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Hey Hodslate,

So I put some more time into Bane of Oakenshade. I actually figured out quite a bit (found the shrine, got a bunch of levels and the next spell). I had wanted to put about two hours into it, but about an hour and 25 minutes in the game crashed on me and I lost a LOT of progress. Overall, though, I like this a lot and, if you're interested, I'd love to be able to play more while talking with you live some day.

When the VOD with this gameplay releases (which, I'll admit, I did go through our history in FQ events because I do want to be clear about this for folks new to my stream so they understand why this game is such a big deal to me personally), you can check it out on my Youtube. I do hope you'll give it a check and see where the crash happened. I also want you to know, I changed my rating for this game and made it higher than I had originally done.

While I know you said you won't submit games for a while, I do hope if you get some time you'll be able to improve this title even more. I do legitimately like it and want to play through to the end of the story (I know From Software games tend to never have "happy" endings, though I am hoping you've put one in this).

I'm just gonna comment on the card stack part for now, as I think the VOD will do a better job covering everything else.

So first, put 200 items in your inventory using the game editor tool. Now get into a fight. On the bottom half of the screen where it shows your cards, the stack of cards on the left side (which are face down) will have now expanded to cover several of the cards you've drawn.

I should have the VOD up in a day or two. I just need to edit a previous stream VOD (which wasn't for FQ5) before I can get yesterday's up.

I always want to ensure I'm giving some sort of valuable feedback.

I return for another Infinidagger adventure!

So before I dive into new thoughts, I just want to note I found a bug. I'm not sure how much of what was going on needs to match, so I'll simply state that I killed the last element, a Rock Elemental, with the rock that the elemental gave me. I had performed no other attacks that turn, and it resulted in nothing responding. XD

I also want to note that most of this was from the same version of the game I played before. Part way through writing, I did realize I forgot to update and opted to play more with said version.

With this said, I can now get into some of my new observations.

So I know part of your intent is that you want players to discover things and be surprised by what happens. This was something you brought up when I noted just being thrown in and being confused as to what to do (which I still think, for the first screen, you should indicate what the player should do). While this is a good idea starting off, when I have multiple visits to different things, have no idea what they do and ultimately just feel like they're having a more negative effect, I'm just going to ignore them. Some examples...

- The Training Dummy. As far as I can observe, I just lose HP here. What is training supposed to do?
- The Pond, the Campfire, and other screens where you're asked to discard a card. Save for one lucky time where I got the cat and somehow got a good reward, these things always result in me losing cards and getting those cards you can't use. What I would suggest is an internal check where, once the player has encountered it, say, three times, it offers knowledge of what to do.

The next thing I wanted to bring up was the amount of monster blood early on. The amount of blood obtained from enemies even a few boards over is way higher despite them often being easier than they were in the start due to just having more cards and options for fighting. I'd like to suggest that in the first few boards, monster blood drops higher.

(Additional off tangent note. At this point, I began playing with the latest version of the game and had another bug such as above, again involving a rock elemental. This time, however, it froze following the enemy's turn).

The last thing I wanted to touch on was something I felt just... didn't make sense. So some enemies are able to apply wound and bleed effects which remain in your deck afterwards. I don't recall if they remove after a fight (and if not, they should). However, I also feel like if you block the damage of the attack entirely, those effects shouldn't be applied. I mean, if an enemy hits you four times but you block it all, how would it make sense that you now have four deep wounds? You blocked them. They didn't actually touch you. :P

Well then, look who's back! Thought you'd escaped me the first time, huh? Well, I had time to spare and thus I did a longer playthrough! This time, I actually beat the game! This makes it the perfect time to come back here.

Since people mentioned UI stuff, I want to instead focus on the gameplay and presentation. I'm going to focus on the first one, since I think it matters more.

Before I get into it, I do want to note that the issue I brought up before about the card stack isn't fixed. Put some 200 items in your inventory and you should see what I mean. :P

To begin, how big of an area would you imagine this place is? Like, how far do you think the player is traveling? The reason why I ask is because the map itself isn't all that big. Like, if I look at the size of drawings and roads and try to extrapolate it into an actual walking area, I'd wager it'd only take a day to go the long way to the boat.

One thing I had been feeling when I played it is that the world should be "bigger" with time passing more slowly when you're not performing actions. This, in turn, would spread enemies and obstacles out. It'd also allow for a lot more options in terms of new paths. This brings me to the next issue: replayability. Right now, once I've beaten the game there's nothing for me to play again. It's not like the map changes or locations of hordes and enemies change. I think this is where things need to be worked on next, to make it fun to keep changing.

Next, there should be more info to explain to the player what the crafted items are for. I don't want to waste items on a campfire if I don't know how it'll benefit me. In a similar vein, a bit of explanation of how combat works (specifically what the numbers mean) would also be good.

One thing that I found infuriating while playing was the high chance for luring away to fail. I had a time where I attempted to lure four times and every one failed. Given the amount of energy and time this takes, it can be infuriating for it to fail. I'd say the failure rate should be lower, or that the cost to energy and time should be less so it's not putting the player on the backfoot so easily.

