Post by RoboZero in Digital Cycles - Turn based RPG jam comments

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(oh gosh long post incoming)

Enter the digital space! A game reminiscent of classic JRPGs like Persona or Final Fantasy. At first the characters felt like OCs, but I grew to actually really like them. I'm curious why Furro isn't technology based, but that could be intrigue. They each feel distinct (heavy hitter, a nostorafu/self healer, guardian), have this cartoony feel (was anchoring to My Life as a Teenage Robot and Cyberchase intentional? Vibes), the names and ability names (punch -> double punch?) fit well, and after a few battles, you get the intuition of who to use when. The enemy designs are great too each with clear intentions like the soft deer, the stun eels, the giant tank gun horn, give the appropriate feel when combined with their low damage, stun, and big freaking damage stun mechanics. Speaking of, the game has surprisingly tightly and well designed mechanics. Every ability did eventually have a use, but more importantly there's a good incentive to normal attack when you don't need to spin wheel, want to save AP for a specific ability, or save AP for a crit with that same ability. Plus, it's really satisfying to chain complete wheels after turns of setting up. We can plan around the order of characters before completing each, which is more satisfying since it feels like I'm getting my 4 AP ability one use ability for free. On my second run through it went way faster while still keeping nuanced abilities. Finally, the UI looks slick at a glance. By the end (level 8 for me), I was mostly focus on trying to get every enemy's wheel almost full and ordering character actions, adjusting based on who needs to go last.

Constructive Criticism:

1) There's a huge UI / Mechanical issue blend that I'll try to condense down. Primarily, there are 5 different regions across the screen I have to focus on at once. I have to look at which enemies have which wheel states and health, which enemy I'm targeting, which ability I'm using, which character I'm using, and how much health and AP each character has. My eyes are jumping everywhere, OK this seems like a good target, ok attacking them now, ok I'll use this ability, wait do I need to use another character first because I'm on low health, wait can I use another character first like the guardian to redirect, wait do I need to reconsider my enemy now, etc. The end result is I'm absolutely exhausted after a few turns. Maybe experiment with methods of chunking the mechanics, where you only need to think about 2-3 things at a time, like splitting into offense/defense phase.

2) I'd argue this is compounded by various UI issues that maybe benefits from placing related info closer together. Between each region there's a different layout (soft wheel vs. jagged abilities) and color-scheme (fusia wheel, blue abilities, white stats). I have to translate matching the character to their wheel icon (maybe place health and icon next to abilities). Red targeting outline blends into the purple too well, where associating your attack as the cause of the red outline is not natural (maybe line on the ground indicating your character attacking opponent). Even after learning, I kept thinking the character closest to the screen was the character I was using (on the left), but I was actually using the middle character (center). It's a focus-on-the-largest-thing-that's-blocking-other-things issue. Having the enemy attack on the same wheel that the player uses to get extra turns mis-associates them, like how a spinner has a little triangle indicating where it lands. The red AP being missing AP instead of it's own resource, which it looks like as it fills from right to left instead of like the text left to right, and not showing max AP in the stats area is confusing. Placing the stats so far away it's its own region is adds tracking complexity.

3) As for more obvious discrepancies: Add a 'press space to start' text I was spamming my keyboard. Players and enemies sprites have drastically different qualities (I imagine this is temporary. Everything feels really still. A dynamic camera might really help, like Persona. Later, I realized that having it still helps to think about problems, but it feels unpolished so maybe experiment. I feel like I read the wheel as if the next character will the the one clockwise, but it's actually counterclockwise, whoops.

4) I'd highly recommend investing in a strong tutorial if you continue with this project (for big dum dums like me).

Here were some of my questions

- Who am I targeting? Why can I target before I choose my ability? Who do I use first? Without abilities these all seem the same

- How do I get AP? Where's my red AP? Why is this ability still available? OH you gain AP every turn. I assumed I'd get some by using an ability. What's my max AP?

- Welp, I killed pineapple. How do I get them back? (literally even if the recovery ability was right there)

- How does pineapple bite? In his hand, is it a book or a chomper thing?

