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I think it depends on what the future of RoboTemplar looks like.

Either way I think weapon modifiers are easy wins.

Thank you trying out the game, and for the very detailed feedback.

Tutorials are my greatest weakness right now, and I think the only solution will be to add button prompts to all menus. I've actually already made a map this week because you are not the first person to bring that up.

The journal is indeed totally broken.

You can't equip weapons from the inventory, only from the stats / equipment screen so that was't a bug either.

If you want to know how to continue: Katrina should've said to visit Mosca after sending the letter, and then she gives you another quest, and upon finishing that one the sun will set and Modest will be waiting for you behind the chapel.

Nevertheless, it's crucial for me to know if people are getting lost so I earnestly thank your for the feedback.

Thanks again for playing.

Thank you for trying the game again.

I appreciate the feedback but in all honesty I have no idea how you managed to play the game without starting a new save. I think most of the issues you experienced might have been the result of that because you'd only have 20 hp if your CON and STR were 1, and the starting value for Katrina is 6. 

I think the game would've crashed immediately had you reached the new content.

I apologize for the issues, I'd make it clearer next time that save data is not compatible between versions yet.

- Bomb spam is not as powerful as the last time I played, but some screens feel impossible without abusing bombs anyway. Mostly because enemies approach the player from awkward angles from which they can't be hit without repositioning. 

- I think that a lot of enemies are too tanky to reward quick reflexes because they can reliably retaliate against the player when hit.

- I'm unsure of the direction that the game is going towards at this stage, but my recommendation would be main weapon modifiers to mix things up. Such as a weaker automatic gun, a shotgun with multiple projectiles and a small spread, a slower gun with a larger explosion, another slower gun that pierces through enemies like a railgun, and maybe even a weak gun that tracks enemies. In short: Steal all the weapons from Contra and Metal Slug.

- Keep up the good work.

- If I'm not mistaken, "Mel" means honey so she is "Honey the Caramel Dog". That's the sweetest name ever. The bubbly footstep sound effects are fittingly silly.

- The model and animations are excellent, except for maybe the running which looks appropiately stiffer than walking but it doesn't limit your mobility any.

- The sequence where you gotta climb on disappearing platforms next to a wall seems a little inconsistent. I had to get multiple times to the top before I could jump on the elevated platform because it would go up and down out of sync with the platforms on the wall.

- I only got 5/6 bones because I couldn't figure out how to get to the top of the castle in the middle of the stage. However, the small bones do a decent job at leading the player otherwise. Nevertheless, I found the underground section earlier than expected because the camera clipped into the stage geometry, and I got to see everything.

- Also, I tried buttstomping the rat enemies, but they didn't get squashed. My disappointment is unmeasurable.

- I only found one noteworthy issue: If you walk towards the wall from this platform Mel will elevate in the air without doing the climb animation. I'm only pressing forward here. 

- Overall, I think that the game looks pretty good.

- Keep up the good work.

- The game doesn't launch in fullscreen by default on Linux, and I can't find the settings to change this. 

- I recommend naming "The Tower" and "The King". It'd give the game more personality.

- Events are a cool inclusion but you should probably display the odds to succeed before picking a choice, or at least have a more concrete description for the difficulty than "standard". As an example, in the world of dicerolls, you'd say that a challenge with 50/50 odds is difficulty 4+ with 1 standard die.

- Is it normal to teleport around randomly? I figure it's a floor gimmick because I also encountered elite gates, floor spikes and invisible paths, but there should be some sort of warning for that one in particular.

- Furthermore, awarding experience for exploration is a novel idea, but what do you get from combat? I saw that the end screen says that I got varying amounts of glory.  I'm assuming that's a resource meant for meta progression later: Permanent upgrades, unlocks and the like.

- Moreover, awarding exp for every space on the board runs the risk of making exploration feel like mowing the grass or turn based Pacman. Just to give an example, in Darkest Dungeon you want to explore every room because there's treasure in them. It's functionally the same as a value going up, granted that the player has inventory space, but the main difference is that it's better contextualized.

- Likewise, the level layout is unknown until it's explored, so uncovering the board is useful even in the absence of extrinsic motivators. Revealing the board from the start is good if the player gets to plan their run through the stage like in FTL or Slay the Spire, but here you want to explore everything so I can't help but feel like there's something missing. 

- As for the difficulty, I couldn't beat the demo this time. I think the biggest issue are the wolves; I either one shot in one turn or they do the same to me with no in-between. The combat in general is very snowball-ish since you can gain extra turns off your extra turns. This also has the side effect of making the cleric worthless.