I loved the option for points where you can easily recover water. Thanks to these, I don't feel like the speed in which water drains is a problem. However, I do feel the speed for food is. Just thinking in general about how long a person can survive without food makes me feel this should be changed. Since the game is supposed to take 9 days, here's what I would recommend: making the food meter drop a little slower. When the meter empties, it begins to drain energy faster. This would feel more realistic to what the body is capable of. This would, in turn, allow the player to strategize when they eat. Similarly, all food should provide some energy no matter what.

And just for context to the above, I have personally gone 3 days without drinking anything, but I've gone a week without eating anything. When I had nothing to drink, it had a toll on my body. However, the most that happened when I wasn't eating was I felt more tired. This is why I suggest things the way I am.

I also think maintaining health should be a bigger deal. It wasn't until I began making huge use of sleep and rest that I noticed that doing either recovers HP. However, the amount gained felt way too big to me. I'd say make those gains much smaller, but in exchange make enemies a bit weaker. This would then allow for more strategy.

Finally, there should be a combat option if you run out of items. In fact, I would argue that the player should always have a non-card option for combat though with a drawback.

Okay! Now that I've actually gotten to play through the game a little bit, I can give more proper feedback.

I'm going to start with noting that I assume this game is intended for a controller. I always tell people who design games like this that they should always include keyboard settings in the event the player doesn't have a controller. You do seem to have some keybinds, but they're a little awkward in that it's WASD movement but ALSO uses keys for jumping, attacking and healing that would be more left handed than right. This makes it feel like you're only using the left hand to play. For keyboard controls, I'd say swap to using the arrow keys and then using Z, X and C for jumping, attack, healing, etc.

Movement wise, I did feel things moved at a nice pace. I was satisfied with my speed, both in moving and attacking. Jumping and having platforms I couldn't reach until I got the double jump in the first screen felt a little awkward. I would suggest trying to reduce that a bit. Let the player get a feel for controls BEFORE they observe things they can't jump on.

Hit detection for enemies was a bit janky. When I'd attack, rather than be where I was making physical contact, it was so long as I was in their huge box. I noticed rather large spaces. If the plan is to make the attack range bigger than the punch, I'd recommend giving a weapon to the player that could be used to represent this distance. That way, the player will feel like they're actually hitting.

I also encountered a bug where I fell out of the game. Just lettin' ya know. XD

Finally, it was a bit of an issue to get past that first screen when you start when you're on mouse and keyboard, because the mouse cursor vanishes and there's no way to tell what choice you're choosing. Better support of keyboard would help here, since then you'd be ensuring everything has to work on both controller and keyboard.

I'd also say for now, since your game is currently in a more prototype/alpha stage, to just remove that intro for now. Let players get into the game quicker for the purposes of feedback.

Looks fantastic! :D

Well then, allow me to help with the colour thing! Along with red, orange and yellow (standard fire-related colours), you could do white (as fire gets hotter, it burns lighter until it's white), blue (when you light a gas burner, the flame starts blue), and green (This one is less a normal thing and more a "I have my own logic" thing. See, I've seen my father put together scuppers for rooftops intended to help get water down a drain pipe. These are usually made of metal and need to be soldered together. Part of the process is brushing a soldering paste (or muriatic acid mixed with bits of galvanized steel to kill the acid's strength) where you'll be soldering the solder. The idea is this stuff helps the solder grab hold of the metal. Anyway, after you solder a part, you gotta clean the iron off and then heat it up again. When you put a flame to it in this state, the gas will burn off any remaining debris from the paste with the flame turning green from the burn-offs. But legit, green flames are just a thing).

You now have six colours. Ensure that red, yellow and orange are never beside one of each other and it'll work great!

Heyo! Just downloaded and gave it a boot up and... well, I got this.

Hello! Welcome to Feedback Quest 5! It's nice to meet you! My name's Hythrain. I'm part of the FQ team and a hobbystreamer. I'm writing this review live after having played your game.

The concept for this is quite interesting to me, though there are certainly aspects that felt awkward to do.

I'm going to begin by echoing the idea that the controls for shooting should be mouse based while using WASD for movement. I'm also going to go further and say that the mouse cursor should be used for aiming the first shot, because a lot of times a straight shot isn't good for a starting shot. This is especially true when ships begin moving on curves.

Beyond this, I want to talk about the gameplay itself. The idea of a shot you have to send back and forth is interesting, but I find that the complexity to do this efficiently is hindered by... well, too much going on. You have ships that shoot, ships that can deflect the shot, and ships that explode in eight directions when destroyed. All of these things can make it more difficult to get the right shots lined up. Now I'm not saying difficulty is a bad thing, but I would imagine if you tried to scale the difficulty up higher than it is now you'd end up with something that is too challenging. I'd recommend slowing down the speed of waves and giving players an easier time to kill enemies. For example, I would say that the ships that explode on death shouldn't be combined with ships that are shooting at the player. This can get a bit overwhelming, especially at higher difficulties. Instead, I'd say you should make a variety of enemy types beyond what you have and see which combinations offer the right balance (the shield enemies and exploding enemies work well together, for example). Finally, I'd say the laser should just be able spamming it in a set duration instead of a limited number of shots, since there are times where the arrangement of enemies just won't be nice and the player can't always predict when those good times will come.

One idea that I just had that I want to suggest: once the player fires the shot, they have to hit a specific input for it to actually return. That way, if the player wants to shoot a certain way and not have to move, the shot will just travel through them. This could help alleviate some difficulty from above, since now they don't need to always be moving.

