Hey Evelend Team,

I just played into your game after waiting for a playable version literally years. The concept your game is based on is fantastic and I can't believe you actually got it to work. 

And while it certainly can be proud of some aspects (which I will mention a few lines below), it feels like there is still so much work to be done. The general level of polish feels very underwhelming, even after just a few minutes of playing the game. 

Now, I of course understand that it can be very hard to make games, especially with a team of only 3 people and also considering that it is the very first big game you are working on. Which is why I want to offer my help in assisting you with the Quality Assurance.

I've been working as a professional playtester in the QA department of a middle sized game developer for a year now, so I can bring some insights and competences. I'm also very well informed about pretty much everything regarding video games and I have many, many years of experience as a gamer. 

Of course we are talking about unpaid assistance here and I obviously can't fully devote myself to finding bugs for your game, but I am willing to offer some of my free time in order to help you find and hopefully squash out those nasty bugs, glitches and general problems of your game. That is, of course, if you actually feel capable of working with my feedback and bug reports.

In case you are interested, I'll leave you my Discord contact data, so you can reach me: HappyxYaYx #2447

Regardless of your decision, here are some first thoughts and problems I encountered:

Let's start with the positive impressions: I took a scroll through your enemy library and I'm massively impressed by the sheer number and variety of enemies in your game. The pixel art presented in the game is very charming and the soundtrack is a good fit. Furthermore the generated rooms often look very nice and I was really surprised by how big some of these rooms can get. Since I haven't played too far into the game yet, this is all the positive feedback I can give right now.

Now (and it almost hurts my heart to say it like this), there is a lot of stuff currently wrong or unfinished in the game. The fighting system is way too simple to actually work in a roguelike game. It feels in no way satisfying and just plain isn't very fun. Adding combos or multiple attack variations as well as more "weight" to attacks would be a good step to improve the fighting of the game. The hitboxes are also very confusing at times, which is especially frustrating when you consider the permadeath feature of the game.

I've also encountered various issues with the room generation. Some of the rooms are way too big, considering their actual contents. I was literally climbing for 2 minutes in a room that only had 4 enemies and 3 doors in it. There are also some issues with the placement of platforms. Sometimes they are very hard to reach and require some pinpoint precision, which is more frustrating than it is fun.

I'm also not a fan of the menu and UI design. There were also some general issues to be found, like I had to click every option in the main menu 4 times before it actually transitioned me to the next screen. Some parts of the monster descriptions inside the Filedex were too long for my screen and went offscreen to the right.

There is also an issue with talking NPCs. I think it would be a lot more intuitive if you would have to press E once to open a dialogue and to press it again to close that dialogue, instead of having to wait for it to close. The NPC file names are also on a layer above the textboxes, so they overlap with the text in the textboxes and make it hard to read. Furthermore, if you press E while standing too close to 2 or more NPCs, all of them will start talking at the same time.

It's many small issues like these that amount to a general feeling of incompletion or very low polish.

I hope I could help you with this first wave of feedback and I really hope that I didn't demotivated you with this. I still have a lot of faith in you guys and this game! You can do it!

Hello there. First of all, thank you for getting in touch with us. This is all great feedback and we really appreciate your time in writing this. We feel honored to receive your offer but at the same time we wouldn't want to make anyone work for free so if we ever consider hiring a QA tester we will think about you. For now we already have more tickets that we can handle and it might be an overkill.
We think we understand what parts of the game need to be improved but at this point we are having a lot of issues with Game Maker Studio and our source code itself. We are considering making the project open source and maybe try to move as much as possible out of the Game Maker Studio ecosystem so it can be easier to manage.
We will create tickets for the issues you reported and hope to get back on track fixing and releasing updates!
Thanks again!

Alright then! It's at least good to know that you're still actively working on the game. I was a little concerned, seeing that the last update was quite a while ago.

I will still log into here from time to time and report some bugs and requests, hope that's fine with you guys.

1. If you're standing on a block and there is a platform (one of those were you can press down to fall through) directly above you, then your character won't jump by pressing up. I'm guessing there is a initial check if the space directly above your character is free and that platform (even though you should be able to jump through it) prevents you from jumping entirely.

2. I think someone reported this before, but in certain library rooms, there is a specific spotabove the ceiling (and therefore outside of the room) where an enemy can spawn, basically preventing you from completely clearing the room. I've seen it about 5 times now and it's typically one of those blue robot enemies that come from .exe files.

3. Is there a specific reason that dead character files are still remaining visible in the character selection? As far as I understood it, there is nothing to do with them except delete them, so why not automatically delete them on death?

4. There really needs to be a quickstart option after death. Because if I die in the second room I enter, I don't want to go through the entire character creation again. I just want to restart with the exact same settings as before. There should be an option for that.

5. I'm guessing the feature that multiple same files in a room create a bigger/stronger version of it's enemy type isn't in the game yet? I've been to a room with literally nothing but 50 of those leaf enemies and I haven't seen a single one that looked or felt different from the others.

6. A loooot of enemy types just walk left and right. I guess those are not fully implemented yet. 

Here are some issues I have with enemies that actually seem fully implemented:

- The blue robots that come from .exe files have a very weird hitbox on their hammer attacks

- That paper characters that come from .pfd files and just run away while additionally also teleporting should have a downtime before they start running when you come too close. Otherwise it's just super annoying to catch them in very long floors. They also change their direction every frame when they are just at the edge of detecting the player, which just looks very weird.

- the stars with bow and arrow have a very weird shooting curve.

- the bush enemies that come from .iso files have a very low range for their attacks. Maybe reduce the amount of things they shoot, but make the range a little further.

- the giant flying skeleton heads can teleport inside you and kill you instantly (which makes them even more terrifying).

- the little zombie enemies seem to just be walking left and right in a small area but they teleport sometimes and it just leaves me confused

That's all the enemy issues I can recall for now, but more will probably follow.

7. It seems you actually don't die when landing on exactly 0 HP. Happened to me once and left me in confusion. I guess the death only starts if you fall below 0 HP.

8. I don't get the second chance skill. I bought it and when I was about to die, it said second chance and I didn't die. The same thing also happened the next time I would've died though. Am I just invincible now?

That's it for now. I also want to apologize for being so harsh on my original post. I played the game yesterday for another 3-4 hours and despite the flaws, it was actually fun. Your concept is incredibly strong and you really made it work! 

Here are some more things that I actually enjoyed a lot:

- The adventure skill tree has very well chosen skills. Nothing feels useless, everything is worth looking forward to.

- Blacksmiths are actually a great idea for getting rid of all the double and triple items you find!

- I like that the game shows you on the fly what the actual file names of enemies, doors and NPCs are

- The Filedex is a fantastic addition and I wanna see all the enemies now

- Choosing your own file type during the character addition is a cute idea

I hope this was helpful and I believe in you guys! Keep rocking it :)