I’ve made it to the seventh level in the pre-jam version without losing any characters, but it feels like a harder game (though it is nice to get some extra challenge after beating the jam version, but I’m not sure that level is beatable, maybe I should have had a character close to level up so that I could let that character take a beating and level up and get healed).
In the jam version I had to avoid getting noticed by too many enemies at a time, but if I did that right I could just heal every character before alerting the next enemy. In the pre-jam version all the enemies started moving towards the party at the same time, so it became a game about finding places where their pathfinding would glitch and so that the enemies would take longer to arrive and I wouldn’t have to deal with all of them at the same time. Which is fun too. And seeing the seventh level where there’s several human enemies near the start, I don’t think there’s enough room in the start of that level to bottleneck them so they arrive one at a time. I’m glad I played the jam version first, as I feel like getting the harder challenge first would have been somewhat frustrating and also if I got good at that and then tried the easier one, it would have felt a bit bland at the skill level I’d have reached.
Aside from the gameplay, the jam version also has more dialogue (and the dialogue it has makes more sense) and more music.
Now, if you keep working on the game for a summer cleaning jam or something, here’s what I think could still use some improvement:
- The text splitting where I see the end of one sentence and the start of the next and then I have to press a button to see the end of that sentence. Splitting the text at sentence boundaries would probably have worked better. Maybe you can look into how subtitles on TV are split. Those too have to break text into pieces of a particular length.
- Maybe add a way to see a list of missions you’ve played and replay them in whichever order you choose. I guess that could make it a bit difficult to keep track of with characters levelling up and getting items though. But having a savegame at the start of each mission and being able to select which one to continue from would probably be doable.
- Make it so that I can start moving characters around as soon as it shows “your turn” on screen, rather than having to wait until it removes that text before it takes any input.
- Let people see from the start how many missions there are in total. Or do like those PS1 games that when you save or load savegames, they show how much of the game is completed.
- Add portrait variations so the characters can show facial expressions right next to the dialogue text.
- Maybe add a little bit more level-specific music.
- If you still want to change something, maybe add PS1-like features like an attract mode (watch a replay of some part of the game after the music finishes playing on the main menu, and there’s a “press button” thing letting people know they can return to the main menu by pressing any button).
I think the jam version was a bit easy, but I liked the story and the art (and it mixes 2D and 3D really well). And I still made some mistakes (I even restarted a level because of that). The story was probably a part of what kept me engaged so that I finished the game. It’s also nice that it can run on Linux. There were some Windows-only games I couldn’t get running.