Hoo Roo!
I'm one of the judges of this game jam and was assigned your game! As such, I've been tasked with scoring your entry based on the five criteria of Theme, Gameplay, Presentation, Engagement and Polish. While I can talk about these aspects, I cannot showcase the scores given, so please don't expect to see any numerical number tied to your entry in this post.
I chose to record my gameplay of each game I judged and post up both the video (after it goes live) and a small write-up I've done for your game. Hopefully both will help your continued growth as a developer in some way! Thank you for sharing your creativity, drive and experience with us, as every game has something wonderful to share with the world.
To start, the video!
Theme
The game didn't really explore the theme beyond setting up for it to possibly be explored in the future, beyond the point to which we got to play.
Gameplay
I appreciated the idea that battles were small challenges that were part of the game, but not a major aspect, and that they had goals to complete within the battles, however there were very few to engage in over the course of the story. The challenge mode was interesting and allowed for more of a showcase of the battle system to be seen but got quite harder once you stopped learning skills – up to that point you just use the same strategy over and over and hope that the enemy doesn’t kill you first.
The choice options in the game seem like they may be interesting in a future build but ultimately have no pay-off beyond seeing a few alternate scenes and game ends, but adding them gives the game some replay value.
Unfortunately, we don’t see enough of the game to deepen any systems in it beyond surface level basics.
Engagement
Honestly, the most engaging aspect of this game was the challenge mode, and only to a certain point. A big reason for this is due to the writing. Having to stumble your way through the story and dialogue does tend to create problems with wanting to play more of a game.
Another thing that tanked the engagement of this game a scene shown towards the end of the game, which made me not want to play more – namely the inappropriate sexual content between the succubus and the kitsune. Even outside of the failure state, knowing that a character you may control again is a sexual predator really tanks the desire to play. Unfortunately, as this was the second to last scene of the game I was left with a rather bad impression and a lack of desire to play more even if there had been more to play.
Presentation
For the most part the game presented itself well. Music was interesting and fit well with the scenes it was used in, the sound design was not jarring (bar the clicking noise) and the character art was, for the most part, quite well done. I will note that there was some discrepancy in the art at times – sometimes it was highly polished, other times it was very sketchy. I recommend picking one style and sticking with it for the full release as having both felt rather disjointed at points.
Mapping was decent enough to be able to tell what was what most of the time, but there were two instances where I could not find sprites on the field based on where they were placed as they blended in to the tiles they stood on. That said, there were a few nicer maps mixed in with pretty lighting effects to enhance them, but otherwise level design was very standard.
There was a zoom and pan effect during scenes at times which was pretty cool and was appreciated so as to get a better look at the custom character sprites, which had some nice poses.
Polish
I did not encounter any bugs or issues during the playthrough of the game, however there were a LOT of problems when it came to the writing. It was very clear that English is not the first language of the developer as the dialogue and story was littered with various grammatical issues – capitalization, word usage, punctuation – all throughout. The sheer amount of the issues made it very hard to read and understand what was being said at times. I highly recommend getting someone who is an English native to read through the script and help get this sorted as it caused a lot of issues in understanding what was going on in the story.
Overall, the game has some promise, but it’d be nice to see it without the questionable content and a bit more polish when it comes to the written aspect. Picking a specific style for the portraits and event imagery would also be a good idea. Good luck with your game, dev!