- Will killing lose me the extra turn? Ah, killing enemy loses me the wheel if I don't get the extra turn. Whoops

4) I suspect that if everything was magically fixed, there would be a pacing issue as it's mostly player phased and enemy abilities can't interfere in a way you couldn't plan around. Hopefully that's not the case! It's so slow to chain wheels if all enemies need one character. Some way of changing the enemy wheel would be cool. Also, you're actually screwed if one of your characters die, can't complete wheels.

5) I wish I had a greater reason to care about what enemies looked like. I now appreciate Persona's hidden elemental design a bit more now, since I have to look at the enemy to think about what they may be weak against.

Anyways, hopefully this is helpful because I've really struggled with this myself. Well done!

BUG: If you revive with recovery, that unit can't act anymore with spacebar and you get softlocked (hence the reset)

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DougVanny59 days ago

omg that's a lot of feedback! Thank you so much for putting so much time and effort into writing this all down, I really appreciate it!! Turns out that making a turn based battle system demanded me a ton of effort so I just didn't manage to focus on polishing things as much as I wanted, your points all making it very clear just where that extra polish was lacking!

I agree with everything you said, but lemme try to reply to some of the points :)

0. Just about what you commented on Furro not being technology based, the short answer is that the character is heavily inspired by furry culture, which is something that exploded with the internet, from social media to virtual spaces such as VR Chat and Second Life, and as the setting of the game is a virtual one, it's inclusion made a lot of sense to me :)

1. Yeahh, the game has a heavier perceptual overload than I wish it did. The "Crit" message on the skill selection is one small example of me attempting to lower it, but since you still need to plan ahead, you're still required to keep an eye on everything. One thing that I really wanted to do was bring the character's stats UI from the corner to much closer to each character, not unlike how it works with the enemies. There would still be a need to look at multiple information at the same time, but if I could split it between player area and enemy area, it would have helped at least

2. You're not the first person to comment that they thought the character leftmost character was the selected one, I just regret not having the time to bring them even further out of focus. All other comments such as the enemy selection, the red AP bars totally feeling like a resource of their own, they're all due to the lack of iteration that I couldn't bring myself to do due to finishing the actual system and UI way too close to the jam's deadline. Not wanting to use this as an excuse, of course, these are things that totally should have been improved and is feedback that I'll love to tackle whenever I have the time to do so again

3. The "Press space" was such an obvious thing that I missed. About enemy and character art being so discrepant, it all really comes down to just how heavy my hands were, I constantly knew I had to improve the character art, but I just failed to find the time. The camera too, my plan was to have an idle movement to it and move it more drastically as battle effects played out such as on attacks, but the lack of movement totally makes it feel less polished than it could have been

4. Teaching the player how to play is basically game design in a nutshell, making a new, unorthodox mechanic useless if the player never learns. I tried to at least cover the basics with some tutorial messages in the beginning, and while I try to not be too invasive with tutorials, I did end up leaving it for the player to figure things out by experimenting. Sure, it's fine to leave the player to learn the game organically, but this makes sense when you're learning things that are meant to be mysterious, such as the behavior of a certain entity in the world and so on. When it comes to simply learning how to interact with basic rules of the game, every effort is worth it. While trying to avoid too many invasive tutorial messages, I really wish I could have added short speech bubbles with the characters guiding the player towards understanding all of the game's fundamentals, perhaps even being a bit repetitive just to make sure nothing is missed. The clarity of the UI is important as well, such as the lack of feedback when selecting a skill you don't have AP to, or how the lack of AP is presented (aka not making it look like a brand new resource lol). All this to say, yes, perfect examples of questions that the player might have and that the game should absolutely answer, and that I really hope I can better teach in the future :)

4.2 (since there are two 4s lol). I detected that as well while playing, the game puts the player a bit too much at the mercy of an uncontrolled randomness. Each enemy does have it's own rules, so individually, the wheel repeating the same character multiple times is often by design, but when multiple characters pick the same characters, there just isn't anything that I'm doing to avoid that. I would have loved to put guardrails such as making sure no character is over or under-represented on the wheels, but that ended up being beyond what I managed to do. The reason why the retry option in the gameover screen rerolls the wheel is an attempt to keep the player from being stuck, but that's about all I'm doing to deal with it.