I do love the concept, though, and I'd love to see it improved.

Hello! Welcome to Feedback Quest 5! It's nice to meet you! My name's Hythrain. I'm part of the FQ team and a hobbystreamer. I'm writing this review live after having played your game.

Canadian! Canadian! Canadian! I'm so glad to not only see someone who I know is a Canadian, but has made their game about places in Canada! As someone from the Toronto area who has also been to Gare Centrale in Montreal (I've been to Otakuthon a couple times), this was just so cool to see! I will 100% be playing more of this!

My biggest criticisms are a lack of sprites seen throughout the prologue and... well, a lot of errors in the writing. I suspect English isn't your first language? I'd suggest having a few sprites in the prologue to liven things up, even if it's not a whole lot. As for the writing errors, I'd like to offer my own assistance in this endeavor. As Mayshing/Altabestudio (one of the hosts for the FQ main events) can verify, I have some experience with story writing. I'd love to help a fellow Canadian out!

I only played through the prologue at this time, since I'm trying to cover all games and can't spend too much time on each one yet. However, this is 100% on my list for a more thorough play-through.

Hello! Welcome to Feedback Quest 5! It's nice to meet you! My name's Hythrain. I'm part of the FQ team and a hobbystreamer. I'm writing this review live after having played your game.

I want to start quickly with my love for this type of game. I'm a big fan of Metroid and Castlevania, so it should go without saying that when I saw this mention being a Metvania that I was excited. The controls were pretty good and I really made my way around.

The three biggest issues I had were that there were too many instant death traps, having a hard time getting the spear into small gaps when doing a small jump, and the use of the middle click attack. I'm not a big fan of a game that makes use of it, since mine in particular isn't easy to click (I don't use a gaming mouse). I noticed Left Shift worked for it as well, yet this was awkward to use while moving. I'm not 100% certain what the best solution would be, but I don't think it's this. I also think there should be a delay from when you throw the spear to when you can call it back. It's a little too easy to be spamming it and you keep summoning back to you and getting no where.

Beyond this, I like the world, I think the Naruto headbands are cute and I'd like more plz.

Hello! Welcome to Feedback Quest 5! It's nice to meet you! My name's Hythrain. I'm part of the FQ team and a hobbystreamer. I'm writing this review live after having played your game.

Except, unfortunately, that's not the case. When I booted up the game to play on stream, it became impossible to do so (at least in a way where viewers would be able to get a sense of anything). It was all so choppy. This is likely due to a lack of optimization done in regards to the graphics, which I noticed you had updated for this current version. I would recommend adding in controls for changing visual quality as well as to work to optimize what what you have now so that I CAN play it. XD

That's all for now. Will try to come back later to play it again.

Hello! Welcome to Feedback Quest 5! It's nice to meet you! My name's Hythrain. I'm part of the FQ team and a hobbystreamer. I'm writing this review live after having played your game.

So before I get into this, since I know you can see what I score you and "hear" my reasoning, I just need to explain that my ranks for specific scores could be related to me knowing nothing. I could be wrong in my assumptions regarding the graphics and the music. If I was if you watch my VOD, please let me know.

So when I jumped into this, I was honestly expecting some sort of deep story RPG, primarily because I didn't notice you called it open world/sandbox. Going into the prologue, I had no idea what anything was. I had expected more to happen in the prologue, but instead it was just several very long fights that, I assume, are intended to let the player play with the controls. However, in terms of story it provides nothing about who these characters are or why they're important. It doesn't even tell much at all. In short, it's just empty fluff you probably don't need. Unless you plan to add that in, in which case you need to do that now. Otherwise, it makes the prologue entirely pointless.

Now that said, that's also the first complaint of the gameplay I had: the prologue fights being so long and slow for no real reason. Tutorial fights don't need to take so long.

From there, there's a massive lack of direction of where to go. Like, from the moment I started controlling my character, I had no indication where to go. I was told there was a boat but no idea of direction to go, so I ended up going the scenic route by mistake. Then when I landed, I was just as confused for this huge place I was dropped in. Then I began exploring around and immediately found myself in the middle of chaos I was not ready for. This lack of direction and just... testing out things... led to me ending up stuck in the one dungeon, where I stopped playing for my sanity (because saves). What you need is a quest log that you can use to keep track of things. In addition, you should mark people who give quests so that the player can discern who actually matters to talk to.

Otherwise, it looks cool and I'd wanna see more.

Now to hope my logic works.

Start from Fire. It's the defending element, represented by green. The defending element will always resist itself. From here, the next element it's resistant to is flame, indicated by purple. It's also immune to blaze, represented by blue. Heat and Plasma, which are both pointed to in red, will deal more damage to fire, thus fire is weak to them. Burning deals normal damage, represented by no line. Next, you turn the dial so each line has moved to the next value. So the new starting element is Flame. Through this, you always maintain an equal number of strengths, weaknesses, immunes and normals. This, in turn, can make it easier to determine what to change to. since you can just focus on one element: one weakness. From there, the player will learn by memory and observation that, say, Burning is resistant to Heat and immune to Fire.

