Sorry Marmoreal, I recorded a long video, but for various reasons, including that I am a noob at video recording and at OBS Studio, I recorded it at very low quality (pro-tip: always record videos in high quality, and then use some other programs to create a compressed version). The produced video has painful artifacts in some segments, but if you skip those, you might still find some value from the video. But if you decide not to bother, I have listed some of the things that I remember, as well as general commentary. If my internet connection was better, I would have streamed it on Twitch. At least the video is less than 3 GB despite being more than 5 hours long.
https://mega.nz/file/c2czAahD#_p_rX0Y96GIlcXW9prSk4LpXBl1wUpdZmVHobKE_xoM
- I played through maybe everything, completed all the story missions, and played all the optional missions (I might have missed one non-story forest mission type). The game is both very large in scope and mostly very polished and fun and good. I have difficulty believing that this was done by just one person, even considering how many years it has been under development. I mostly liked the humor, even though it is not quite my preference. The army hero trio mission was a bit dark at the end, even mentioning "genocide" (I would have left out that word myself), but from what I understood, the character was spared at the end. The army hero trio mission is clearly still a work in progress, with some clear bugs, like enemies still spawning after retrying a boss fight, and dialog being immediately shown after defeating a boss, possibly causing dialog to be skipped passed by accident due to frantically clicking a few extra times in the frames after the boss has died.
- Will you continue developing the story content, which I assume might take a lot of time and work? Or will you end it on a cliffhanger, and release the game, and add further story updates in updates or (free/paid) expansions? Or something else?
- I never realized that you could use healing, I only saw it after playing the game, in the input settings.
- When the archer-mage is in invulnerability-mode, if she dashes, she becomes vulnerable even while the mode is still going on, which was annoying in one boss fight.
- The boss fights were mostly great, and what I would expect from a team of professional game developers, not a solo amateur. Really nice!
- Nitpick: I dislike the low number of males in the army, men make better meat shields and cannon fodder, but that is a thematic preference.
- Genuine GMI energy, my impression in the thread was that this was some small game in development hell with a quirky theme and a small amount of content and animation, but you have a lot of content and cutscenes and animation. I would have worried about the scope, but you have already completed a huge amount. Really nice.
- I mostly liked the story and the humor in the game, and was caught a bit off guard with the darker themes. The mixture of high levels of silliness and darker themes may be common to some kinds of story telling, though.
- Would it be possible for collectible items to gravitate towards the hero if the hero is within a certain radius? The crates in some maps also took more hits to destroy than I would have expected.
- Nitpick: When in the level-up screen, is there any way to see how many ability points you have left?
- Nitpick: When selecting a chest after completing a non-story mission, could the highlighted chest stand out more from the other chests? I did not realize that I had selected a chest the first few times I saw that screen, and kept clicking the chest without realizing that it was selected.