A cute and polished demo! I gave some feedback during a playtest with one of the creators on a call, but due to time constraints we had to cut it a bit short so I played through the game again and made some additional notes. It's my understanding this is a slightly old build though so some of these may no longer be that helpful 😅
- Dashing into destructibles should probably deal damage to them or break them (can still halt your dash though)
- A small UX improvement to dashing would be to make it so that so long as the dash input is being held, your player will try to start dashing once they get the chance. There are a few cases (such as running into something which cancels your dash) which requires you to let go of dash and then press it again, but it feels like this would be improved if it automatically buffered the input so long as the player is still holding the button down
- Might recommend making destructibles taking 2 hits before getting broken than 3. 2 hits still allows fun physics movement from them but 3 hits seems slightly tedious (edit: after a while I noticed you can charge up attacks, which somewhat deals with this issue)
- When choosing your movement path in the fights, it's probably best to make them choose the shortest path, rather than a squiggle if the user happens to draw that path. If later on it is important what route the player takes and the player intentionally wants to 'squiggle' then as far as I can tell that is already supported since the player can just string together a movement input with another movement input. The current situation can lead to cases where the player accidentally wastes movement points (at least they are able to undo this if they notice though)
- Rather than clicking on an input action and the menu being replaced with those actions, it might be quicker and more straightforward to make a second menu next to the first that swaps out whenever you hover over the action groups, rather than clicking on them
- If you want to have some more unique weapons but don't want to let the player constantly fall back on using them, you could probably have some sort of system that allows the player to summon/create weapons they have previously found. Depending on how you set it up this could also be done in a manner where all previous weapons are created simultaneously for the same cost, which would encourage the player to use many or all of these rather than just spending some resource to use their single favorite weapon again and again. It's difficult to convey this system succinctly here though so let me know if I should elaborate
- During our chat I got the impression that this issue is addressed in newer builds, but I will say that in the current system I would be likely to avoid using the special abilities which break my weapons, which is a bit unfortunate given the intent of the system. I'm looking forwards to see how the new system addresses this issue though!
- Instead of saying the range on an attack through text, might be better to just include a small image of the grid with the tiles highlighted that it can hit
- Gems from chests/destructibles should maybe be magnetized to the player after a short period of time, in case some fall into annoying to reach spots
There were a few bugs, some of which were noticed during the playtest. Not sure if any of these are even still applicable, but here are a couple more that I noticed during playing: Neither Hit and run nor Shocked seem to work as far as I can tell.
Good job on the game, and I hope the game progresses smoothly :)