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Craftsman42

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A member registered Nov 01, 2018 · View creator page →

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I've thought about battles in your game probably far more than I should have, but if you're still planning to continue working on this game after the jam, here's a suggestion for combat.  Instead of having a traditional "battle" like in most RPGs, you should have a morality variable in game.  You can encounter various NPCs in the game, either randomly or in the story, where combat takes the form of doing good/evil deeds to an entity.  If you do nice things, your morality goes up and you can ascend to higher levels of heaven.  If you do bad things, your morality goes down and you can descend to lower levels of heaven/hell.  I imagine this as something similar to the ACT option in battling in UNDERTALE, if you've played that game.  That could be a way to replace the story triggers and make "combat" more meaningful.  Another thing to add, this game does feel more like a walking simulator than a proper RPG.  Just putting that there with not much else to say on that.

This is a strange game.  It has some charming points, but not quite enough for me to comment fully on.  The story is an interesting variant of Dante's Inferno.  The exploration is decent, but the one thing that bugged me is the typos.  There were so many.  I can forgive it since you're not a native English speaker, but it impacted my enjoyment of the game a lot.  Would like to see some form of combat in the future, but I understand if that wasn't a concern.  I like where it's going, but I don't have enough here to make a full judgment on.

So I tinkered around with this game for a bit and here's what I think.

It was pretty well summed up in being a fun and quirky platformer.  The story doesn't take itself to seriously, which is nice.  This time, it's a princess who captures a princess.  My biggest issue is with the controls.  I don't know why, but I seemed to struggle with them quite a bit.  I failed to make simple jumps quite often.  I don't know if I'm just bad or if something is wrong, but that takes a few points off on my score.  Also, I had one time where when I was hurt, it interrupted my jump arc and I fell into a pit of spikes.  Not sure what I think of that.  Also, the keys were in a weird spot for all the controls.  This game definitely benefit with custom key mapping, which I learned on the main menu.  The arrow keys were obvious enough to navigate, but when the enter key and space key didn't select the chioce, I had to drag my finger accross my keyboard to find what key selected the highlighted option.  I eventually found out it was Z, which is not intuitive to me at all.  Also, I had some difficulties keeping the abilities straight while playing.  Jump and shield use the same finger, so I couldn't use both at the same time.  I would say I'm not sure where to take the story, but then I thought about Mario and how similar this game was to it, and retracted that statement.  Overall, it's a solid game with some potential, but there's other games that I feel do what this does better.  Maybe with some additional polish, this game can stand out, but I can't anything for sure.

Although I am disappointed in myself that I failed to impress you, I completely understand why you chose to rate it this way.  I have more plans in mind for where I wanted to take this game, but for the contest, I just wanted to put down the core mechanics of this game and make something that works.  In that end, I think I succeeded, but in hindsight, I see I confused "room to grow" with "not enough to expand on."  This isn't something I want to give up on, but it may well be necessary for me to continue this on my own for a while.  Thank you for your feedback, and sorry for the late reply.  I wanted to take a few steps back and post a comment objectively rather than have my reason blinded by a negative response.

So after tinkering around with the game for a bit, I have some opinions I can share.

The character creator is a nice touch.  As said in other comments, a default preset would have been nice.

Gameplay feels solid from what I played of it so far.  The combat wheel for basic attacks isn't something I've seen before, and it's a really nice unique addition to the game.  I could see room for expansion on other attacks.  Also a point mentioned in another comment, blocking feels weird.  Half the time I forget it (which is my problem), but it does seem like the timing is too strict for it.  I couldn't get it to work after the tutorial.  Maybe I'm just bad.  Who knows?

The exploration is open-ended, which is both a boon and a detriment.  It's nice to explore wherever and whenever you want, but I got lost easily after trying to go to the mountains for mining.  I eavesdropped on the conversation, but I don't know what I was supposed to do there.

And finally, my biggest thought, PERMADEATH.  WHY????  This is more of a blanket statement, but I hate the idea of permadeath.  It's the biggest reason why I'm not attracted to games like Fire Emblem and Yoshi's Story (I think it was that Yoshi game.  One of them, at least), but I digress.  Objectively, it seems to be used well.  If you die, one of the students becomes the new master.  Seems fair, and is a good reason to keep training whoever you can.  Subjectively, however, that's the reason why the game lost me.  After dying and losing my character I was invested in, I was immediately disenchanted.  I tried reloading after death, but the cutscene still played and I lost my character.  Sorry.  I'm a pansy, I know.  One thing I would suggest is to have an option where you can choose at the beginning to have a casual/hardcore mode, where the casual mode doesn't have permadeath.  Maybe I'm being too harsh by fixating on a single mechanic I don't like, but I thought I should give my full thoughts.  

Final verdict:  Overall, a well done product that would be interesting to see grow and improve, and to the right person, could be a very appealing game.  However, it's not for me because permadeath.  If in future updates there was a way to toggle it on or off, I would absolutely give it another fair chance, but right now, it's tarnished my opinion.

Thanks for the feedback!  I will definitely keep your suggestions in mind as I move forward.

I fixed the problem.  Apparently, I had the files hidden and not able to be downloaded, which I quickly changed.  Thanks for the heads up, and sorry for the inconvenience.  If you play it, I hope you enjoy.

Hello gamers.  This is the first time I've tried something like this, so I am open to any constructive feedback, positive and negative (especially negative.  There's no way this is flawless.)  Thank you for your interest and have fun.

 Hello gamers.  This is the first time I've tried something like this, so I am open to any constructive feedback, positive and negative (especially negative.  There's no way this is flawless.)  Thank you for your interest and have fun.