5. Honestly, as the game is designed right now, with all information available to the player, the design of the enemy does end up being nothing but a visual. Even it the behavior of the enemy tried to match their design, the player doesn't have to figure out anything. It would require some thought to figure what would be the best way to do so without changing the game's design too drastically

Hope none of this came out as me being in the defensive, all of the points are extremely valid and are things that show where to improve in future iterations of this idea!

Thank you so much again for the heavily detailed feedback! It means a lot to me!

(And o shit that BUG looks serious af lmao I'll have to investigate that one immediately!)

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RoboZero59 days ago (1 edit) (+1)

With how tightly the game is designed, I can completely understand the lack of perceived polish. Getting to level 8 and seeing how deep it goes got my attention. From this thought, I think it's worth emphasizing how it seems a lot of players, including me till I took a break, were really exhausted before they got halfway through just so you can analyze why.

0. Totally understand. With that logic you have to include at least one meme character! I think what's jarring is how distinctly robotic the other two look as our reference point, so at first it felt like a culture shoe in but later became intrigue after how beefy he felt. Hopefully that makes sense.

Assuming the crit is interpreted perfectly by the player, the crit can feel good reinforcing the wheel spin. In fact, assuming every change you mentioned was added and the tutorial was flawless, I suspect there would still be some underlying issues. Particularly how it's really hard to track all the moves and in which order (lack of chunking? choose ability then select target), feeling a lack of agency over controlling the color wheel (exploiting enemy weaknesses?), and the pacing of how long a players turn compared to the enemy and how there's no incentive to observe them or change your plan because of them (you can know you'll lose health and get status). I swear, I really hope these aren't issues and I'm overreacting here. In my head, it may be worth experimenting making the enemies way scarier and even attacking at the same time, but making the wheels and damage across each consistent and giving way more ways to manipulate the wheel to obliterate them. I understand how this is a really dramatic change though, it's more a 'how would this feel?' question if you wanted to try it.

> When it comes to simply learning how to interact with basic rules of the game, every effort is worth it.

With exploration, I'd like to say with how genuinely interesting the abilities are and knowing when to use them at what time, and how to control enemy damage, I think streamlining everything else and letting us explore them would be worth heading towards. This probably sounds contradictory, hmmmm. Brain fried.

I hope I didn't come off too brash myself! It's a really cool game. Maybe the issue is me and my own expectations - I want to feel like I'm cleverly and slickly destroying these strange and scary foes.

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DougVanny58 days ago(+1)

Not brash at all! The design needs to be questioned so it can be improved!

Interestingly, originally I did want to make enemy attacks be a lot more impactful, since just one of them acts per attack. I ended up playing it safe though, due to simple lack of balance time, and also due to understanding that the dev will always play the game better than someone who played it without any prior experience, so I tried to reduce my risk and made the characters have more hp than originally intended

Also, regarding your worries, I do think that this system as it is would not fit a several hour long rpg without bigger changes. The jam theme did give me the opportunity to experiment with the idea and I had fun with that, but the game does have pacing issues, and I totally understand how exhausting it is, given that I didn't manage to finish it myself haha. Something that would have helped would be adding narrative elements between the battles, something that gives room for the player to rest, but then we're talking about turning this into a real rpg, which goes way beyond the scope of a jam

A change I would consider would be replacing the reward for completing a loop by something else, something that doesn't let the player turn go forever, so the dance between player and enemies feels more balanced, also so I have more room to think of defensive moves which would mean spinning the enemy wheel one time less, but that could enrich the strategy even further. The question though would be what is the new reward for making a loop, and the answer I don't quite know. Maybe it's damage, maybe it's a new resource, maybe it's bringing that enemy down and restore your turn so you can also bring all others down in a single turn and finish them off with an all out attack. There would be some more room for creativity here :)

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