Hi InfamousRabbit,
Just played your demo, I hope you don't mind me providing my feedback - I think feedback is a really important part of the game development process.
Things Done Well:
- The art style is cute and vivid. It's hard to work with pixel art at such a high resolution (and v. time consuming!) but I think it has been very well executed.
- The pacing of the story, provision of new gameplay elements and narrative was largely well done.
- Humour is used with both the right level of quality and quantity.
- The control scheme for Keyboard was logical and easy to use.
- The battle start sequence with the enemies 'rushing you' from off-screen is a great idea that stops the change between exploration and battle being too abrupt or cliche.
Areas for Improvement:
- Despite the pacing being largely well managed, there was a big dump of mechanics just before you fight the toadstool. It was difficult to therefore work out which to use and what the respective impact was. I'll be honest in that I still don't really understand when to use which ability against a given enemy.
- I thought the walk speed was a little slow, until I realised there was a run option (holding shift). I'm not sure at which stage this was introduced to the player (If it was, I may have missed it) but I think it is definitely worth reminding the player of this control at the beginning of the black and white chase sequence.
- Narratively, I struggled to understand why Slippy follows you around. I know this is useful from a tutorial / meta game perspective but perhaps a clearer in-game motive would be useful?
- The CRT screen effect is very love-it or hate-it. For me that graphics are not retro enough to warrant the justification. I read in the comments below that you intend to make this optional - I think this is a great idea. Perhaps ask the player outright at the beginning of the game which mode they prefer - rather than assuming a default with menu-digging afterwards to turn it on/off.
The biggest single issue for me was that the game crashed each time I selected restart after failing the black and white chase sequence. This seemed to happen only once I got as far as the water bit. Fails before this point resulted in me starting the room again (a pseudo autosave) but unfortunately this didn't get mapped to the main save file. As such, I was sent all the way back to the last save point on restarting the game. After this happened twice I had to sadly put down the game for good - A shame as I would have liked to have taken it to the end.
I hope the detailed feedback is useful, I am developing my own game so totally hope you take this in the manner it is intended - to help you make the best game possible!
Ben