Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• I think that Cave RL suffers from the author having attempted more than they could finish in the timeframe. The game hints at a lot of interlocking systems: there are monsters and combat, there are different minerals to be mined, a lighting system, a recursive artifact crafting mechanic, as well as a secondary artifact restoring goal? However, each of these systems is just barely implemented, and difficult to make work as intended. You can dig minerals of different types…they spawn all around you, but only after you randomly find a pickaxe artifact, and then find three other artifacts to sacrifice to make it, and then randomly stumble across a “work bench” to make it all happen. Then, once you can mine minerals, their only application seems to be to get money from random merchants, but there is also quite little to spend that money on.

  The artifacts do seem to have been fully implemented, and I was curious about finally getting to use the spell book to zap my foes, however, there are two big stumbling blocks to an extended play of the game. First, the map generation does not account for balance, and so I was often swarmed with monsters that would drain my health before I could make it from one section of the caves to another. Second, the interface ends up getting in the way of many actions. Using the mouse to look around yourself is cumbersome, and often interacts badly with having to use the mouse to click on items or minerals. In addition, none of the interface is sufficiently explained. I didn’t realize I HAD an inventory until items popped up on screen, and then didn’t know that I had to click them to activate them. Finally, the author left the space bar bound to “reset” the game no matter the game state, which led to several frustrating restarts for me.

  There are some interesting ideas here, but if the author wants to develop them, I would recommend picking one mechanic to explore and balance, rather than trying to create all of them at once.

• The user interface has issues, there should be something behind the text to separate it from the background, I also found the free camera tedious to control with it sometimes moving off when I select an item, I would have preferred it to be centered on the character at all times.

  Since both the mouse and keyboard are required it takes three hands to comfortably use the arrow keys, which I foolishly tried to do my first few runs.