Along with this should be a matching of skills, where a type that is weak to another type will use effects that don't matter to that second type. So returning to Fire. It's immune to Blaze. Debuffs that Blaze can inflict don't affect Fire even when inflicted because the type of effects wouldn't affect how Fire is intended to be used. Say fire is meant to be high physical damage. Blaze would use effects that reduce magic. This means everything about Blaze is bad to put against Fire. In the end, you'll know to not remain blaze if against Fire.

Ok, now that I've explained this, I will also note this version of lines might be wrong to use. For example, it says Fire takes normal damage from Burning. However, if you turn the dial to Burning, it says that it's immune to Fire. It would be more optimal if something it was immune to was also weak against it, since you're using two weaknesses.

And that's all I got. Keep it up!

Hello! Welcome to Feedback Quest 5!

Nice to see you with a different game, though still just as ridiculous as the last one. XD

So before I get into it, I assume you are making this as a highly comical game, what with the main character just turning her own dragon to ash, then wanting a pony and then the fairy stuff, right? It's important for me to establish this because the very first part of my feedback would change drastically depending on yes or no.

If yes, then it's absolutely perfect. Nothing wrong at all. I adore it to the end and can skip to gameplay stuff.

If not... oh... oh no. This... Listen, you gotta let me write this for you. Please. I beg.

Moving on to gameplay, I loved the amount of ways you could live up to the term of pyro. Fire, Flame, Burning, Heat, Plasma! Plasma really got me. However, with the set up between the different elements, I found myself unable to easily remember what was weak and strong to what. This is because when you read the description, you're being fed three different pieces of information about five different values. This makes it hard to properly remember what to use against what, especially so if it's not cyclical in nature. To explain what I mean, I made a chart in Excel, checking what was weak, resist and immune to what. In cyclical world, you would always have two weaks, two resists, an immune and a blank/normal. These would cycle through in an order like hands on a clock all moving together but pointing different ways. But you don't have this. Going in order of the mementos on my game, this is how things looked for when an element was attacking another:

Fire: 2 Resists, 2 Weakness, 1 Immune, 1 Blank. Flame: 3 Resists,  1 Weakness, 1 Immune, 1 Blank. Blaze: 2 Resists, 2 Weakness, 1 Immune, 1 Blank. Plasma: 2 Resists, 3 Weakness, 1 Immune, 0 Blank. Burning: 2 Resists, 2 Weakness, 1 Immune, 1 Blank. Heat: 1 Resist, 2 Weakness, 1 Immune, 2 Blank.

So from a gameplay level, it's much harder to figure out what to use against what. Then there's the utter abuse of Plasma, the shame of Flame, etc. I'd like to suggest making it cyclical. To go back to my clock metaphor...

Y'know, next time I do a FQ stream, I should get you there to answer things directly. XD

And just so you don't need to ask, my next stream is tomorrow (the 20th) at 8 PM EST and the page is right here!

I'm very fascinated with this tool, so I want to play around with it a lot and see what I can do with it (which would also help to give you feedback). I could see this being a good starting tool for learning how to make synth and 8-bit music in general.

So I should probably explain better... I'll use the echo for this.

I don't know what Amount, Decay, Spacing and Strength mean. Now extend this to... everything. XD

I literally know nothing about any of this, but I'm so fascinated with this and want to play with it.

I'm also trying to figure out how to make percussion.

Hmm... I thought the examples would help, but it seems not. XD So perhaps a change in wording will help.

As someone who doesn't know anything about synth but who is still testing this tool out, I don't know what any of the values for any device do. I also don't know how all of the devices work.

Hello! Welcome to Feedback Quest 5! It's nice to meet you! My name's Hythrain. I'm part of the FQ team and a hobbystreamer. I'm writing this review live after having played your game.

... Or rather, after attempting to "play" it and not getting anywhere. Can you shed some light on how to utilize this? I get it's for synth music, but unless someone here knows all about these different things already they may not get what to do. A sample finished set up would help.

Hello! Welcome to Feedback Quest 5! It's nice to meet you! My name's Hythrain. I'm part of the FQ team and a hobbystreamer. I'm writing this review live after having played your game.

I find the concept of this game interesting, though right now I do feel parts of it need a lot of work. Hopefully my feedback will give some indications. 

The first issue I ran across was how unresponsive jumping could be at times. Usually, jumping was okay. However, there were times where I'd press jump and either get a weak jump that led me to my death or I didn't jump at all. Given how important being able to jump is to a platformer, this is the first thing that should be dealt with. Whether in the middle of the platform or on an edge, the player should be able to jump. Speaking of jumping, if you're running across a wall and you jump over and over, the height gained isn't always the max height despite holding the jump button in full.

The next issue was the wind blowing you back when you're running over the jaws. Not only is this wind excessively powerful if you stop moving, it works well beyond the limits of area. Meanwhile, if you jump before going over the jaws you can skip half of it. I also had an issue when I got to the area with three sets of jaws all together where I was being affected by multiple winds at once.

What I would recommend is keeping the wind active at all times but it only affects the player once they're in the jaw area. In addition, if the player is blown off the jaws they should just stop immediately instead of being sent flying back. Making these changes would fix every issue I saw with this mechanic.

