Wow, thanks for the detailed feedback!
A setting to always have the text show without typing it out is a good point. I think we had discussed it early on, and it got lost along the way.
We will do some testing on fixes for the Confirmation Dialog Box to prevent accidental choices. That is a new feature, and we did not test for people speed pressing keyboard or joypad buttons to advance the dialog when it popped up. We will probably add a, short, delay before the buttons show/become active.
We will need to think on the item descriptions. We wrote them based on a more human perspective of how they would be used normally. The Slimes are only discovering the combat benefits they get from eating them, so shops and elsewhere would generally have info based on the human viewpoint. We may add a dual description to them showing both the normal use, and notes for the Slimes. The character details screen is just for showing the info. We need to rework the look of the items a bit, and maybe grey them out for the Slimes. It is a general details page for all characters, even if they can't equip items. We do have plans for some limited equipment for the Slimes (such as helmets acting like full body armor), but it will be later and handled in the existing inventory screen.
Some of the item descriptions, primarily the seeds and berries, got reverted to an older placeholder version recently. We are going through to fix them, and take a fresh look at the wording of all the items. The items in general are getting redone as we switch to our own artwork and have more freedom to create whatever we want. As we do so, there are some oddities in the levels that need to be worked out. In jam plays little details like this are often overlooked, so we’ve been a bit lax on getting them cleaned up.
The Slimes are out looking for food in general to feed their clan. After the first combat they learn the enemies’ gear can also be used for a combat benefit. Currently, in game you only use the items for combat. That will be changing. We have a lot of ideas for how we want to expand on consuming food, and have been trying to find the right balance before we dig into adding the new systems, as it will be a big update. We’ve been fighting over the direction to take the game, between our earlier plan for quick and simple, and the much more expansive game it has been growing into. Only yesterday we decided to go the more expansive route and ignore the limits of keeping it faster paced. The quest log will be updated to show how much food the clan needs, and how much has been sent back. You will be picking items from your inventory to send back. The quantity and quality are intended to have an impact on story elements. As you progress in the story, sending items will have more importance. We’ve also been working on a hunger/fullness system to allow eating items outside of combat. This will partly come back to the story elements about them looking for food and eating the items as their food, in addition to the combat benefits. Ideally we want to have what they eat impact their stat growth/leveling up, but are still working out the details on it.
The ability cooldowns not resetting between combat was a design choice. We wanted them to feel powerful and useful, but not be the only thing used. If they reset and were available on turn 1, then we’d have to balance the fights based on the Slimes always using them, and it made everyone feel too powerful. We also debated having a cooldown that starts with combat, but many combats end quickly preventing their use, and it didn’t play well. This is still something we are working on. One of the ideas is that each Slime will have certain items that when they consume them, will reduce the remaining cooldown.
There is a bug with drag and drop in the current version. We recently added a long press to see item details feature for mobile. Unfortunately, it ended up interrupting the drag and drop. Our team has mostly switched to the right-click fast transfer in the bags, and did not properly test the drag and drop after adding the new long press logic. We try to have accessibility for multiple inputs and play styles, but it does make testing them all more time consuming, and easier to miss one. Drag and drop is a common way to move items, so we really messed up not testing this better. This bug has has been fixed for the next update.
Affinities are a percentage, with 100% being the average. When you are weak with an affinity, such as most living creatures being 50% with Death, then your ability to use that affinity is lower, reducing your attacks with it. Your defenses against it are also reduced, so you receive more damage from attacks with that affinity. When your affinity is above average, your attacks and defenses are increased. We need to work on a better tutorial and UI to show this in game.
Scrolls are limited early game, but will become more generally available later. Most healing items and abilities do not revive. Currently, the only thing we have coded to do revive is Helen’s upgraded heal ability, which you will get in a planned story event at level 10. Each of the Slimes also get a second ability at level 10. We will think on how best to make sure Tanko doesn’t feel less useful when not doing his ability.
