I am in somewhat of a similar boat. I do not feel qualified to give advice. All I can do is give you my opinion and warn you that I have no successful games of my own =).
Usually games from this genre are focusing on the story and art style and less on combat (GameMaker type of games.)
Your game fighting style and feel reminds me more of Pokemon. The twist being that instead of catching pokemons you get different weapons. Your niche may be here. Give weapons more focus and story and make them collectible, the compendium adds little value atm. Using it for weapons instead of enemies may be one way to go.
I tend to prefer action like games more than story focused games. I played a lot of games and very few got my interest in the story even some games that had a really good and polished story. My point is that these 2 categories are really hard to reconcile.
Making the character free movement in cities feels right to me.
It could allow you to add minigames in cities later on. Similar to what a lot of GameMaker games have.
This may allow the story to be told at a slower pace as it would give the player something to do before hearing the rest of the story.
Finding your audience is a hard one... and I do not think there is easy solution for this.
My approach to this is to make games that I like to play, the audience being people "like" me. Is that a good approach? probably not...
If the project has grown much bigger than intended I would push trough to release it sooner than later.
Most of indie game dev quit after 1st game. I do not know what to do with this information.
My interpretation of this is that I need to push trough and launch more than 1 game =).
Witch is what I am trying to hint at here.
You project has a lot of features already, and if you can't figure out what niche is this for, you could try to find it by releasing it.
The alternative looks more like endless development...
I can not express enough that this is just an opinion from someone who has not released any games. So please that that into account.
Thank you for taking the time to delve into these talks!
Wish you a successful game release with lots of buyers ;)
Viewing post in Hungry For Loot jam comments
Thanks. These are good points. We do try to design games we enjoy, as it is easier to get a feel for if it is fun, and more enjoyable to test. Sometimes in jams we will explore new styles, but sticking with what you know helps. This started one way and grew in others, so we kind of got lost along the way. We will experiment this month with some of the changes we are thinking of and see what people think.
I know indie dev is hard, and most don't make it. We still have a bit of time left to try to make this work, so we are going to do what we can. And even if it needs to be cut back to nights and weekends, we do plan to keep working on trying to make it succeed.