Next, sliding along the wall. While it's an interesting idea to make sliding on the wall trigger the wind up, I can also see this being very limiting or, even worse, annoying players. In some places, the player can kill themselves if they accidentally slide on a wall and get pushed up into spikes or some other obstacle (this happened to me at the demo's end, where I slide on the wall briefly while getting the 11th strawberry and wind pushed me up into the constricting area). Instead, I'd say disconnect the wind from sliding and instead just make those winds exist all the time (and any challenges for berries in them should be about getting it the first time. You miss? You gotta start the screen over). You could then use sliding down walls as a mechanic for getting around when going down and would work well with the axe the player gets at the very end.

Another issue is the sliding and the saliva. When you slide on the saliva, it makes you slide VERY far. If you end up colliding with a wall and then try to jump, you'll just have a bad time. Similarly, if the saliva is on a set of jaws or the end of the jaws, you'll have a bad time as you can't get across. Attempting to slide will push you back, jumping won't work and you lose your momentum from running on the saliva. What I would recommend to fix all of this is give the slide a set movement distance. The player slides, they move a set amount. This amount is higher when on saliva. This way, you can directly control how far the player can slide.

The last part I want to comment on from the game itself was the constricting area. You clearly know how to make animated walls closing and opening, as you have this happening for the jaws. This needs to happen with the constricting area too. It looks awful right now with the snapping open and close.

I also want to cover one general is in regards to controls. A good platformer should have tight controls, aka responsive and easy to judge. Jumping can still be floaty like how you're doing it, so long as movement is quick, jumping is immediate and the player can easily predict how things will go. If I'm right, you're using a physics engine for this rather than manual inputs. While I know the physics engine can help with stuff, I would recommend trying to avoid it for a 2D platformer. It makes controls less tight and makes artificial difficulty for the player.

That's all from me. If you want the VOD, I can share it when it's uploaded to my YouTube.

As for the interface... well, watch the VOD and you'll notice a couple things. But overall, I just mean making things cleaner and easier to discern/read, tweak things for the flow of a player's cursor, etc. For example, you now have it that players click on a portal and they get a blurb of info about the reward they've selected. Instead of clicking the portal again, I think a button that indicates they'll go into the next stage for that specific reward would be a good idea since players will likely move the mouse cursor to the box they're looking at.

Ask and ye shall receive.

Normally, all my VODs go to YouTube within 24 hours of the stream. It sometimes takes longer for various reasons. In this case, I needed to edit and manually upload the previous day's stream due to some mishaps. Whenever I have a situation like this (I had two parts of my huge Zelda: TotK series that I had to do this before), I don't make VODs from streams that came after public until the older videos are there. This way, it reminds me to deal with it.

Honestly, at this point it's a bit for me. XD I keep a copy of the song for playlist I use for FQ pre-streams. I could remove it anytime, I just don't. XD

Hello! Welcome to Feedback Quest 5! It's nice to meet you! My name's Hythrain. I'm part of the FQ team and a hobbystreamer. I'm writing this review live after having played your game.

Usually, I write my reviews by looking at how I reacted during play. However, due to something that happened during the start of this, I have to skip doing it like that and just hit points.

To begin, the gameplay is simple to get but a bit dull due to only being able to move and shoot. An option to boost your speed could help make things a little more exciting, because now players can boost to try and dodge. But additionally, combat felt tedious. It took a lot of shots to kill anything, and there are enemies everywhere. It's easy to run out of ammunition as a result. Some guns don't even behave how I would expect, such as a shot gun doing more damage when close up. Overall, enemies just took too much damage for the ammo available. I do get it's a bit resourced based, but I shouldn't feel like I've only killed a third of all enemies while having no ammo.

Secondly, when someone dies they begin at the last checkpoint they hit, but the game autosaves everything at every step rather than when you hit these checkpoints. This leads to enemies keep damage on them and not needing to collect things again. However, one thing does not ever get saved: currency. Despite the fact that the majority of it is scattered about, its lack of save means the player can run out. It would be better if money saved as well.

Next, the graphics. I couldn't quite tell what most things were. I did get a vague sense, but many things I was just all "it's just a blob?" If you're able to make things look more discernible, that would help a lot. Also, GOD NO THAT THING IN THE DESERT NO FGHASUGFHSDKJHGFASFG

Finally, this last one is why I didn't get to write this as I would want to. Some of the fonts used are incredibly blurry and impossible to read, leaving me with no sense of what was going on or what I was doing. Pixel fonts are fine when you can guarantee they'll work, but in this case they're not. You should probably change those fonts.

Now that all said, I did enjoy my time. I just wanna know what I'm doing. And what things are. Aand being able to kill stuff. Aaand keep my money on death. Aaaand not have a giant bug thing freak me out. XD

Hello! Welcome to Feedback Quest 5! It's nice to meet you! My name's Hythrain. I'm part of the FQ team and a hobbystreamer. I'm writing this review live after having played your game.

This was a blast to play through. The sound effects really got to me. XD

In terms of gameplay, I think the only issue I had lied in the sword attacks. Ultimately, how you approach this is up to you, but there are some suggestions below that could work. I also think a longer weapon would allow you to keep the current method of attack since it'd make the player's reach better. Beyond that, it's a challenging experience.

As a few notes, I noticed that if the player is on keyboard and they're moving down and left, they can't use the dodge. At least that was the case with myself. Might be something to check into? Also, I do feel the bomb shouldn't get caught up by the sheep in the boss fight. Makes a challenging fight (since you already have to rely on using bombs due to the game's attack mechanics) even more difficult when it's not necessary.

