itch.io

Hey there! I appreciate your thoughts here, but wanted to mention a few points I think are important to mention here. Firstly, the point about game length is probably fair. We've had a lot of internal discussion surrounding the average length of a run, and have made a few changes here and there to make the experience a little quicker. On the whole, though, we're pretty happy where run lengths are at. An average run being somewhere a little over an hour is just about the standard we were looking to reach just with how slow Toontown battles are. In practice, I feel it's allowed the slow, but constant progression of your Toon to feel more natural. To get to an average run time of about half an hour, we'd need to give the player items at potentially double, if not triple the current frequency, which already feels pretty fast in my eyes. It's also worthwhile to mention that making a faithful adaptation of the Toontown Online battle system meant we had to preserve the fact that the battles are incredibly slow. They always take up the vast majority of your run's playtime, and as such, we give you the option to speed them up as a bit of a workaround.

As for the lack of information, I don't entirely disagree here. We've been talking a lot about having a legitimate tutorial in the game, especially for people who may see this game on itch, and not have much experience with Toontown in the past. Right now, the game does a very poor job of giving those players an understanding of the mechanics at play, and that is something we should work to circumvent. For items, though, I don't agree with your stance that the effects should be immediately visible. We have an item, Monocle, that will display item effects before they are picked up. Part of the game design is meant to be some trial and error, where you don't know exactly which items are maybe not the best idea to pick up. Letting the player slowly build their own knowledge on the items is almost like its own invisible progression system. Though, I should mention, for status effects specifically, those aren't hidden and you can hover your mouse over them to read exactly what they do.

Finally, I want to highlight is that as a benefit to being an open source project, we understand we may not always make the best calls on the game design end of things. But we greatly encourage modifying the game in any way to suit your own tastes. And while I understand that may not be a satisfying answer, I do promise to keep an eye on the issues you've brought up here, because we may always end up coming around to your perspective on things later.