Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• The game is really hard to play. The character starts off in the middle of a group of enemies and has to figure out how to play. I think if you had the player encounter one enemy at a time and allow them to learn the game and introduce new enemy types through the level it would make a better experience. The player has multiple attacks and skills in the beginning but they are never taught how to use them. The levels are big and filled with enemies, but the levels feel like they are not designed to teach the player how to play, guide them to their destination or create engaging combat. I think the UI and sound are really great and help make a more immersive experience. I think changing up some of the level design would really make this game great.
• This was really good, and something you should be proud of. I just wanted to give some general feedback: 1. Its always worth spending time at the beginning planning what you're going to make and where you're going to spend your time. Ideally, you'd plan -> develop -> feedback -> iterate -> (develop/feedback/iterate repeat) -> bug fixing. You should always aim to allocate a chunk of time at the end where you're playing the game and focus on fixing bugs or balancing. 2. Be careful when using random world generation that you don't just make it completely random. Its nice to make each play through different, but you can end up with awkward to navigate levels or being attacked immediately when you come out of the tutorial. Something to be mindful of in the future. 3. Try making various difficulties for your game (easy/medium/hard). This will make your life balancing much easier as you won't have to try and make 1 difficulty that fits all cases. 4. Look at ignorable layers with your raycasts. When picking up items or attacking enemies, you don't really care if they clicked the player. You can ignore them so that its much easier to click an item or enemy. 5. Give a bit of UI love to your spells, adding icons, a recharge timer, and mana cost. They keys look a bit odd in the rest of the screen. As I said, this was really good and something you should be proud of achieving. Great job!
• I really like the amount of features you managed to create, with an ARPG combat system, items, inventory, quests and even a boss! The combat system feels pretty good, but sometimes I'm clicking on the enemy without the character attacking, I think (pure speculation) that this might be because your method of click detection, be it raycasting or something else, runs on the "main" layer instead of a layer for only interactable objects. If you only run it on things you can interact with it should feel way more responsive and easy to click on the right place. This was also a bit obvious when it came to picking up items. One of the hints managed to drop behind a tree so I couldn't pick it up despite seeing half of the object. The character has 4 special abilities, but without reading your documentation all I knew about them was that I should click the buttons Q, W, E and R. It would have been nice to get a short description of the abilities and maybe even stats of how much damage they deal etc. I liked the amount of different items in game, but they all felt pretty similar. I then read your documentation and noticed that it's probably due to the bug that doesn't apply stats when not running in the editor. One thing you could improve on here is the description of the stats in the inventory screen, I had no idea what MR meant. The quests were nuanced and told an interesting story, I know from experience that a story is usually the first thing to go out the window when under time pressure, so well done on this part! Now to the topic of bugs... I encountered two bugs I would call major. First of all, I found an issue where I killed all the enemies on the map while searching for the statues, so when I got to the "Clean the cemetery" quest, I got stuck and had to restart the game. Also, despite me having a very high end PC the framerate of the game is pretty low, it feels like the camera skips around rather than moves smoothly. I liked this submission, but it could use a bit more polish and testing, I encourage you to keep developing games and maybe get a friend or family member involved in testing the game for you. If something needs explaining to them it might need a better explanation in game, and if something doesn't work for them it might not work for others. Test early and test often!
• A nicely consistent, coherent feeling game. You made good use of third party assets, and it's pretty atmospheric. Adding quests, inventory, and the four spells added a lot of value. Tim Page, Well Played Games
• A solid effort, nice themeing on the base game to try and turn it into something unique, while maintaining a hook back to what was provided. Unfortunately I only got as far as "go kill the reset of the enemies" and the game wouldn't progress, I ran round and round and couldn't find anyone else to kill, during this time there seemed to be some serious stuttering as well. The documentation mentioned an inventory system, however I couldn't seem to gain access to it while playing? As a tip for turning this into a solid profile piece, you are lacking a lot of feedback on the players actions, when I interact with a game I want the game to respond in such a way that it acknowledges my command, without it, things just feel a little lost.