Some of the settings are designed in a way that they can’t be adjusted during gameplay, so we can’t easily put the main settings in game. We have had other requests for this, so will be selectively adding some that may be most useful. As for saving, there is a save system in place, but currently disabled. It needs updating for the events and quests. We keep adding new features and want to get to a more stable point before revisiting the save system. When we added the events and disabled it, it felt like there wasn’t enough to worry about the lack. As the content grows, it is becoming more important, so will likely be worked on in the semi-near future.
We initially had the Focus Tooltips (item/action details) for keyboard enabled by default, but most jams comments said they played with mouse and keyboard and found them annoying, and very few jam players seemed to change any settings, so we changed the default. We need a better way to onboard people and set defaults for how they play. Perhaps the various Tooltip settings can be among those on the pause screen. Maybe we can add a dialog/popup asking if the player uses keyboard/joypad and would like the Focus Tooltips turned on.
We will take a look at the Silver Arrow. We went with silver items being water as we were setting up stats, but the art should reflect the affinities.
Thanks for the typo list, these have been updated in the dev version.
We had fun making the towns and trying to have them feel alive.
We try to fit our dragon into each game somewhere. There will be more dragon appearances later, beyond the dev messages.
Yes, the names reflect the classes.
After we added the target icons for the enemy actions, the lack of knowing who your healer was going to heal really stood out, and had to be fixed. Going forward we will be revisiting this ability. The faster paced gameplay of our original plan is why we went with auto targeting, but now may consider if there is a good way to allow a player selected heal target.
The enemy plans system was a common request in our early jams, and we agree that it is nice to have. We are thinking about having some enemies who don’t play fair later on… There are plans for more in the combat, but details are being worked out.
We’ve been doing the Godot Wild Jams, and they are big on accessibility. After our first jam with them we started creating a game template with a lot of core accessibility options, and then found that many of them are fairly easy to implement. Often, the settings that get added are things we used during testing and decided to include on the settings screen, rather than remove.
The bag exchange action was originally planned to allow you to manually swap items between your personal bag and belt (like the inventory), possibly with a limit such as only having access to the top 10 or 20 items in the bag. We ran out of time to implement it for the jam and were not going to have the item exchange at all. That early version also did not have an inventory screen, so you were relying completely on random luck for what you got, and the lack of an exchange was problematic. The random exchange was a last hour inspiration for how we could allow exchanging without needing to create the UI, that only made it in shortly before submissions closed. Afterward, we realized that it fit the faster paced flow the game had at the time. Back then there was a brief intro story, and that was it. The game was all about the combat loop. There was more of that, with a final boss fight at level 20, and your characters getting their additional abilities at level 10. With our changing plans, we may revisit this and allow the manual exchange, though likely with it still taking your turn… maybe once per turn a single item can be exchanged randomly for free.
For this game we are planning to stick with the automatic movement, mainly to reduce feature creep and need for more significant time world building. If we did free movement, it would require a lot of time for fleshing out the world and NPCs before we’d be satisfied My wife is a storyteller and her TTRPG worlds are very alive with everyone having a name and at least some backstory. Some day we may make our grand JRPG... We do plan to add more to the towns to give the player more to do, including a tavern for flavor text chats. As part of our recent change to allow more strategy elements, we plan to add an overworld map, and are debating on allowing the player some choices in the path to take, while still headed in the same general direction, and possibly always going to the same towns.
The original jam theme was “Consume”. When we saw it in the voting we had no ideas and were not fond of it. It took a fair bit of brainstorming before we came up with an idea, and that was originally just everyone on both sides could only use items. Then, while going through art, one of the kids asked if the Slimes could be our party… and that lead to the idea of them eating the items, and the enemies could be humans with normal equipment. We are very happy with how the game has progressed, especially from a theme we initially did not like!
Selling and sending items back are part of the next major update.
We are glad you enjoyed! Thank you again for such wonderful feedback! I’ve got plenty of notes from this.