- I think that leveling up should be juiced up more. It's an integral part of the RPG experience and people love seeing numbers increase, even if they don't get to pick their attributes. You are leaving cheap dopamine on the table, basically.

- What's the deal with chests? I opened several of them but I only managed to get something in my inventory once. I couldn't tell if this was an error.

- Cool loading screen by the way.

- Overall, the game seems to be progressing well, and the combat has more going on even if it's a bit unbalanced at the moment. 

- Keep up the good work.

Thank you for trying out the game. I find your feedback very illuminating.

It's good to know that aiming doesn't work as intended on controllers because holding a direction should work.

Your guess about how skills work is 100% correct. I'll be sure to add descriptions for them later. If you don't mind telling me, did you notice that skills level up with use? Because I'm worried that the feedback is not noticeable enough.

Finally, you can run by holding x, and the reason your accuracy is so low is because you are hitting enemies from the front where they can see your attack coming.

Thanks for playing.

Thanks for trying the game. I'll probably make a map at some point, and some sort of tutorial.

If you are interested in continuing the story, I think that you might have gone to the wrong baths. You want to go to the female ones across the stream from the male baths.

Either way it's good feedback.  

Nice game.

I appreciate that you don't die in one hit but once a platformer requires me to conserve momentum from going down slopes I think it has become too difficult for me. I could never beat Dust Force for this reason.

Either way, the game is nice and the guns are a nice touch. Good sound design. 

Keep up the good work.

An interesting prototype.

It's still very early, but I think the most pressing issue at the moment is the lack of navigation tools. Without them it's very difficult to tell where you are, where you are going, and how fast.

This would also help sell the concept more since you can walk around in the cockpit and all. 

Also, consider only playing music during combat because any song, no matter how good, will become grating given enough time. 

Keep up the good work.

Cool demo, it looks very stylish.

The pre-mission interface is not particularly ornate but I figured out how to buy mechs, weapons and deploy them so I believe it's functional enough. 

As for the AI, the enemies try to kill me and my allies go in the right direction, but the constant mech jumping looks a bit silly.

I'm not sure what the best tactics are as all I did was walk towards the enemy and fire until the placeholder victory screen popped up. I'm not sure what would make for more interesting battles, but more terrain variation would probably help. 

Keep up the good work.

Cool prototype, tactical games are a pain to make. 

That being said, I don't see the tactical element at this stage. I guess the closest would be a Syndicate-like.

Also, while 6 units from the get go is cool, I feel like it's too many. The sweet spot for squad based tactics in my experience is usually 4 or 5.

However, I do like that you can set a unit to fire on an enemy outside their range and they'll move towards it weapons up, and that you can toggle it. That's a cool detail.

Keep up the good work. 

An interesting exercise. I'll be waiting for the inevitable AGDG Linux distro.

Keep up the good work.

The game hasn't changed much since the last time, as informed by the first comment, but I do have a couple of notes.

I think that doing the "a door opened somewhere" is fine when there's a single closed door in the stage but if the maps are going to get more complex this may become a problem in the future. Cables going from the button to the door could be a nice, organic solution and contribute to the room decor as an added bonus.

I experienced no performance issues during the second stage, and I'm playing in a toaster.

I also found the floating headlight someone else already reported. The enemy is dead but it's still doing the animations. However, it can't move.

I'm afraid I couldn't tell if it's dealing damage or not because I had no health left.

Keep up the good work.

Thank you for giving the demo a shot, and for the video too. 

That is a peculiar graphical issue...

I'm aware that the pathfinding has issues but you should've seen it before. It's a work in process.

I was not aware of Phantom Brave, I was mostly inspired by a game called Mordheim: City of the Damned, but I think I pretty much have to study that game now too. 

Thank you again for playing.

Thank you for the feedback. I appreciate the extra attempt despite the difficulties.

I think you ran up into issues because of an oversight of mine regarding the save system. Nevertheless, I figure I need to research ways to nudge players in the intended direction too.

Thanks for trying the demo.

I'm not married to the battle theme myself, but I haven't gotten around to changing it.

Knowing that players are having difficulties with the first battle is valuable feedback. I believe the player should suffer whenever there's combat but frustrating people too much risks alienating them. It's a difficult balance.

Anyway, there is a way to beat it if you are curious for next time, but it involves exploring the level and talking to all the NPCs scattered around before picking up the stick. 

Thanks for trying the game.

A lot of the issues you mentioned seem to be recurring such as the crash when loading the fortress map. At the moment I believe it might be an export issue.

I recommended polearms because I think that the fight against the soldiers is difficult if you don't have any armor pierce, but balance is an ongoing affair. 

I'm very happy to see Shining Force mentioned because I love that game. 

