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So I beat your game within around 35 minutes. I've taken a lot of notes so I hope this provides you better insight on areas you can improve on. I will be completely honest so I hope you don't take things personally.

  • I like the custom battle art and portrait art. I looked at your other games and I see some improvement. So if you keep this up, I can see you making quality artwork within a few years.
  • The free healing at anytime is a good addition. It saves the hassle; especially for shorter games.
  • The first cutscene ends too quickly. I was expecting to take control until the screen faded and jumped to another cutscene. I think you could either remove that portion or at least give the player a better tease of what's to come. I felt that there was a missed potential there.
  • Lance's death means nothing to the player because there was no character development for Garret. We don't know who Garret is nor how great of a brother Lance was.
  • If you're going to use text to label buildings (Divine Blades Guild), it should be consistent with every other building like the shops.
  • The whole "You shouldn't enter someone's home without permission" discourages players from exploring. You can be a bit more creative. For example, in Earthbound, you can't enter some buildings but they have fun dialogue regardless (like XXXsterday referencing the Beatles).
  • For the dialogue, you need to do a bit more "show" rather than "tell". If you study how movies do cutscenes, you'll have a better understanding of what I mean.
  • I think the dialogue sounds unnatural in certain parts of the script. Think about how conversations happen in real life. Do people always point out the obvious? When they do, it's usually a joke ("No sh*t Sherlock"). In your game, however, it's taken seriously.
  • It would help if the monsters on the map have a visual indicator when you're spotted like an exclamation mark.
  • On maps, the corridors need to be expanded or the monster's field of vision needs to be narrower. It feels like encounters are unavoidable.
  • The maps are like a long maze sometimes. You can definitely cut down on the length of some paths. In older games, they did this because of random encounters and artificially increasing playtime.
  • The battles seemed a bit too easy for me. I'm playing on normal difficulty and I was holding the confirm key and attacking to win (I beat the first 2 bosses by attacking only). It wasn't until the Volcanic area's boss where I needed to use Reflect to avoid getting 1 shotted.
  • For the last crystal, I think you should have allowed the player to interact an event to start the cutscene rather than having it autostart. I usually enter the room and save before the boss fight but for this one, Damin attacked me and I had no chance to save.
  • Ravager is way too broken because it kills 3 party members, it can't be reflected and there's no signal to indicate that Erriga going to use it so I don't know when to guard. When I restarted the fight, that was the first thing she used and it was really annoying. The only reason I won is because I was lucky enough to have one battle where she didn't use it.
  • The reveal that Damin is Garret's brother was unexpected, but it doesn't really make sense. So who's Lance then? This basically makes the first cutscene a waste of time.
  • I felt like the only person who had a slight bit of character development was Garret. The other party members felt like they were just there for the sake of having support in battle.

So the biggest thing I noticed is that you're lacking a novelty for your game. What makes your game special compared to other games? Is it a fresh and interesting story? The stylish graphics? The fun and unique gameplay mechanic? It's this missing piece that can cause your game to get overlooked because it feels generic.

If you want to become a better storyteller, I highly recommend studying the Hero's Journey. It provides a good structure for story arcs and character development. You should also learn the different archetypes for characters. Usually there's a hero and a villain but there's also the messenger, mentor, shapeshifter, etc.

I hope this provided you good feedback to learn from. Goodluck with your future projects!

Thank you! I am glad you took the time to point things out, and leave suggestions.