Hi Emmanuel_Rosas! Thanks for your response. I’ll do my best to reply to each of your concerns in turn.
Firstly, I will say that while my attention span might be quite flighty - I have been diagnosed as having ADHD and have a diagnosis as such - I still take the game with complete seriousness and have a great passion for game design. Rather than doing this out of obligation, I appreciate each and every game as a creative gift, and treated your game with the same amount of seriousness that I would treat any game. I enjoy the art of reviewing and giving critical feedback.
I will say that playing through many of the games, I found a lot of them not so monotonous! They paced their games quite well and they provided interesting conflicts, varied amount of different skills being tested.
If I did not access three menu options, it was because I felt that the game didn’t introduce them to me. I enjoy complex systems in games that allow introductions of levels of complexity, and if I had have known, I would have explored them gleefully! But I simply didn’t recognise that those existed, and whether or not it’s because of the user interface or because of the way I played the game, I think it’s important to realise that there’s a reasonable chance that a large portion of players would ignore these tabs tucked away. They weren’t explicitly introduced, and because I usually assume that RPGs have the same standard tabs tucked away in their menus, if they aren’t introduced to me explicitly, then my mind doesn’t usually get gravitated towards them. I feel like if there were more hints in the game design or even a tutorial placed that introduced these levels of complexity, then I would have been able to explore these levels of complexity and have fun with them. But as it stands, it’s entirely possible for a person to play through the game and never notice them at all. Whether you see that as the fault of the player or the fault of the game’s design is up to you. But it did affect my overall experience.
If I had known I could assign myself the Mage class as a “second class”, I would have given it a go. I think it says something that even up until the point you told me, I was unaware that such a thing existed. Perhaps if I had played up until past the first hour of the game, I would have realised these things existed, but I am required by the rules to only judge the game based on my first hour of gameplay, and I spent so much time within battles that no NPC pointed out these mechanics to me, to my understanding. If they did, I suppose that is my fault, but I didn’t wilfully ignore these tabs.
Judging from your description of the quest log, it’s my personal opinion that it’s usually better to progress the story organically rather than through a quest log, but that’s a general assumption and it might not be too correct. If I play the game again, I could find the quest log quite compelling, and it actually makes me interested in knowing what might have happened had I found it.
I honestly think that I did pay attention to the dialogues, but they didn’t have much information in them.
So actually, I think you are right in that if I had found these tabs, I would have discovered a whole new dimension of the game that would have increased my enjoyment of the experience as a whole. However, I didn’t find them, and I felt like I had no reason to find them.
Also, I don’t necessarily want more story and less battles. I really love battles, if they have a bunch of interesting decisions in them. I think you could have introduced the story subtly with the same number of words. It was nothing offensive, the writing, but in my playthrough I didn’t discover it. Perhaps if I did open the quest log I might have found some interesting lore that gave background to the area around me, but sadly, I didn’t find it.
I also very much like mystery in games! Very many of my favourite games are set in incredibly mysterious environments, but as I played, the mystery wasn’t gripping me.
It is important also to realise that all players do not play the game like me, I agree. But I can only judge based on my experience of the game.
Based on this feedback, I think that the improvement I would suggest would be to force the player to recognise the tabs in the menu that, without them, it makes the game quite a frustrating experience. It comes down to the feeling, “If only I could have known”. But it just wasn’t made obvious to me.
Either way, there is no objective evaluation of a game or piece of art, only descriptions of our experiences, so this one I had to trust what had been given to me.
Thank you for making this game, I see that a lot of heart went into it, and I appreciate that you gave us the gift of this game. Every game is a gift.
Cheers!
Cash :)