Thank you for the kind words, thoughtful feedback and full play through! I learned a lot about my game watching you play it. To answer some questions from the play through:
- Attack means "melee attack monster A" and Fight means "choose your melee target".
- "Martial vs simple" weapons relates to who is allowed to equip the weapons according to the game engine, but this game allows both characters to equip everything. So it had no effect in this game
- There is no downside for resting, you're right about that. Resting uses a food resource in the engine I built but that doesn't work for this game so I just balanced around every fight being against full health
I agree the hit balancing is off - my idea was to have each creature be a bit of a simple strategic puzzle - bats are supposed to be very high AC but they were a huge part of the game and Hargir just kept missing them. Other things often had an AC too high so he just misses a lot in most fights. Very unsatisfying.
I completely agree it would be nice to see what the spells do. I built the game on top of a "Might and Magic 2.5" engine I had created. The very bizarre UI is an artifact of that. So it may have nostalgia value for some people but now that I've used it, played with it, and seen people respond to it I think I'd prefer something more modern in the future. Having to hit C3A etc over and over is authentic, but the UI isn't the part of 90s games we generally want to bring back.
I enjoyed seeing you figure out that you're not ready for certain fights and then going back to them. That means the balance somewhat worked which is good. As for the map being much more clear than the levels, you are right about that for sure. It seems to be how our genre works.
Thank you so much for all the effort in your video and write-up.
EDIT - on more thing - I noticed the "move sideways" button 'A' was also "(A)ccept" during the conversation at the end of act 1 where you are kicked off the island. So you moved into a guy and immediately missed the conversation and arrived at a cutscene on a boat. That must have been pretty unsatisfying to see. Basically the event was you got yelled at buy a guy and then exiled from the island for stealing the figurine.