itch.io

First of all, thank you for such great feedback!

I will look into the potential memory leak bug. We primarily test on native Linux, and Windows in Wine. The browser tends to only get a couple of us doing a full playthrough of the game once we are finalizing a new release, so there certainly could still be some web issues we missed. We also do all our browser testing with Vivaldi, which is Chromium based. We may need to pull out Firefox, Opera, and some others for more testing.

We created this game for Godot Wild Jam # 83, which was just short of a year ago. It did not become our primary focus right away, but eventually rose to be the project we chose as what we wanted to be our first big release.

We try to be accessible in our games, and when possible develop for mobile as well as desktop. Dungeon Revolution was an outlier in not having had the time to setup the mobile controls. We have a template for them too, but it still takes a bit more work as we need extra icon art per game. It also needs a review with the recent Godot update that added in some default mobile controls.

We know the intro needs work. We are planning to break the intro up into a prologue for those who want more depth, which will start earlier in the day, and then the main game will start after you wake up at the inn, with the Leader Leo dialog happening there. We are considering adding mini-games and taking part in the festivities as part of the prologue, along with free roam and being able to play it from the perspective of each of the 4 party Slimes. Some of these are a bit feature creep and would be added later.

One of our earliest tutorials was combat focused. The big area in town with the festivities was actually designed for the combat tutorial originally, and only a recent update filled it with festival stuff. The tutorial, as we tend to do, was too long. It took you turn by turn introducing each ability the Slimes had and the combat mechanics. This was also for our old combat system, where things were pretty different. You had several basic abilities, and then 5 items from your bag that you could use. With the new abilities I would not go through and show each of them. At some point we want to create a new version of this combat tutorial, but with all the feedback that our tutorials are too long, it has been pushed to the side for now. I am considering an option where you have mini-fights started from the Training Hall, where you can do a turn or two at a time for specific things. That will take a lot more code to setup, so is far down the road.

The game does feel fairly intuitive to us, but many were confused in the past. I think a lot of our design changes have made it easier to understand, but we did not do a good job of cutting down the tutorials as we made those changes. We only recently disabled the tutorials by default. They will get a fresh review in the future, after we have got a more solid view of the path ahead.

We added the initial in development popups for Steam due to some of the initial review process, but they probably are not actually needed. We will see about dropping them, as you are right that while some people probably like the changelogs, many don't care, especially on the first play.

I'm assuming you played with the default of Inventory Management off. That was also a recent change. In the original gameplay you are supposed to distribute your loot among the personal Slime bags, rather than keep it all in a single shared bag. Each Slime can only access their bag in combat to pick items to use with their abilities. This is why the inventory screen pops up after each fight. I had meant to disable that by default when we also disabled the Inventory Management by default, and will do so in the next update. The inventory screen layout was also designed for that aspect of the game and normally the center would be split at the middle with the shared bag at the top and Slime bags at the bottom. A lot of the filtering and sorting options were designed around distributing your loot from the shared bag to the personal bags. I hid the personal bags in the last update, but the UI needs a fresh look to see how to clean it up when not playing with Inventory Management.

You mention wanting to sort/filter the food for villagers. The main quest of feeding your clan treats all items as food, since your people can eat anything. When you get the later quests to arm and feed other towns, then the Traders' Depot will automatically apply filters so only items that meet the selected quest will be shown. There is a filter for food items. It is in the last tab of the filters and uses the loaf of bread icon.

We plan to add a subset of the filter to the combat item select. We just haven't worked out how we want to do it yet. It does filter down to the items you can use for the ability, but we want players to be able to a bit more filtering if they are looking for something specific.

Art is an area we are constantly working on. The game started in the jam with a free asset pack. We then created our own art and transitioned to it. Now we are expanding it. The characters have 3 of the 4 directions done for basic animations. Once the 4^th is finished we will be adding in attack/ability animations as well. We will start with some general ones, but plan to add more over time.

I don't think the story as we picture it would do well in a roguelike. There is too much to it, and it would slow the game down, especially in repeated plays. Maybe we will evolve things as we go and find a way that feels true to our goals and works in the format. This will still be in the same world, and some of the core story will be present, though we have not decided on the roguelike's story yet. The main game is intended to move beyond the forest, and the end of the demo is leaving it. We are finishing up the tilesets for the plains, which is the next area you move into. There will be plenty of additional terrains to travel through in the main game, and the roguelike.

Thanks again for your great feedback!