Hey, very nice. Glad I'm getting a chance to play this after seeing your progress.
- Presentation feels very high quality right off the bat.
- I like the intro text, music, background image, etc...
- Controls feel good and solid, look and sound of the game is great
- Doors on bottom edges are a bit hard to see, maybe dont make them go transparent
- Bit of disconnect from the intro text and the beginning of the game. The intro said I knew of a back door to sneak into. But I sort of woke up on the floor with some items around me. I think the fiction can be maintained a bit more consistently.
- first little crawling enemies are fucking creepy. nice.
- A little more visual indication that I hit them would be nice
- Beat a magic skelly and got a fast magic sword. Feels fantastic
- Just got monkey-stomped by a bloodsoaked guard. Seems like this is a bit of a roguelike? Wasn't quite expecting that, not sure how I feel. Or did I just forget to save or something?
- I somehow dont feel very empowered when confronted with a large pack of guys. I feel like I'm going to be taking damage no matter what I do, especially with melee weapons. I can sort of kite and attack with the bow, but it turns into a very slow and somewhat tedious process. I tried to bottleneck the guys in a door to reduce damage, which helped a bit. But generally, it feels a bit too punishing too quickly. i truly believe that one of the strengths of Diablo is that it isn't actually very hard. The "failstate" is more often being slow and inefficient, rather than outright death.
- I see now that I can save. I am a huge proponent of autosaving. Not as a convenience, but as a central feature. There is no reason to offload the work of remembering to save onto the player, and punishing the player harshly for forgetting to save. That's just bad feels. I wish I knew that so that I didn't lose that magic sword on my first attempt.
- I think there is a bit of cruft around the targeting. Feels like my guy wanders away a little bit, or changes targets a lot when I don't intend him to. Perhaps if I clicked on a guy, it would stay targeted on that guy until I clicked again, or until he was dead. If I was holding the mouse down and killed a guy, automatically targeting the next-closest enemy and continuing to attack. Little things like that help a lot to make the player feel more in control. Especially when all the damage you're getting matters so much, all the little mistakes can feel a bit frustrating
- Difficulty swings seem high between attempts. My first attempt, there were only a few creepy crawly guys in the first level before I got to the second level. The other attempts have had what feels like far more enemies, and tougher ones.
Great job on this. It feels very high-quality and when I got into the groove, it felt really good. My post is sort of a running tally of things that "stuck out" to me, which doesn't really include any of the stuff that was executed perfectly (which was a lot). So I hope it doesn't come off as too negative. If the game had autosaves, a bit more smooth targeting stuff, and was a bit more forgiving in terms of taking damage, then I think it would really be able to shine. Keep up the great work brotha.