Thank you for the feedback.

Thanks for playing, and for your feedback.

The crashing issues will be fixed in due time.

The UI breaking is a good find, there must be a small frame window I missed.

Thanks for playing.

I'm aware of the crashing issue and the controls will improve in the future.

The barkeeper has a model and a portrait, but no in-game dialog yet. A lot of things are half-implemented, but I am glad that people are looking around the fortress, I take that as a good sign.

The game is already pretty fun.

In terms of difficulty, the combat feels very hectic but I managed to beat the entire demo without losing a single life. I essentially kept almost dying over and over.

Bomb spam is very strong, like in a game by Psikyo.

By comparison, strafing doesn't feel particularly useful.

I think the game could be really good if it had more enemy types and more interesting upgrades besides flat stat increases. The familiar that eats bullets is a good example of an interesting upgrade.

Keep up the good work.

Thanks for trying the demo. A 1+ hour long video is far more than I expected.

I'm afraid the game has some serious crashing issues right now so I'm sorry you had to deal with that. To make matters worse I believe the culprit is the main hub stage.

I also believe that the game needs more tutorializing, I'm just not sure how to do it right now.

The reason why you were missing so much is because enemies have a much higher chance to evade attacks if they are directly facing you, unless it's magic which never misses.

I also can't let the player place caltrops directly under a character's feet.

As for the jail, it's the building near the center of the fortress if you really want to see what's inside. It's just some more writing for now.

I'm trying to be ambitious and make a lot more content in the future

Thanks again for playing.

The animations look fantastic, and the gameplay is intuitive enough. My only concern is that it can feel a little floaty at times. 

I'm not sure what else to say because a game like this requires other people to play against to truly apreciate, I don't think playing the AI is enough if every character is essentially the same.

However, I think you could make a compelling gauntlet mode if you added some upgrades, new stages and forced the player to unlock skills along the way, as dumb as it sounds.

Keep up the good work.

Good for melee characters because they can run very fast.

The game looks good, but now the characters probably need higher detail now to match the background, textures and such. That's the downside of a graphical glow up.

I think it would be cool and add some flavor to the setting if you started with no equipment and received a set of gear and items corresponding to your starting class upon being prompted to pick one.  

Goblins are annoying. It's cool if you want small enemies that run away from combat, but be warned that this will implicitly favor ranged builds. All ARPGs have either a melee or a ranged bias.

Either way, I think I prefer the weapons that have fast, snappy animations. This is only my opinion but I think slow attack speed never feels good.

I think enemy health scales faster than the player's damage. By the time I started seeing warlocks it felt like me and my party were mercilessly kicking old men. Granted, this is also how you kill ranged enemies as a melee class in Diablo 1 but you usually deal more damage too.

That might have been my queue to grind, but I hate grinding, no matter how thick the enemies get. 

However, the biggest issue I found was that death is very janky. If a party member dies you can dismiss and then recruit them to revive them on the spot with half health.

Most importantly, I died 3 times during the course of the demo and the behavior was different in every ocassion.

The first time I was granted control of one of my party members but I couldn't find where to revive. I talked to the healer but she didn't help me. However, restarting the game brought my entire party back.

The second time I was prompted to respawn in town, and I did. This is probably the intended behavior.

The third time I died immediately upon respawning in town, and had to restart the game again. 

On a different note, I'm happy to report that I didn't break the UI this time around. 

Keep up the good work.

I don't have a lot of notes because the game seems to be progressing well. 

The gamepad controls work, the shop works, and nothing broke as far as I could tell. 

I'd like a visuals settings menu although the default Alt + Return works for the window/fullscreen toggle. Moreover, suggesting a settings menu feels like recommending a save menu or replacing the placeholder graphics. 

Good work all around. I hope one of the future male characters has robot parts because robot parts are cool.

I went on parade, but perish I did not.

I beat the demo stage without much difficulty. The combat system is intuitive and I think most people would figure out that skeletons are weak to blunt damage and slimes are weak to elemental.

Nevertheless, I'd like to see more inventive enemies since the playable characters are so good. You could probably recycle some of the art and have the party encounter enemy rogues or dark knights, as an example, or maybe skeleton versions of the party. I don't know.

On that note, the animations look great, as always. 

Moving on, it's been a while, but the sprites look a little more pixelated than I remember? I believe I prefer the sharper look.

The UI is also more utilitarian, which is probably a good change, but the art style is a big asset and I think it's important not to waste it.

The dungeon interface is a good idea but it might need a degree of contextualization because white blocks floating in the void might be too abstract. 

As for the music, it's very fitting.

Overall, the game seems to be coming up great. Keep it up. 

