Thanks for your thoughts! The English was fine.
We have a lot of ideas for things to try to make it more fun, and more RPG-like. Right now we are trying to get as many of them in before Next Fest as we can, to get a feel for how everything will work, and what needs to change. We have acknowledged that the original loot concept has been lost as we switched to the item stacks and newer abilities, so have been thinking on how best to add back some dopamine boost inspiring items. There is currently the issue of some people feeling overwhelmed by a cluttered inventory, so we don't want to add them yet, but the Traders' Depot is up next and will let you unload excess loot. After that is in place we want to look at adding rarity to items, and having a chance of getting a smaller number of rare, or even unique, items in fights. With things being single use, this will need to be balanced to feel rewarding and not unpleasant to get a cool unique item that is used once and lost.
We did think about letting the player have free roam controls in towns. The main reason we decided not to was to keep the controls simple for cross-platform and mouse/touch only UI. We could do a click to move system, but that feels like a lot of extra work implementing and maintaining an extra system. Instead, we plan to add an option in the towns where you can watch as your party moves between locations. This is just a toggle at the bottom of the menu, so you can quickly change it as you are in town, depending on what you want at the moment. We have also updated the button that hides the Town UI so that it also zooms out to show you more of the town. With the ongoing art update we are also expanding the towns to have more going on to make them feel more alive. We are looking at options for your in town interactions to be able to add more to do, such as after talking with someone it will add a new person to talk to, or possibly a new location to visit in the town.
We are not sure on the grid movement. It is an interesting idea, but we like the feel of the party travelling with the current side-scrolling. We will keep it in mind as we work to see if it feels right for any parts. We are also planning to introduce a "world" map soon. It will initially just be showing info, and then used for some quests. We have thoughts about using it for selecting your next destination, though may also just add forks in the road where the party stops and you can decide which way to go. We do want to add some forks and letting the player have a bit more freedom, while limiting feature creep and having too many possible paths to deal with in balancing things.
At this point we are not so much looking for a cool idea to make the game stand out, as we are trying to find where we are and how to best optimize what we have in the time available. We know that we need to have something to draw attention and get people to play the game, and some of the current design choices do offer that. If something doesn't work, then we are going to change it. Part of this dev-log and our current thoughts are on the marketing end. We have been looking at the side-scrolling over free-roam as a limitation that we were not fully happy with. Now we are questioning if we should change our mindset and promote it as a benefit for people with time constraints. If we go into it seeing it as a negative, that will show in our presentation. If we can see it as a benefit, at least for some people, then we can try to optimize it and promote it for that audience. The key is if there is enough of an audience who will appreciate it, and if so, how to best adjust the feature for them.
This is where things like the grid-based movement could be considered. Our current system does have some longer segments where the player is just moving. We are reducing the time between things as we redo the map, but maybe we add an option to reduce it further so that you go directly from fight to fight to whatever is next without the extra walking time. This wouldn't exactly be that grid-based movement, but would have a similar effect on time between things. This is something we would want to set as an option, instead of the default, for those who want to speed things up. We already have the options for speeding up movement, but also updating the maps themselves to be shorter is an option as we try to optimize.
We know not to try to make the best game as your first release, and that most people fail to make a living doing indie game dev. We were lucky enough to be in a position where we had a chance to try this, and still have some time left to see if this can work before I need to look at going back to a day job. Even if this isn't enough to make a living, it can at least be an example project for trying to get a job in game dev, rather than going back to web dev that I had done previously.
We had initially intended to do something much simpler, but the game just kept growing. We are trying to balance making it good enough for us to feel good about releasing it (my partner and I are both perfectionists), but also not letting feature creep take over. Many of the games we love to play are grander, and that played into how the game grew. We are struggling to find the best balance of how to finish this game. We are far enough in that starting over on something new, even a simpler game, would take too long. We need to find where to take this game to make it good enough to release and find enough of an audience. We are hoping that we will have enough in place by Next Fest that we can roll into Early Access, to start making at least a little money to continue development. There is a lot to do in a short time, but we are making progress. How to make the current systems feel better is on our minds a lot right now, which is what prompted the dev-log and seeing what others think. We really appreciate your comments. This kind of feedback helps us look at it from other viewpoints.
We are already setup as an Android developer and do plan to release on Google Play once it is finished. The UI is not optimized for mobile yet, but we do keep mobile in mind as we work on the game so that it can be polished up for a mobile release.
Thanks again for your comments. Thinking on things as we read through and responded has helped to give some new ideas for places we can improve and refine.