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!)