I am really impressed by the amount of work you and your team put into this project! Very well done!
I played until I reached the third town (I can’t remember the name sorry…). Also, I didn’t read all the devlogs, so sorry if I suggest ideas you already have or if I ask questions that you already answered.
I am going to start with what I liked about the game (sorry, English is not my native language):
- I really liked playing slimes which are usually basic enemies in RPG. The inversion was funny in itself but also a pretext to talk about the expansionist tendency of some human communities, which was a refreshing take.
- The fact that items are used to attack instead of just action points like most turn based RPG is the funniest part in my opinion. I liked managing my inventory to use the worst items on weak enemies while keeping the rare loot for tougher ones.
- As a godot user myself, I found the amount of available settings and inventory management (with many filters, types etc.) quite impressive given that I didn’t noticed any bugs. Just out of curiosity: are you using plugins? If yes which ones? Maybe Dialogic 2 for dialogs? Or did you make your own dialog engine?
Now for what I disliked:
- I don’t mean to sound harsh at all, but simply fight one battle after another felt like something was missing. Sure, there are town conversations acting as checkpoints (and the dialog and overall story is nice and well written), but I don’t think that is enough. Since you plan to sell the game eventually, let me compare it to other games that seem similar in genre to me (obviously, these are games developed by professionals, and I’m not saying that the same level of quality is always required—I’m simply saying that I find the comparison in terms of features, and what makes them fun, interesting). Darkest Dungeon features a minimal exploration mechanic that already feels more engaging than simply battling when crawling in dungeon (let aside from town management aspect). Free exploration is not the only option: Loop Hero features a kind of unique map management through card so that each loop is different. In my opinion, the best suggestions that require minimal changes to what has already been developed is the following:
- Allow the player to move the crew between towns, even if the maps remain simple.
- Make it meaningful (gameplay-wise) to send food items back to town. Like, maybe enabling bonuses when a certain food quantity is reached or, even better considering the funniest part of the game is managing tons of different items, when a certain amount of a specific item is reached? A roguelitish mechanic like this would make it more meaningful to send food to town.
- The completeness of the UI comes with an inconvenient: there’s so much information on the screen that it becomes hard to read (for example, the filters that are always displayed in the inventory). Furthermore, there’s often much more information than necessary (for example, I reached the third city, I didn’t find a single challenge that really justified the complexity of the statistics). So, what I can suggest on this topic is:
- Hide some data behind some more tabs or collapsing menu bars (like the filters).
- Try to put more emphasis in the important data in a given context with colors, animation, different font size, etc. For instance, the tooltips of items in combat (which are a very good idea btw) should take a larger part of the screen as it the most important information.
- Put UI scaling option or force full screen mode. As I played in the browser, many elements were too small.
Overall, very nice game I liked it! Good job!