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(+1)

Played through the game again and I'm glad to see it improving.

Blob shadows really made the game look better and I'm glad you implemented them.

Wounds on enemies is a good health bar substitute. As for skeletal enemies, you could give them more armor pieces and make them fall off as they take damage. Skeletal mages could get their robes more torn and flying skulls could get more cracked. 

Didn't finish the entire playthrough this time, since I got rekt in the skeleton pit, where some of the balance problems became apparent.

Early in the run, I got really lucky and found life leech bow and a ring. First problem is how overpowered ranged weapons are. Most enemies are slower, or have same speed as the player so taking care of them is really easy. Dodging projectiles is also not that difficult, except for the arrows since the game is pretty dark and they are hard to see. Plus some enemies and even bosses got stunlocked by my arrows and couldn't really do anything to me. Combine that with health leaching and I was pretty much unstopable. Then came the skeleton pit and I found a unique sword in the chest that had also life leech. I picked up some magic shield and tried killing something as a warrior again and I got killed really quickly. 

My stats might have been a problem, but a bow has very obvious advantage over melee right now. Most straight forward fix would be introducing limited arrows, but that would be quite hard to balance drop wise. Or you can try giving player a "magic" quiver that has about 10 arrows and they regenerate slowly.

The best option though is going to be sticking with combat arts. I'm sure as you develop them and add more of them, melee will become stronger and more comparable to ranged weapons.

As for combat arts, here is a little tip. If you want to stick with the WERTYU keys, please make sure the game recognizes the active keyboard layout (Or allow us to rebind those keys). Most keyboards outside of english speaking countries have Y bellow the A key instead of Z, which can mess things up.

One thing that slightly bothers me (many games actualy do this for some reason) is the "press ENTER to start". Nothing againts the screen itself. It is much better than just spawning and getting attacked while I'm doing something else. It's the "enter" key that bothers me. The game is played with mouse and left side of the keyboard. Enter is quite far from there. Spacebar or simply mouse click would be much better keys for that since I don't really have to move my hand from the optimal keyboard position or from the mouse. Just a minor gripe.

Lastly, sound. I think I talked about this the last time, but adding sound effects for opening and closing inventory screen, spell book or minimap might improve the general feeling the game has. Same goes for sound effects of droping items. I missed several item drops since I had the outlines disabled and adding some kind of sound effect that plays when item drops would be of great help.

As for bugs, I found only one. On second level, the automap didn't draw some parts correctly. 

I think that's all. I enjoyed plaing this game again and I think it is going the right way. Keep it up!

(+1)

Whoa, you work fast!

Thanks for another detailed review. I am very glad that you were willing to play through it again, and took the time to write a review. That alone tells me that the game is interesting enough to warrant playing it more than once.

To address your feedback, firstly I agree with everything you've mentioned. 

The balance is all over the place, mostly since the math I use to determine the damage values the player will take from an attack is still being worked on. The goal is to have one calculation that works for all enemies, and incorporates things like their damage, the player's armor, and the enemies' armor piercing values. Right now I think the formula makes the early game easy, but the late game too difficult to enjoy. It's also hard to figure out since I don't have all the pieces of the puzzle, like the rest of Combat Arts, ready. I'm hoping the problem will resolve itself without me having to change any values by just adding more skills.

Pressing Enter is annoying - it really should be asking for ANY key instead of enter and it's something I didn't really think about after the first implementation. It will be going on my to-do list and implemented by the next patch. I also need to get to work on rebindable keys to avoid issues with the WERTYU setup. 

Sounds for UI and enemies is something I didn't get to work on, but I remember all your insight from the last update. It will surely be addressed for the next update. I never even thought about having sounds on opening UI panels. It's so obvious in hindsight that it's been missing, but it's just one of those things that require a different perspective to notice.


Thanks again for the detailed feedback and playthrough. I am very grateful for your help and support. It has been a long and fun journey for both of our games, and I'm glad we're both improving our games and our skills.