Hello! Welcome to Feedback Quest 5! It's nice to meet you! My name's Hythrain. I'm part of the FQ team and a hobbystreamer. I'm writing this review live after having played your game.

Since this is a prototype, I can't rate artwork and sound for this. However, I may cover these in feedback.

Gameplay felt smooth and the controls made sense to me after a touch of trial and error. I don't remember if wall jumping was explained to the player. I don't think it was, and it was honestly luck that I figured it out. It was a bit weird to use dashing to kill enemies, but that's a me thing. Overall, I like where it's starting.

What you should do next is make a bigger screen and zoom the player in more. Everything is incredibly tiny and your character can blend in with the stage. Making them bigger can let you add details to make them stand out more, and in generally it'll be better for the player. Also, some sounds for specific player inputs so that they can use it to verify the input they wanted if they're, perhaps, in a position to not know if they're dashing or wall jumping when they want to be.

Hello! Welcome to Feedback Quest 5! It's nice to meet you! My name's Hythrain. I'm part of the FQ team and a hobbystreamer.

So I'm trying to cover as many games in the event for streaming when I reached this title in the line-up. Upon looking at the screens and reading your given disclaimer, I realized I may not be able to stream this game. As such, I need to ask if this game is safe for streaming or if it features nudity.

Hello! Welcome to Feedback Quest 5!

Another return title that shows a lot of new additions and changes! I was excited to jump in!

For starters, there's a LOT more information given throughout the game. It makes it much easier to figure things out and get a handle on the game. In addition, the starting limitation of crabs meant I could learn the game's mechanics with in an environment that wasn't going to through everything at me at once. This helps make feels less overwhelming and able to focus more on getting a better sense of the game, and boooooooy did I get into it!

In all honesty, the gameplay is in such a good place that I don't have anything to really build on at this time. Maybe once the game itself is built up more. I feel the main piece of feedback I can give is that I feel it's time to polish things up like the interface, build the framework for the game's presentation. If you don't know what I mean, then just ask this: would you sell this game as is right now? No. you wouldn't. Why not? Because you have the gameplay but not the game itself. Like what the game is about, what's the context for what the player is doing, etc. I'd like to see the next version go in that direction to allow the game to feel more complete before we worry about building on the mechanics again.

Thanks for the info on the bars. That will help. I also had a feeling the hit detection could be an engine thing, so confirmation on that is nice to have.

With the information of the shrine, I'll probably try again when I have more time. I do want to go more into this, since it does have a lot going for it. 

Yea, I do give a limited amount of time. I usually cover every game (FQ4 was crazy, when we had 100 games and yet TotK dropped early into it), so I do need to pace it. Of course, things are working out in a way where I'll get more time for certain games later on to explore them more, so I'll get to see what more time looks like.

Unfortunately, I don't use Android phones nor can I run an Android emulator. D:

1. So I had times where nobody was on their deathbed, yet someone would permanently die. I don't think this was intended if a soldier needs to be on their deathbed first.

2. For me, the problem was how the colours blend a bit with the background. On top of this, the text can be hard to see.

3. When you have these future playables, will each have their own set of turns for actions or will it be three actions across all characters? If the former, you could potentially remove the character select and just go through the characters in order. If the latter, that does make more sense for your design.

4. It was, but I also know players can forget all details. For example, I forgot the last skill for reviving soldiers took my life away.

Hello! Welcome to Feedback Quest 5! It's nice to meet you! My name's Hythrain. I'm part of the FQ team and a hobbystreamer. I'm writing this review live after having played your game.

As for the gameplay present, I will straight up say I think most of it works nicely. I'd say the shaman should be able to generate a little bit more MP (say, 25% instead of just 20%), and the Triple Strike on the Chief and Warrior can seem really strong. When I got to the last fight, I was using all AOE attacks to blow through the basic enemies quickly, and those Triple Strikes were absolutely carnage due to how they work. I do think that Triple Strike should have a diminishing return when hitting the same enemy, but also should put a preference over attacking an enemy that it's not hit yet with Triple Strike. This would help curve this power, since if it got multiple strikes on one target it's less likely to kill them outright but will still bring them very low.

If there are more mechanics you wanted feedback on that I missed, let me know.

Also, there was a typo on one of the archer's skills. It said it only did 1% physical damage. I think it meant 100%.

Ok, follow-up that needs to be brought up. During Feedback Quests 3 and 4, after I had given you my feedback (which in those cases was pretty much entirely negative), you removed your entries completely. When it happened during FQ3, I thought I was crazy at first. I didn't know why the total number of games I played was greater than the number in the jam, until I noticed yours was pulled. When this happened again in FQ4, it went from being a bit of a silly response to being pretty sad. Despite what you may think, my goal here is NOT to just shit all over your games. I hope the comment above offers some evidence of this. I am aware you use old software and hardware to make your games, but to me this is an excuse. Being on old software and hardware doesn't mean bad game design is okay. Just because games today tend to have better design doesn't mean it's a result of modern software. For example, look at Mario games. These have been some of the most polished games since the 1980s. The resolution stuff is one thing, I can let that slide. However, there are going to be things that I will be critical of if they don't seem to work to me.

