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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!

Personal note: My original video was very harsh due to a number of different reasons. I have redubbed the video as I felt upset at myself for putting out a subpar vod. It is still a bit harsh in areas, but not as much as it was. Sorry if you saw it before this redub, dev-chan, it was not my intent to hurt feelings at all, I was just in a lot of pain and took it out on the game and I apologize that I let my pain make me grumpier than intended.

Theme 
A guild requiring you to make your way through the ranks whilst being looked down on by other guild mates at least shows some effort in creating a set-up to go beyond the expectations put on them, so it did hit the theme well enough.

Gameplay

Gameplay consists of two parts. The first is the dungeon and the second pertains to the guild. 

The dungeon is a maze-like area that has random encounters and specifically placed item collection points, with a few chests scattered about. You start there and have to find your way out, which can be very treacherous as you start with no items or equipment, making you easily killed. One of the biggest issues with the game is the balance in battles - early on you can die very easily, later on you can only be hurt by certain enemies who use poison damage. 

The town portion gives you a guild that you want to rank up in by doing requested tasks, a shop that sells very cheap but very defensive equipment and your home where you can rest and talk to your father. The guild quests never change and require that you take a quest and go back to the dungeon to fulfill it before you can take another. You have the choice of a few quests, but they all amount to the same thing - go through the dungeon to fight enemies and collect their parts or find a specific item in the dungeon. Once you collect enough, you sell them at the guild, get some money and guild points and build your skills.

Oddly enough, only after selling items to the guild do you gain skills from levelling up. Not sure why that is the case.

Unfortunately, while the gameplay loop is set up to be addictive, there's a lot of issues in the game that caused it not to be so. The ideas themselves are pretty good and could have been done very well, but the balance is very broken once you get every piece of equipment, which doesn't take much more than one quest. 

Healing items are well-balanced, but can only be found by killing monsters, so there is plenty of reason to hunt them down.

Engagement

Sadly, this is where the game really falls off. While the basic grind of running back and forth between dungeon and guild, doing quests and raising ranks sounds like a great gameplay loop, there's a lot of problems when put into practice. 

You are locked to the first floor of the dungeon (as far as I could get, at least) and thus you tread the same maze over and again looking for the requested items over and over. There is only one type of request item in the game - mushrooms - and they grow all over the dungeon and grow back after a while in the same event points every time. You can go to the first room, pick mushrooms, wait, then repick until you have the amount you need for the quest. The other quests require killing enemies and collecting their body parts, which also becomes onerous when coupled with the fact that once you collect all the equipment from the store you're pretty much untouchable and can just clean up with no challenge in battles.

The game ends up being very repetitive and thus, quite boring to play. Sorry, but it's true. 

Presentation 

Honestly, my favourite part of the game is this. I like the look of the dungeon and wish it had been worked on a bit more to add some more variety to the visuals. The music was pretty good for what it was and the writing, for the most part, was decent. I will note that calling a woman minxy is a bit derogatory as it can mean they're cunning, flirtatious and impudent, so having the first line of the female character call her that is a bit of a shock since, yeah, didn't expect to have my gender insulted from the get-go like that.

 I did like the scenes with your father, though, and appreciated that scenes changed depending on which character you chose to be. I even like the stark visual choice of just having blank backgrounds in town - I think that no matter why you made the choice, it worked for the game.

Polish

There was some weirdness with the request filling - sometimes you had to sell the items to the guild boss and talk to him afterwards to complete the quest, other times the event didn't read as you having x amount of items even if you did. It was a little wonky in that aspect, but otherwise the game worked well.

Summary

There are some good ideas here that need a lot of polish to make it work well, but it has potential to be a good game if given the care needed to shine. I liked the overall idea quite a bit but felt that it fell short of the mark due to ignoring balance and repetitive play. There's certainly ways to fix this, though, and I hope to see you do so in the future, Dev-chan! 

 


(+2)

Hello! Thank you for the giving me the pointers and the incite so I can improve the game, that means a lot! I had to restart the game with a week left due to file corruption, so I did have to rush in some of the areas so I'm sorry I couldn't make it more engaging than it was. For the minxy descriptor, I was more meaning to go for the equivalent to roguish and was not meaning to have it be derogatory so I am very sorry if it came off that way. I was told by multiple that minxy was a good descriptor that would work so I am very sorry. I am planning to do some updates to it after the voting period is over and I hope to be able to fix some bugs and make some of the changes some have told me. Again, I'm sorry if my game caused you any stress or anger on an already bad day. Again, thank you for playing and for telling me ways that I can improve, it really does mean a lot. I don't care how I place just that I had fun, was able to finish something in time and that I met some nice people while being told how I can improve so thank you for helping show I can improve and grow my skills it really means a lot and I hope you are doing well. Thank you very much! ^^

(+1)

You got the perfect attitude to grow as a dev - not taking things too to heart and using feedback to improve your game. Again, sorry if the first video caused any grief (if you saw it), it wasn't intended to come off quite so harshly. Roguish is generally a positive descriptor nowdays, but minxy hasn't really changed much and it's strongest synonyms are... well...

 

Not great. Roguish is gender-neutral, though, so you could just use that instead. Glad you're still intending to work on the game, though, and hope it all goes well for you! 

(+1)

I think it's best for life in general to not take things to heart. If someone tells you things that should be changed or worked on it just gives you more of an opportunity to grow. I'll change the wording in the update. Once again, I'm sorry about that and thank you very much for the kind words and showing me where I can improve.