Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• My initial thought of Dragonvein was utter surprise - being killed before I'd even made a move. My second thought was it's aesthetic beauty: you've done a fantastic job of the tiles, dealt with the difficulties of hexes well, and used animation well.
  

  But, I struggled with Dragonvein a lot early on - particularly with the lack of direction and feedback. Eventually, rereading the description did help a lot - but I found it hard to judge why I was winning or losing fights, or how strong my team actually was. I also struggled with being unable to avoid combat: I had a lot of team kills due to randomly walking somewhere, and being attacked to death without any warning. But, I also understand that balance is tough - particularly in a 7DRL, where you may not have the chance to beat the game yourself. Ultimately, I was able to beat the red dragon, but haven't yet been able to beat the game. I'm pretty sure I close to exhausted the villages and towns, but was worn down by continual random encounters.

  The design is clean, and the game is interesting. The world building text works well. Despite struggling with the lack of information, I did like the use of people/shield colors as health and strength in the absence of a HUD.
  

  It's a clever game, and a worthy attempt over 7 days.
  

• The game is very basic prototype with very little to do. Most enemies are "random encounters". You can encounter an enemy right in the tile where you come from. This removes any tactics from the game. There is no scouting. You can build quite big army if you are lucky enough with tightly populated area, but then loose half of it due to chain of unfortunate random encounters. There is nothing to do except to move around. The graphics is nice, but I believe it's some sort of assets from unity. The game hangs and then crashes when you try to close it or press escape. There were roguelikes attempts where instead of single character the player was controlling a small army. This game doesn't feel like rougelike at all. Random terrain and random encounters do not make a game into a roguelike. There is a potential, but it's not realized.

• I liked the variation on the Roguelike formula in this game, where you grow your army of soldiers and gradually increase their strength rather than increasing the power of a single character. The game still requires a careful strategy, especially near the beginning where you need to avoid fights until you have enough of a basic mob to just overwhelm enemies by sheer numbers. It's an interesting way of applying typical RogueLike strategies and tactics to a more party-based context, without needing to micro-manage the party.

  The only problem with the game in terms of completeness is a known major bug (crashing on exit), and lack of clarity about loading/instructions within the game itself. Although the readme describes the goal and what to do, it'd be good to have those instructions in the game itself. Similarly, when a new game loads after losing there is a noticeable delay but no notification of what is happening. A simple message that the game is loading would be enough, so players don't think the game has crashed. A message indicating what kind of loot was found, and how it improved your army, would also be nice. The soldiers already visibly upgrade, but some notification explaining what happened would increase the immersion and aesthetics of the game. (It's just cool to know I found a magical sword or something rather than just the same 'got loot' message.)
  

  Overall, it's a fun and very aesthetically pleasing little game.