I say this all because I need to ensure the intent of my feedback is understood before I bring up a significant issue. I need it to be understood that when I'm giving feedback, it's to try and improve the game. If everything about the game doesn't feel good to me, then I'm going to criticize everything about the game. And that is an important part of this game jam: to get feedback, good or bad. Whether you agree with the feedback is up to you. However, removing your games upon getting a highly critical review is just... not acceptable. And since you've last entered, I've joined with the team behind FQ. As such, even if I'm not a host for this specific event (I tend to host the mini events we now do), I do need to keep in mind the integrity of the events. And as such, I do want to inform you that if this game gets pulled from getting feedback from me (or from getting a lot of negative feedback in general), I will be speaking with the head of the group about banning you entirely from these events. Now if you're wondering why I'm not saying this privately, it's because I've already spoken about the issue in a public setting (aka on stream) when I saw it happen before, before I was part of the team. As such, a lot of people are aware of this. This makes it better for me to be transparent, to be open with it and to let you know. This will also be in my stream VOD, such that if this entry IS removed, there will be evidence that this had been explained to you.

Wanting to remove your title from a jam with a long title afterwords is fine. Removing it in the middle of the event because someone was overly critical is not. While I'm not saying you need to condone rudeness (and I hope my response to this game has made it clear I'm not trying to be rude), reacting in a poor way and removing the game isn't helping.

I hope this point has been made clear. I hope you have a better understanding of my approach for feedback. I hope that my little joke in the last comment gave you a little chuckle in the end. But above all else, I hope you won't pull your games anymore even if you get a lot of negative feedback. Thank you for your time.

Hello! Welcome to Feedback Que- wait.

Y'know, I wasn't sure if you were going to submit a game this time around. After the last two times, I thought you might not. But we're here, so let's get going.

So like most people who played this game, they likely had trouble finding a weapon. I eventually DID find out, when I began just pressing use against everything and finding out I could go inside the fortress. Once I had a weapon, I thought things would be okay and I'd be able to get somewhere. However, I found I couldn't tell if I was hitting the spiders (and due to dealing with mild arachnophobia, I wasn't exactly looking directly at them). So I took my fight to the skeletons, only for them to kick my ass. Eventually, I found gear and put it on. I was making progress! Then I discovered magic! And whoa! Suddenly, I could kill the skeletons in a single hit. I felt much stronger and like I could do something, even though it wouldn't last long.

After this, I spent a while trying to play through. I burned through the few spells I could use rather quickly. Even a mana potion didn't really help. Meanwhile, attacking felt sluggish and difficult to pull off. Now this isn't to say this sort of combat can't be good, it's the sort of thing that From Software games do all the time. However, those games have great feedback to let the player know they've done damage. A lot of my attacks, I'd see an animation but no indication that I dealt damage of any kind. Some attacks did make it obvious, thankfully. Then arose the complication of how long I was fighting. Like I said, I was testing on skeletons because I couldn't look at the spiders for personal reasons. And while my magic could destroy a skeleton in one hit, I found it taking dozens to do the job by melee.

I also wasn't quite sure what the bars that empty on attack and fill up are for. I had assumed they were related to how much damage an attack did, but without any means of knowing how much damage I do in a hit, it's impossible for me as a player to confirm this.

Of the games you've submitted to FQ, I find this one has the most actual game to it. Areas don't look repetitive, I can discern where I am in a world, and there's stuff I can actually do as a player. I actually enjoyed playing this a bit. Whatever my personal feelings on the controls, I was happy just to be doing something. Unfortunately, I can't put in enough time to get really in-depth with the game. I would like to know more of what's going on, but since I have to cover many games I can't dedicate as much time.

Looking at things, I'm unsure what would be the best way to improve the starting situation while keeping your intent with the game. You could give the player some starting money, or you could give them starting equipment. Alternatively, you could make early leveling easier (I don't know how much experience you need to level, I had around 30 or 40 at my top) so that players can make some early gains that let them just be capable of taking more hits. Whatever the case, something to make the start work more smoothly would help the experience for players and make them overlook the shortcomings from using older software.

I have more to say, but since I want this post to focus on the review and feedback for the game I'm separating the rest into another comment, which will be as a reply to this one.

Hello! Welcome to Feedback Quest 5! It's nice to meet you! My name's Hythrain. I'm part of the FQ team and a hobbystreamer. I'm writing this review live after having played your game.

I first want to say I'm very happy to see you looking into feedback so early into your development. While this may affect the score, I feel this is the sort of thing this jam truly exists for. So please don't be discouraged by score.

Wait, didn't the guy below me say all this? Crap. I swear, I wasn't copying him.

Anyway, as someone who is often high on stream (and tonight was no exception), I started off feeling concerned and not knowing what the heck was going on. However, this quickly began to fade as I went about experimenting and got a quick idea for the gameplay. It quickly became about how far I could get on the limited resources I had, then once I got the item that gave me full stats I got to truly test around and see how things worked.

Upfront, I love the concept of switching between working inside the sub and playing outside. I'm reminded of We Need To Go Deeper, but as a single player experience. With that in mind, I want to give suggestions for improvements.

1. When firing missiles, it shouldn't just fire over and over if I hold the mouse button too long. When I was trying to fight, I often had it where I'd fire two missiles. This makes it too easy to waste them. A longer delay between shots could deal with this, or you could make it only fire once per click. Based on the invincibility frames you employ, I think the click option is better.

