Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• Space Station TDA616 puts you on said space station with a simple mission: pick up explosives, find an alien ship 9 floors from your starting point, and "blow it straight to hell." You can't actually kill aliens and have to rush to your objectives while they attack you. You have a randomly generated name and there are randomly named wandering crew mates too. This is a nice premise but doesn't turn into much.  I have a lot of feedback:

  • Having to go into an inventory system to pick up items is quite odd.
  • There are *a lot* of controls for a 7drl. This game could be just as effective with only the arrow keys. There's a targeting system that appears to do nothing. Was this game adapted from something else?
  • The ASCII is mostly fine, though a little dark. The unorthodox choices confused me a bit (e.g. Z for doors). Having all items represented as 'q' with no way to identify them other than entering a separate look or inventory mode is not great.
  • It's never explained why all items other than the MacGuffin are clothes. This whole thing (dinner jacket, polo shirt, thong) is pretty wacky compared to the tone of the rest of the game.
  • There's quite a bit of lag when holding down movement keys.

  I would guess this is a first attempt at making games and if so, seriously congrats!, because we definitely have here a fully functional game that isn't particularly buggy. I could forgive all of the above criticism if there were just some meat on the bones here, some interesting mechanic or something to occupy my time. My advice is to keep making games and aim for finding that interest mechanic.

• Space Station TDA616 feels very basic and light, even for a standard 7DRL. There is some fun to be had though, and it's worth giving it at least a quick playthrough or two. The goal of the game is to ascend ten floors and find the "high explosives" along the way, where you will then plant near the Alien Ship at the very top level and wait a few turns for it to explode. The only threat present are aliens that will follow and chip away at your health. There are NPC's present but they don't do anything except wander around. There are also items present, mostly in the form of clothes, but these too also serve no purpose. I couldn't really find a way to attack the aliens either, so I just ran to the next level and tried to avoid them as best as possible. The game looks pretty standard for a roguelike and has no sounds, but is easily controlled and the console looks nice. I didn't encounter any bugs and the dungeon generation was quite solid. It took me four tries to finally ascend and blow up the Alien Ship and although it was quite simple, I still wanted to play and felt motivated to beat it.