attacking should be more likely than cowering, restoring abilities should have a very low chance if they're almost full, etc. 4. The battle mechanics were a nice base/system, but there's lots of area to improve. Why should I use melee over magic? Because some enemies have a higher resistance to magic, others don't. Or I should use melee because I picked up an awesome sword which has a bleeding effect. Looking at Pokemon as a base can give you some ideas of little things to add as improvements. Also, I'd add numbers and costs to moves and avoid rounded bars, they can make it very difficult to see how much you actually have, and how much a move will cost (instead of finding out by clicking a move and being unable to use it). 5. The only rewards I found were in the chest that I spawned next to There didn't seem to be any chests inside the dungeon and no rewards from killing the enemies. Adding drops to killing enemies or moving the chest inside a dungeon would give more rewards for fully exploring dungeons and killing bad guys. I know its not easy making your own game and coming up with all the ideas on your own, especially in a short time frame. You should be proud of what you've achieved, great job!
• This is a really good start to the project. The 2 big things you are missing is audio and game progression, however despite those 2 missing features its a really decent demo project and something I would seriously encourage you to continue working on. As a side note I would advise adding the ability to quit the game during combat. When potential employers play/test demo projects they may have to drop out of the project at any time and having no way to quit can tend to leave (what is otherwise a positive project) on a sour note. However, well done and really good effort :)
• Ambitious project based on a classic concept, would have benefited from scope reduction to focus on executing a smaller number of features well
• An ambitious game - as you acknowledge in your write up - but you achieved most of the features you needed to make it a complete game. Because there's a lot to it, a lot is quite 'first pass' - you really notice the lack of character animation and plain dungeons, for example. That said, the list of features you implemented is impressive. Tim Page Well Played Games
• UX is more important than most developers think. I found this game to be hampered by poor feedback for what was happening and unnecessary delays in actions when in fights. I could also not see a goal, but goals are necessary for all games, even if only intermediate goals such as "to craft a workbench" in minecraft. This game seemed to have no goals but with risks with no rewards.
• Moving in the game was frustrating because if I clicked before the player finished moving they would glitch and jerk back to where they started. The world felt pretty empty and with no sound it made it feel even more empty. I think the combat has potential but it felt like a chore. The enemies have a lot of life and I never felt like I would die so I was just bored waiting for it to progress. I think if you added some more things to the world and tuned combat it could be a fun game.