Cool boot up sequence, all mech media needs a cool boot-up sequence.

There's some odd behavior with the mouse pointer when you change the screen resolution, as in, the point doesn't remain on the tip. Might be a UI scaling issue.

Also, the mouse pointer defaults to center of the screen when opening the settings menu.

The "it's not frozen, I swear" warning was only on screen for a few seconds at most so whatever was worrying you wasn't an issue.

There's a stutter whenever you use a weapon you haven't used before, but only the first time you play the game. It's not a big deal, probably just shader cache.

The menu after a game over doesn't work, can't retry, go back to the main menu or quit. However, the same options work fine in the regular settings menu. The menu after finishing a stage has similar issues.

I like the new cockpit with the 3D wireframe model in there, but some kind of rear view camera would be more useful. Also, maybe a little radar animation and higher range because enemies kept sneaking up on me. Maybe they are too quiet.

I couldn't get any weapons besides the starting ones to work in the arcade mode but they work fine in the stages. I could select them but they wouldn't fire. It would be nice to have a loadout screen regardless.

I got better at the arcade mode over time but my high score was only 18.

Overall, I'm sad to say that the game might need a refactor of some sort because the menu, weapons and inventory work differently depending on the stage when these should be modules that behave identically everywhere. 

Either way, keep up the good work.

What's new since last time: Too many things, it's been 6 months and one day.

There are 3 side quests to complete: they are started by recruiting Katrina, talking to Mosca and completing Mosca's quest respectively. 

There are also 3 main quests that can be started, but only one can be finished.

The demo ends when exiting the jail.

If you get lost, that's good feedback too.

I recommend using polearms.

I'm getting the same warning as Branno, and I'm spooked.

That intro reinforces the negative stereotypes I hold about people who play hard platformers after 2018 so it's not for me, but the target audience might like it.

The spritework is good, and the gameplay is functional although it's much better with a controller, especially because you have to hold down buttons. You should probably have a "real bunny androids use a gamepad" disclaimer.

Keep up the good work.

I think the game is pretty self-explanatory from the perspective of someone who doesn't usually play roguelikes.

My only note is that the resource nodes could stand out more.

Keep up the good work.

Thanks for trying the game and providing feedback.

I think those suggestions are reasonable, especially the skill description because otherwise you can only read them outside of combat.

First time playing the game. 

The golfing is actually kind of fun. I sorta forgot I was playing a horror game and that I was aiming the business end of a shotgun towards my face. That might be a bad thing depending on what you are going for, but the golf works.

The only issue I encountered was that the ball clipped through the ground close to the hole in the first round of level one and I got softlocked. However, I didn't have the same problem after restarting and it was only the first hole so it wasn't a big loss.

Someone else already commented this but saving should also save level progress. It doesn't change the gameplay any since it's basically the same as saving the game at the start of the next level.

However, I admit I'm biased because I have mixed feelings on limited saves as a whole. I've always found them annoying more than anything, and anger is an excellent antidote to fear.

Keep up the good work.

I think I had the older version because I downloaded the game again and the sound works fine.

Good game. I like the big selection of sprites and color palettes.

I'm not sure what to comment when it comes to the gameplay because everything seems good to me.

I've found one major issue with the audio. It sounds like some sort of static or perhaps a short portion of an in-game track that keeps looping non-stop and gets worse over time until you go back to the main menu. Dropping the sfx and/or music level doesn't stop the cacophony either. It doesn't sound intended.

I recorded one level to show the issue.

https://files.catbox.moe/o2ucgf.mp4

The game is an effective time waster.

I like the population mechanic but it feels too punishing because you can never get it back and every additional guy costs more than the last.

The only technical issue I encountered is that the tooltips are a bit fickle and would sometimes refuse to pop up. They can also pop up outside the FOV.

Keep up the good work.

First time trying the game.

The hat is a fun idea. Makes the game less punishing since you can take 2 hits and the hat can be picked up again after dropping it.

The portrait does the "you have huge guts" meme pose. Classy.

The game feels quite polished already. I like how the circle around the crosshair represents how many bullets you've got left.

The sound design is good but I think that sometimes the bat will do a metallic sound when breaking something that's apparently not made out of metal and I'm not sure why. 

Parrying projectiles with the bat is pretty cool but melee combat feels very chaotic.

On that note, the later levels get very messy. I take it that's the point but I fear what will happen later on.

Keep up the good work.

I started the game, shot the enemies and lighted the NPCs on fire. Good.

Blond video game women with pigtails remind me of VtM:B so that's good.

How come there are costumes already? That is very thinking emoji.

Keep up the good work.