This game is great and perfectly captures the Toontown feel (with a few extremely minor details as exceptions), although some elements are rather frustrating, such as some of the near-kaizo-level platforming (I lost a god run to flame jets in the room with spinning platforms in the molten area). Especially when 99% of the game's platforming challenges are more in line with TTO in terms of difficulty, so the super extreme challenges coming out of nowhere feel like bizarre difficulty spikes. It's really frustrating to get 3-shot by something that's totally separate from the "main gameplay" of turn-based battles.
Also the fact that the items don't tell you what they do means they might as well be placebo, because you can't really plan or strategize around items in this game. You just have to hope they're doing *something* for you. The only time an item's effect was really "obvious" to me was when it caused me to start missing half of my attacks. Made me wish I never picked up those stupid glasses, or that I could at the very least drop or get rid of them. And when one of the only memorable items effects was actively negative, it makes me want to avoid picking them up at all.
Considering you don't know what any of the items are going to do, the "next area" selection feels pretty meaningless. It pretty much amounts to "how many anomalies do you want?" Or "what cosmetic do you want?" Because the items may as well be cosmetic with how few of them actually seem to do anything. Same goes for the shop. You're rarely able to afford anything that costs double digit amounts anyway, unless you get the pay raise item (that one was fun, I was rich by the end of that run).
Also a lot of systems aren't properly explained. The fact you need to hit esc to open an extremely important menu should either be explained to the player early on, or there should be an on-screen button for it. Putting a book icon in the lower right would probably help, because most TT players could reasonably intuit that it will open a menu with important information.
And can you hold 1 usable item or 2? Flippy seems to be able to hold 2, but Clara only holds 1? But this isn't said anywhere in their character descriptions? Or is there some other mechanic that dictates how many you can hold? In my first run, I had 1 blue and 1 green and could swap between them, but on my second run, I couldn't hold multiple no matter what combinations of colors I tried to hold. It was really frustrating realizing I spent my jellybeans on nothing, because I suddenly couldn't actually take the item I thought I was receiving.
Speaking of poorly explained mechanics, are the gags used in a certain order or not? The game seems to change its mind constantly. During the intro I was convinced squirt always had to come first, and I operated under that assumption for the whole run, only to realize near the end that I was wrong, and could use gags in any order? And then on my 2nd run, squirt forced itself to the beginning of the move order again! Is it a squirt-specific mechanic? If so, why doesn't it say so in the description when you hover over it, if it's a mechanic that no other gag track has??
Also the intro is fun, the bait and switch is an excellent way to start, but it gets tiring once you have to slog through it a 2nd or 3rd time. Please make it skippable after the first playthrough. Just have the elevator fall under the toon on the character select screen and have the title card pop up there, there's no reason to make me go through an entire battle that doesn't even matter, especially when I know about the bait and switch already. The surprise wore off, there's no reason to try to surprise me again by doing the exact same thing all over again.
Those are my only complaints so far, though. This is a wonderful project, and extremely well put together, I just wish some of its rougher aspects were fixed. Mainly, better explanation for the mechanics, actual item descriptions, and maybe make it so hazards don't 3-shot you when they're already so precise. The battles are fun and engaging, and this fangame is a perfect realization of a dream I've always had for a Toontown roguelike. Even with its faults, I'll continue to play it, because it's still really fun when I don't get screwed over.
Viewing post in Toontown: The Grindworks comments
Hello, thank you for your feedback!
To address several of your points here, there is currently a way to view in-depth descriptions of the items you collect via the Monocle accessory. It will show a detailed breakdown of items you stand near, as well as giving you the ability to hover over items in the menu to view descriptions for items you picked up earlier. This is something that I, for a long time was very intent on keeping the way it is, which I understood was not a popular viewpoint. After reading your comment, however, I'm more inclined to remove that feature from Monocle, and turn it into a toggle in the settings, or something of the sort. I will have to think on this.
A lot of your questions can be answered by just not knowing the Item functions. The Crown item allows you to queue Gags in any order you want, Spider Legs allows you to carry two Pocket Pranks at once, etc. For the intro, after your first victory, the settings menu should display an option for skipping the Cog building segment and getting directly into the game.
Overall, I'm very glad to hear you're enjoying the game despite a few issues here and there, and thank you again for sharing your thoughts with us.
Thanks for the clarifications! Yeah, after a few more runs (I've done like 7 at this point), I did end up getting the monocle, realized just how much of the game's mechanics were hidden, and decided to just start using the wiki whenever I got an item I didn't recognize, lol.
I feel like the items in this game fit into two categories: So minor/subtle you'll never figure it out without the monocole (most stat-boosting ones, or that backpack that only does anything if you know you're supposed to skip a turn for it to work, or any item that breaks TT's rules so fundamentally there's no way you can know you have its effect unless you're literally TOLD you can place traps under lured cogs now), or obvious enough that not having a description actually kinda works (any item which "announces" its effect in-battle, like the alien glasses, the dinosaur one with the meteors, and most pocket pranks).
A game like Risk of Rain can get away with a vague item description or two, because the items with those items usually have instant, obvious effects. "...And his music was electric", and all your attacks are suddenly doing big, flashy chain lightning attacks. Checks out, you know? But the game still explains all of the non-obvious effects, because there's no way to know otherwise.
That being said, I am still really loving this game. The characters have super interesting gimmicks (I'm in the middle of a run with Bessie, she's super creative, and my first item this run was the wizard hat which makes it 10x more interesting), the item effects are really cool when you understand them, the game's various "twists" are incredible (my jaw dropped when the game presented me with a 9x14 matching puzzle and I was like... you can DO that??), and the original music has been stuck in my head ever since I started playing. Special mention goes to the factory silo platforming room where it starts filling up with paint, that music and the final boss music are two of my favorites.
While the game is pretty noticeably different from Toontown in some ways, after playing for a while, I honestly forget it's not Toontown, and it's genuinely astounding y'all managed to recreate it this well in Godot. The controls/physics are at least 90% there, and the visuals are *totally* spot-on, and I can't imagine how hard it must have been to port everything so well like that. It's only super obvious anything's different when the game looks "too good", like the lava platforming room in the mints (which is a really cool effect, by the way).
The haunted golf course area is super cool, too. My only complaint is I can't see 2 feet in front of me, meaning I had to tap W instead of holding it for most of my time there, and the one time I did hold it, I fell right into an oil pit I couldn't tell apart from the floor. Aside from that, the "classic creepypasta" vibe of the place brought me a kind of nostalgia I wasn't really expecting! I had a dumb smile on my face the whole time I was there.
The faulty factory is amazing, too. I was taking screenshots of the cogs to send to my friend the whole way through. And I've had a lot of fun messing around with what it unlocks when you beat it!