Post by lapsio in Pocket Dungeon comments

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I’ll add my two cents - indeed it does feel quite random. Sometimes you get demolished in first floor or first two floors and sometimes you can reach really far. This fact alone makes it a bit frustrating that there’s no save functionality so you gotta start over and over again.

Also idk, I didn’t really play original pokemon games so I can’t judge it in light of actual pokemon games but I feel like HP is quite low comparing to enemy attack strength, which in conjunction with scarcity of healing items and lack of saves AND randomness of enemies makes game quite hard AND strongly dependent on luck.

Another thning I noticed (that may be just design decision, not sure) is that kinks adjustment really strongly affects gameplay difficulty. For example amnestia and mind control are really strong debuffs that make game really diffucult and once you disable them game suddenly becomes significantly easier. If it was planned then I’d say it’s interesting mechanics but maybe it’d be worth to mention it on kinks selection screen that it actually affects gameplay mechanics and difficulty since atm it feels like lack of some kink related mechanics is not balanced out.

Also I did not manage to starve to death. Maybe it just takes too long. Again it sounds like cool mechanics, encouraging player to look for food berries and not just speedrun to stais but it doesn’t seem to be consistent enough in many ways - in some runs food items are extremely rare, then in other runs they’re fairly common and being such important gameplay aspect I think there should be some caps ensiring that player actually will find at least one of them on each level or once per two levels for example. At first I was really worried about starving and tried to always pursue all berries looking for food but then kinda realized there’s no point since I did not manage to starve to death anyways. I thought it’s one of endings so I tried to die of hunger but did not manage to… idk.

And I feel like effects are not really explained in the interface. In general a lot of things are not explained anywhere. You can see icons but if you miss description in log you kind ahave no idea which icon means what. It may be more apparent for me since like I said I did not play a lot of Pokemon games so I don’t know lore behind many of items in this game. Plus you have no idea what cursed objects actully do and it all felt a bit confusing at least to me. Probably some of this stuff doesn’t have to be addressed in game itself, maybe some PDF manual or guide explaining stuff and objects would be sufficient, especially now, at early development stages. I still have no idea how to trade since I keep getting message that pokemon is not interested in trading with me :c Also you mention in readme that icons may give a clue regarding endings but they’re covered by giant locks so you can’t see sh*t xD

Also side note - I’d recommend forcing items shuffle after amnestia in order to prevent player from taking screenshots or remembering order of objects before you forget what they do. Or just implement some randomness mechanics that would pick random unknown item of certain class when using such (eg. no matter which unknown orb you use, game would just always pick random since they should be unknown anyways)

But overall this game feels REALLY complete for first public release and replayability is really high, there’s a lot of content and it’s high quality content. It’s one of better itch.io releases I’ve encountered in a long time. Brilliant work. Standing ovation from me. I really hope this project gets far and gets recognition it deserves. It nailed so many game aspects right away on first release that it’s almost unbelievable.

FerisLycan3 years ago(+1)

Thank you for all of this feedback, this is quite thorough!

Alright, most of the problems of the fighting come from how the original works (both games use the same damage calculation). In the original you have a partner or even a whole team, meaning that you not only have several attacks per turn, but enemies also have several targets they can focus on. The fact that in this game you're only one character fighting against hordes of enemies who also all have very effective attacks makes it really hard to balance. If this would be a normal dungeon in the normal game essentially everything would one-shot you, which is why all enemies in this game are vastly underleveled and all of their attacks have greatly reduced damage compared to what they'd deal in the real games. The team would also usually enter dungeons with an already filled bag containing several healing items which is something that is not included yet. To combat this I'll make the player spawn in with a few helpful items until I release the town.

I definitely have to agree with kinks making several aspects of the game harder, especially the INT loss one being the cruelest one considering all of the abilities it takes away from the player. Probably a thing worth mentioning in the kink selection.

Starving to death is not possible and will probably (hopefully) be resolved by giving the player starting items.

It's a design choice that certain effects are not fully explained, if you are talking about equipments and their curses (and other effects like Corruption). The idea was to simulate that feeling of finding a random equipment in a dungeon and taking the risk of it being cursed or beneficial. Also, in the menu you can look back at the log at any time as well.

Traders don't talk to you if their offer wouldn't make sense (such as getting chastity if you already are in chastity) and they also shouldn't spawn in that case or at least pick an offer from their offer pool that you can actually agree to... well, I'll have that fixed!

The ending icons are still a liiiiittle bit visible behind the lock, just to give a tiny clue, such as certain traps or traders. Though, yeah, not really that big of a hint.

Item shuffle from amnesia is a thing I thought about but I like that the player gets the feeling of maybe remembering what the items in which place were and maybe even finding themself to be unable to fully remember everything. Which is exactly what the actual character feels, not fully sure what everything was, even though they knew it not too long ago.

Thank you again for all of this feedback, this is the exact kind that I wanted to get! A lot of ideas to polish the game even more or think twice about certain mechanics or why they are the way they are.

I'm glad you are able to enjoy it as much as I enjoyed making it, prioritizing gameplay over porn was my general approach to this so hearing that it actually is fun to play outside of the porn scenes does make me happy! ^^

lapsio3 years ago

Starving to death is not possible and will probably (hopefully) be resolved by giving the player starting items.

Is there anything more to starving messages in game then? Or is it just some leftover? Is there any buff or debuff related to being hungry? Considering that game shows you messages “You’re going to starve soon!” it sounds like something serious is about to happen. Yet I couldn’t notice anything particular happening.

FerisLycan3 years ago(+1)

When you're starving you are losing health, 1 HP for every step. It also disables natural regeneration. Even though you can't die from it, running around with 1 HP isn't really great either.