Hello! Welcome to Feedback Quest 8! My name's Hythrain, a co-host and one of the streamers for this event! This feedback is being written live as I stream your game! If you're interested in seeing my live reaction, let me know and I can send you a link to the VOD once it's posted to YouTube!
So my normal approach for any game in these events is simple: I get the game, make sure it's not a virus, then play it with as little information on how to play as possible. This way, I can judge how intuitively someone can figure out the game. Only if it's obvious that I need to read more will I do so. I note this so you can get a sense where some of these feedback comes from. In addition, I want to note that feedback and rating are different; don't use this feedback to gauge what I'll rate, nor should you view my rating as entirely indicative of my feedback.
While I can't say why at this time, playing this has been an enlightening experience for me that I hope will be useful in the near future. So first off, thank you.
Before I dive into the bigger stuff, I want to say that I recommend changing certain keys being used. You have a shortcut to one's inventory on I, a shortcut to spells on B, and then the menu in general on M. However, two of these three keys are all in the middle from where the player's hands will be: the left hand on A and D, and the right hand on the arrow keys. Instead, these should be placed in a more convenient spot so the player doesn't need to move a hand away from one of the other spots. My personal recommendation would be... well, Z, X and C. Yes, I know spells are on Z but I also think THAT should be changed to be Q. This would put all the active keys on the ASD line or above (since the item slot is on 1) while the menu keys are right below it. Since the game doesn't pause during menu usage (which I think it should if you're in the settings menu or the ESC menu), having easy access to these buttons would make jumping into your menu be something that could be done in combat (at least in theory).
So I'll admit I didn't get to the end of the slime area. I'm not too beat up about it, though, as I feel like I encountered enough things in that area to give some quality feedback for you. This will be split into two sides: player gameplay feedback and enemy exclusive feedback. Let's start with all the player stuff first.
The first thing that I felt was a problem was attacking facing northward (or up) vs. facing southward (or down). I noticed that when facing southward, both for the player and enemies with melee weapons like the skeletons, that their ability to land a hit was much worse. For example, I had a time where I was facing southward and attacking skeletons with a broad sword. I noticed that the tip of the broad sword reach the waist of the skeleton but the skeleton didn't get hit while the skeletons had a much easier time hitting me. This also applied in reverse, where I realized fighting the skeletons while I faced north and they faced south made it so they couldn't harm me. As such, I feel that southward facing attacks need to have an improved range to make it more likely that they'll hit. Right now, the balance is off and northward facing attacks are far superior.
Another thing I felt was that spells were slow to execute. Mind you, I only had the spells for healing myself and buffing my physical damage but the heal spell definitely felt very slow. I had to make sure I was far from enemies to make use of it. I don't know how things work with offensive spells, but I do think defensive and support spells should be faster so they can be more easily used in the heat of combat.
The last thing regarding player gameplay has to actually do with the knockback done to enemies with melee weapons. In short, I think it should be increased, primarily for enemies that use melee weapons. The way it is right now, you can knock back an enemy but they remain close enough that they can get back in melee range and attack before you can knock them back again. However, a good design here would be that you are capable of keeping them at bay the entire time, so long as you're attacking them. To help highlight this, take a look at the top-down 2D Zelda games. Enemies are knocked back so far that they are far outside of your own melee range, to the point where if you're fast enough you can even squeeze in a ranged attack for more damage. The point, however, is to make breathing room for the player.
Okay, now for enemy exclusive feedback. First, let's talk group composition. There are many encounters where you'll have a swarm of enemies just grouped together, waiting for the player to get close. When they're melee enemies it's not so bad. However, when they're primarily ranged enemies it can become a problem. For example, the last stage I did featured multiple sets of a spellcaster enemy with water tentacles and getting into range to attack them was very difficult. Group composition should be given greater consideration, mixing melee units with ranged units to give more engaging combat. To give a practical example, let's go back to the spellcaster/water tentacle sets. For the first encounter (which was 1 caster and 2 or 3 tentacles), change the caster to - let's say a skeleton - that the player needs to deal with first before they can get to the tentacles. Going forward, I'll be using this idea to explain other suggestions.
