As a forewarning, the feedback I have is quite harsh. I try not to give overly rough critique like this, but because I can see how much effort went into certain aspects of the game I would feel inauthentic if I didn't give my honest feedback regarding the gameplay portions of this game, and I wouldn't be doing you any favors ignoring the deep problems the gameplay currently suffers from. I'm not sure how close the game is to the intended final product, so I can only hope there is time to address some of this.
- The lack of any tutorial leaves me very confused about certain aspects. For example it seems like you are supposed to be able to purchase units at different quantities and not necessarily just at the maximum amount you can purchase, but if there is a way to do this I never figured it out. Similarly, the turn order is never explained and randomly enemies will take additional turns (or the inverse). Another unexplained mechanic is the... defense number? At least that's my best guess at what it is, except I never could figure it out. For clarification I'm talking about the number that is next to the health of the unit.
- From what little I've seen, the game has a grid but it seems practically pointless. Ranged units appear to be able to strike from literally any range, and melee units just rush towards each other and exchange blows. Sadly there doesn't really seem to be any strategy behind positioning, which I assumed would be important. It's also very strange to me that the ranged units cannot both move and attack at the same time... meaning that there's almost never any reason ever to move them.
- It seems to me that the player has almost no influence over who will win in fights. For instance take a melee unit fighting another melee unit- the only advantage to striking first is that during the entire fight you will get a singular extra attack in. In fights that take several hits before one unit dies, this advantage is almost entirely negated and effectively just comes down to who has higher DPS (and/or luck). If there is more strategy here, it's sadly never shown in what I played. As a consequence of this, if I understand at last the idea behind the defense ability, the player will consistently be actively punished for initiating attacks as opposed to just defending and letting the enemy attack. The only time that wouldn't be true is if the player knows they can kill the enemy in a single hit before the enemy can hit back.
- The animations are frustratingly slow, particularly because I feel like I'm barely even making strategic decisions, so I end up just constantly waiting for turns to play out. I wouldn't mind this nearly as much if there was some way to either speed up or skip this part of the game.
- I think that one of the biggest stumbles this game has- which makes many of the other problems worse- is that it is both incredibly unfair/unbalanced (which I understand is difficult to get right, and for a playtest I wouldn't expect it to be in a final state) but worse, it seems to suffer from a really awful positive feedback loop. I played the game twice, and from what I can tell the enemy gets stronger from one fight to the next, regardless of whether you won or lost the previous fight. If you lose any single fight you are basically doomed entirely, because you're going to be fighting tougher enemies with way less than you even had against easier opponents.
Viewing post in Knight's Errand jam comments
THANK YOU SO MUCH! This is the kind of feedback I’m looking for! Thank you for noticing the amount of effort that I'm putting into the game. It means a lot to me that such an honest and critical player noticed it.
- Thank you for not only saying that the game lacks a tutorial, but also for pointing out specific examples. I will add tips about all of that in the next update, as well as a few others. The game definitely lacks an explanation about unit stats; I will add that too. You already gave me some good ideas about how to do it.
- Range matters in ranged attacks. I will definitely show this in a much clearer way. Positioning matters as well because of this, but the game lacks indicators and explanations. In the future, I want to separate different kinds of ranged units. Some of them will be able to shoot after moving, but this will require more explanation within the game.
- This problem exists. Now it's usually solved by taking the first hit with a less valuable unit. A player can also separate their troops into several stacks to use one as a bait for a counter-hit. But again, I agree that the game should explain this mechanic better. In the future, units will also have different perks and skills that will make the overall tactics much deeper.
- This is the easiest problem for me to solve, and I think the most common one. I will address it in the next update.
- I totally agree. I wanted to start this playtest to get an opinion about this system. The game has a problem with snowballing, and even greater rewards for losing streaks don't help. I have some thoughts on it and will introduce another solution in the next update.
Thank you very much again! This kind of feedback makes the game better!
Glad to hear my feedback was helpful! As for the snowballing issue, the two main ideas that come to mind of what might be worth doing to address this is:
A. The simple option- just make it so that if you lose a fight that it ends your run, and you just go back to the start. Basically the roguelike approach.
B. You could flip the system on its head somewhat. Essentially you could have a strong negative feedback loop and a much weaker positive feedback loop that eventually becomes stronger than the negative feedback loop. The benefit of this is that you can still have momentary comebacks, while still rewarding/encouraging the player to try to win even when relatively outmatched. One of the primary issues with negative feedback loops that are too strong is that all that really matters is the end (e.g. in mario kart games the early laps aren't that important since it's relatively easy for someone behind to catch up and it's harder for people in the front to maintain being ahead of the pack). A practical example of what combining a positive and negative feedback loop in your game might look like might be something like:
- you keep your units between fights, even if any (or all) of them were killed, and they are fully healed
- You have some sort of 'economy' stat. If all of your units are eliminated you will lose some of your economy, but you will gain something that makes you fairly significantly more powerful.
- The economy stat can effectively be tied into making the player stronger between fights. Whether that's upgrades or more units, etc. The point is that the longer you can keep your economy strong, the more benefit it will provide. The main trick here is how strong or weak this feedback loop is. Ideally you would probably want it to be strong enough to counteract the problem of a too strong negative feedback loop but not so strong that the outcome of the entire game essentially boils down to how well the first one or two fights went.