2. Starting off with such few resources and it being a few levels before you'll be able to get to full, it can feel really difficult to start. As such, I'd recommend more starting resources. Along with fixing the above, it'd go a long way to make things play nicer.

3. If you're not beholden to your current use of fuel, I'd recommend making fuel act as a boost in speed rather than just draining. If you want to keep the current use of fuel, I would suggest slowing its base rate of consumption but also allowing players to get a speed boost by burning more. This way, a player who wishes to conserve fuel and instead rely on ammo would be rewarded by less fuel use overall, but if a player needs to conserve ammo more they can rely on fuel boost to get through enemies. This lets players choose what they conserve and what they spend.

4. Faster movement in the ship would also be a good idea.

5. Speaking of the ship, you have three levers for adjusting make HP, ammo and fuel (this really played into my WNTGD feelings). However, rather than the current system of increasing max stats, what if these levers instead allowed your ship to produce those resources or to reduce the amount used. So for example, each level of fuel would reduce the amount of fuel used. Each level of HP would give or improve a recharging barrie . Finally, each level of ammo would generate ammo.

6. There is no six. I just wanted to have one more. :D Hi!

Overall, I love the prototype you have going on and I hope to see more.

Hello! Welcome to Feedback Quest 5! It's nice to meet you! My name's Hythrain. I'm part of the FQ team and a hobbystreamer. I'm writing this review live after having played your game.

First, since I don't pay attention to the genres or screenshots of the game, only if I'm able to play it direct from my PC or if I have to be in browser, I was surprised to see this was a Renpy made visual novel. Something in my head told me this would have combat elements, so I wasn't expecting Renpy visual novel in the least.

As I began to progress through the story, I found myself utterly fascinated with what was going on. From a supercreator to numerous creators of mortals with there being intense politics between them, to this fool of an archangel who forgot his dang job and instead fell in love with a human to the prologue ending as I expected with a dead human, the more I learned the more I wanted it to keep going.

Then it got to the part I was waiting for: a fight. As I was fighting the dragon, two things went through my head:

1. WHY THESE GUYS PERMADYING BUT NEVER BEING ON DEATHBED?!

2. I'm... surprised something like this works in a Renpy visual novel.

After beating the dragon and feeling proud of myself, I continued on until the prologue's end. I immediately felt sadness upon its end. However, after this came the part of me scoring your game, and here I realized some issues that I felt should be addressed.

1. While obviously the majority of the artwork and UI you are getting as something free, I do note the character icons and how they simply... don't match with anything else. I would love to see these sharing in the same style of art for consistency's sake.

2. The dragon fight had a lot of things about it that I hope can be done better in Renpy. For starters, the icons for various things. The abilities, the icons for saying how many actions you have left, the HP and MP meters, and even the number of turns thing all felt weird in their placement and appearance. The action icons don't visually match anything else, the text for HP and MP reads weird in comparison to the vials, which don't pop out enough. However, more than that would be to remove the need to click on the character head and instead have the abilities pop up on their own. I do realize you could end up having multiple playable characters which is why you have this, but I would say that if you do plan that, each should have their own number of actions and just go in a turn order. When one unit is finished their turn, it automatically goes to the next. Similarly, once you've used all your actions, the turn should end automatically. Also, yes, the artwork here should also match. The dragon being different is ok, so long as it's only enemies that look like this.

In short, it was the combat UI and the mismatched artwork that I ultimately felt needed improvement. Everything else is great, though! I can't wait to see more!

Hello! Welcome to Feedback Quest 5!

I don't know if this is a troll or just y'all making a quick little cute thing for kids. I'm going to take it as legit because that's the right way to go.

I love the concept behind this. I also love the sound effects (the alpaca, omg). However, the "shop" button didn't really do anything. ALSO, I CAN SEE SCREENSHOTS FOR A CAT AND A SKUNK AND I DIDN'T SEE THESE IN THE GAME! HOW DARE YOU DENY ME THESE! Because of this, while I've rated the game at top level for everything else, it gets a 1 out of 5 for fun! GIB ME MY KITTY AND SKUN!

Hello! Welcome to Feedback Quest 5!

I jumped in with a lot of excitement for another horror game in the mix! For a jam game, it was pretty fun to play. The dialogue felt a little weird, since I didn't feel like it fit where the game is supposed to take place. I liked the multiple endings and use of multiple characters who behave differently, though I did find it ridiculous that Kyosuke's hands being covered in blood wasn't enough evidence.

I've only seen three endings so far (A, B and C), so I'll have to keep an eye out for the other two.

Because this was a jam game, it's hard to feedback. As such, I'm going to give my feedback on the basis that you will be expanding this concept.

I already mentioned the dialogue, but the models and their movement felt weird. They didn't feel proper. Some may enjoy this, but I'm not one such person. XD

The voices used all feel... well, bad. Chiyoko's voice was obvious just didn't match the personality nor what she was doing, and the monsters felt very... well, I felt like they were snorting and snoring. XD

Finally, the combat felt awkward and hard to do. Like, it felt hard to aim while monsters just ate away at me.

Overall, I like the concept and I'd like to see it expanded into a full game.