Thank you for your hard work. I must confess that I find the game already too confusing. I enter some menus and back away again in fear. I would urge you to make the game more accessible and enjoyable by simplifying and streamlining things, adding polish, not more combinations and permutations. Always try to look at your creation with the fresh eyes of someone who is new to it, as opposed to a developer who's been eyes deep in it for years. As Albert Einstein once said, "everything should be made as simple as possible but no simpler."
I am going to add a story mode that will be taking through the whole experience. I am almost sure that there is a group of people who will play that mode (that will last for 2 hours) and will be happy with the experience. Then some of them may do it again. Maybe a few times (as it will incorporate procedural generation). Most likely, there are not going to be any menus. There will be some UI bits that will work partially as mini puzzles, partially as tutorial for the main mode.This is going to happen and I hope that it will be a fun experience.
Having said that, I don't want to make just an experience. I don't want to just have "oh, you can walk around" effect. I want to make a game. A game that will get into some people's brains and they will think about different strategies, builds, etc. That's why it has to be complex enough. I do love roguelites. There are people who enjoy them too. That's why I need some gameplay mechanics that you may find not necessary.
And I do see faults in the current menu system and it is going to be reworked. I want to make the first contact with the game as easy as possible (ideally, there should be just one question right at the beginning and then the game should start, that is: you should enter the world and walk around). But it's not wise to spend time reworking the menus when there's no actual game.
Now there's content for maybe 10, 20 minutes? You can play it over and over but without anything more you will get the same thing that may get boring quite quickly. Polishing that and releasing a 10-20 minutes game is not what I'd like to do :(
That's reasonable and wise thing you said about looking with the fresh eyes. The thing that you don't see is a pile of things that were let go because of that. Again, the game is not finished, far from finished. I am working on the gameplay core loop and it is the middle part of the game. The menus and basically the whole structure is build to allow jump into that part and test it, experience it.
Just please, give it some more time, wait until I say "that's it, that's how I wanted the game to be, that's when you can actually play it as the whole thing".
But I feel that I should add an information about the game being "work in progress".
I appreciate all the thought you're putting into the game and I hope you achieve your vision.
In the interests of helping you make it a success, I'll offer the following feedback which I hope will be useful and constructive:
1. Reiterating my original comment first: Keep It Simple. Too many menu options and branching trees for skills or crafting sucks you out of the game instead of into it. If the total experience is 1-2 hours long, that's enough time to learn to play and enjoy checkers but not chess.
2. Tweak the procedural generation to maximize the length and width of corridors and to make turn radii larger. If the player is going north and you want to turn them south, let them walk around a more gradual bend. I've found that the current prevalence of tight turns makes me nauseous (and I have pretty good VR legs).
3. The areas with the gondola/ski-lift moving platforms are nice in that they open up the space a lot. They would be a lot more comfortable if they were a bit larger though. Maybe make them 2x2 instead of 1x2. Again, the tight turning is a bit nauseating. Also, the game's moving platforms are too fast which causes nausea and disorientation.
4. I recall seeing a moving train with cars on it and a turret on the other side. The goal being to use that cover. I would lean toward making the direction of the boxcars the same as the direction you need to move. Beyond that, I like the idea of jumping onto a moving conveyor or train and then avoiding bullets and shooting enemies much like Pistol Whip. Just make sure that the enemies appear ahead of you in the direction you're moving. Looking too much to the side while on a moving platform alto triggers nausea.
5. In such tight confines, too many exploding robots can be frustrating.
I love what you're doing with Tea For God. Your work with procedural generation and non-Euclidean spaces is cutting edge. Kudos for your creativity and hard work. I wish you great success turning this into a commercial product. I hope that my feedback helps tweak that final product so that it provides an improved user experience, gets solid reviews, and catches fire. Cheers!
- There might be a bit of misunderstanding here :) The 1-2 hours long experience is going to be simplified, without menus etc. Most likely the way you'd like the game to be. But that's only a part of the game. It should give you an insight into what the main mode looks like. And the main mode is going to be a much longer and complex roguelite. See, I'd like Tea For God to be about making decisions (not story-wise etc, but making gameplay decisions), not just walking and shooting.
- I haven't touch the procedural generation for some time now. The way I treat corridors is that they should take player as quickly as possible from one point to another. There is room for longer corridors and I added that idea to the list. Although they should be rarer. Keep on mind that for what we call "corridors" I have plans to make them look not only as usual corridors. And that may help a bit.
- The size of the platforms for now is forced to be small. Initially I had larger platforms and there was a lot of running around. But again - there is place for both narrow and wider platforms in the final game. I don't want to limit the game to one option that suits one group of people. Speed of the moving platforms is adjustable in the options (check Comfort section). With slower platforms the combat gets much less dynamic.
- I'd prefer to avoid sections that force you to stay in one place. Again, you should be able to run away, change direction etc. That said, I actually want to have a section in which you board a train. But even then I don't want the player to be fixed in one place looking in one direction. As you said, looking too much to the side, may end up not so well. But - you may have enemies chasing you. You may have enemy airship coming to you from a side and robots jumping onto your train etc.
- True. There are ways to avoid getting damage from the explosion - you can push them off the ledge, you can pick them up and throw away or you can just use shields - but even then, exploding robots might be frustrating if you run too often into them. And there are going to be more kinds of robots.
Thanks again for your suggestions :) The game is still pretty far away from what I want it to be, and for a few months it may appear that it is going in an opposite direction to your feedback. But please try it out every few weeks as at some point I should be able to focus on that shorter mode that you should enjoy much more than the main roguelite mode.