Next, I want to discuss group tactics. Enemies should try to work together to make a more engaging challenge for the player. For example, going to the idea of a skeleton with the 2 water tentacles (I'm going to remove the potential third one for reasons at this point). For the player to fight this group, they need to first take out the skeleton. However, at the same time that the skeleton is engaged to fight, the tentacles should also be engaged. While the player is fighting the skeleton, they have to deal with projectiles from the tentacles. Now they can choose to either keep fighting the skeleton, in which case they need to dodge the tentacle attacks until the skeleton is done with, or they can try to go for the tentacles first and avoid the skeleton. Furthermore, to prevent the player from just luring the skeleton away and kill it on its own, the skeleton would have a leash point; once they travel a certain distance from where they started, they'll stop fighting and return to that point. This concept doesn't need to apply to every single group, mind you.
My next area of discussion is in regards to patrolling enemies, or the lack thereof. Right now, enemies just stay where they and won't really do anything until the player gets within a certain range. I think this should change, with there being some enemies that will move back and forth between two points. At some points, the player can lure patrolling units away to take them out. In others, the patrolling units would be part of a group of enemies and intended to make it more difficult for the player to dive deeper into a group of enemies to take out specific targets first. And sometimes the patrol routes are so big that you could get into engaging one group, only for a patrol to waltz in and now you have a new threat to deal with. Let's cover all of these ideas using the example. So you have the skeleton and 2 tentacles, but you also have ANOTHER skeleton that patrols. In the first example, this skeleton will patrol from the rear of the group to the front of it. However, its aggro is not tied to the group and instead is just based on proximity to the player still. The player wouldn't want to engage with the group until the patrol is removed, so they'll wait until it's at the front and lure it away. Now let's change it up and say that the patrolling skeleton stays in the back area. If the player tries to run past the first skeleton to attack the water tentacles, they'll cause the patrolling skeleton to get involved. Now they have two skeletons to deal with. This makes fighting the tentacles first a much bigger problem and forces the player to take out the first skeleton first. They can still fight the tentacles after and try to avoid the patrolling skeleton as it's still as difficult as it was with the original group, but it's not harder. Now for the third idea. Instead of the patrolling skeleton only patrolling around that specific group, they now have a bigger patrol route that sees them patrol past three groups of enemies, with the player being able to choose to engage with two of those three groups. The player would then wait until this patrol moves away from the group they want to fight before engaging, but once they DO engage they're now on a time limit to get everything killed before the patrol returns.
Alright, that was quite a lot. We have a couple more things to cover, but it's not going to be as much writing to explain. First, I want to talk about the speed that enemy projectiles travel. Simply put, I think most of them are too fast. The reason I feel this is because if you try to engage with a group with multiple enemies doing ranged attacks, your only real recourse is to get them to start attacking and then run away. If you remain close, you won't have a large enough window to avoid the projectiles. This is even worse for the water tentacles, which will fire three projectiles with a fairly quick rate of fire. Instead, I think that both the speed of enemy projectiles from enemies that don't need to charge their attacks (like the casters) should be a bit slower while the rate of fire for enemies that will lob multiple projectiles in a short window is made to take longer.
And now for the last suggestion, one that is a bit different: I think the way the yellow slime works should have completely different behaviour to make it a more engaging fight. Right now, the set up is that it fires a projectile when you get in range and then it tries to melee attack you. After a certain period of time, it'll fire another projectile. Finally, when it dies it'll split into two smaller slimes that you need to take out. While I love these ideas individually, I think the order they're done in should change. Instead of the slime shooting a projectile out at all, it should just try to engage in melee. Once the player gets it down to half health, it then splits not into two smaller slimes but into FOUR. However, these small slimes won't try to melee attack the player ever. Instead, they'll fire their own projectiles, with the time between each new volley of shots being a little longer than the time it would take for a player to kill one small slime. Now the player needs to get to each slime one at a time and take them out while dodging the shots from the others. Of course, you can feel free to not use this idea at all. It's just something that popped into my head and thought would be interesting.