Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• I like the idea of forging spells, but I was never able to get much use out it.  You mostly just needed a good teleport spell, a ranged damage spell, and that's all.  The game would update slowly so I usually had to get teleportation to explore at a decent speed.

  On replays it was awkward to have familiar spells on different keys and it would have been nice to reassign them. It'd also be nice if modifying a spell didn't cause you to relearn the old one when running into it again.
  

• As submitted for the 7drl challenge, Spellforger is just enough on its feet that you can see that shapes of a very exciting mechanic driving its design. The basic elements of the rogue-foundation are there, and functional, but minimal. Hallways connect rooms. Enemies wander about. Some hit harder than others. (Though, I will say, the colors are clean, the layout is sensible – features which really aid the moment to moment experience of playing.) But it seems that the time constraint kept the author from really fleshing out the material. There are only 3 levels, and on one of my playthroughs I reached level 3 with seemingly no staircase or goal, I assume a bug. The spellcasting system as well (more on this in a moment) is clearly implemented in the “let’s throw these in there and see if they all work way” after which the author didn’t get a chance to balance and tweak. One consequence of this is that it’s possible to find a super powerful attack spell early on (as I did in one play) and have no need of any other spell or spell crafting. In addition, your learned spells roll over between playthroughs, which I would assume is a mistake and not an intended design. For all of these reasons, I gave lower ratings on Completeness and Scope.

  But! I have to say, the spell crafting in this game makes me really excited. The game allows you to collect runes of three types – target, area, and effect – and use them to cobble together brand new spells. If you have a heal rune and an adjacent rune and a small explosion rune, you can combine them to make a little heal bomb that will affect you and anyone within two spaces. Or maybe you have a teleport rune combined with a line rune…etc. The system is cool. Naming your own custom spells is cool. Imagining a crawl through a fully fleshed out dungeon where you are collecting and combining runes into unique spells to respond to your situation is cool. The fact that it works in even this early version, and works elegantly, is very impressive. There’s big changes to how they could be eventually implemented – I think that you should find runes on their own, not whole spells, or if you do find whole spells you should have to break them apart – treating runes as a finite resource rather than a knowledge…but, there’s so much room for development of the system in any number of directions. I, for one, am pumped about what this system could grow into.

• Completeness - Everything runs okay, features work, but I have experienced crashes, especially when trying to craft a spell.

  Aesthetics - The ASCII graphics get the job done. Controls are functional and intuitive.

  Fun - It is short, but quite enjoyable. It really captures the notion of a wizard casting spells left and right. You do become pretty much unstoppable very soon into the game.

  Innovation - I liked that you can cast spells every turn without worrying about mana. Also the customizing mechanic looks interesting, although I gave up on it after it crashed a few times.

  Scope - This is what I would expect from a 7drl, a well planned array of features based around a single concept.

  Roguelikeness - Turn based, procedurally generated and so on. For some reason it's not actually permadeath because you keep all your spells when you restart the game after dying, but I assume it's a bug.

  Conclusion - Worth checking out, be a wizard and shoot spells left and right. Thumbs up!