Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• Rogue Sails is ambitious in scope, and emerges mostly successful, though inevitably when you try to tackle this much in just 7 days, there are going to be a few rough edges . The "captain on the high seas" theme is great, and a nice idea for a non-traditional roguelike milieu. There are a number of different systems at play here -- a trading system ala drug wars (or the old Apple ][ game "Taipan"), a naval combat system, a quests system, a skills/leveling system, and on top of all that a traditional dungeon-crawl system as well. The main issue is that all of the systems are quite simple and rather undeveloped, leaving an assemblage that falls a little short of potential. Given that this was all completed in a week, though, that's to be expected. And it's to the creator's credit that the systems do all function and hang together as well as they do. Some nits & notes: - I wish there were some way to tell what a given city/dungeon name is. A quest would tell you to deliver something or recover something from such and such place, but as far as I could tell there was no way to tell which island it was on, except for following the quest guide arrows. If there were some sort of reference map, or indeed labels on the game map, one could possible avoid the need for quest guide arrows at all. Same for when you are in a dungeon -- it would be nice to have a label indicating which one it is, and what you might be looking for if you have a quest there. - The icons on the bottom are in a style that don't match the 8-bit, Atari 800-esque art. It's a small thing but stylistic consistency goes a long way. - I wish there were a clearer indicator of when your ranged weapon was ready to fire again. I eventually noticed the icon refills, but the effect is very subtle. - The running out of gold = death mechanic was rather jarring. I wish I had gotten some warning before it happened. Makes trading a dangerous game! - I never made it to the secret "unchartered waters" area but that seems cool; I wish I had been able to get to it! This is more on me being a bad player, perhaps, but it would be nice if progression was a little faster. 500 gold (for 1 level of advancement) feels like a lot when you are only making 30 or so per quest and 15-20 per trade. There's a lot of promise here, and with a little fleshing out on each of the systems at play, I could see this coming together really nicely. Even as it currently stands, it's a really remarkable achievement to do all this in a week. Nice work!
• Completeness 3 I was very impressed with how complete this game was and how much it managed to accomplish. There is no doubt this score would've been 4 stars were it not for losing two games due to crashes. It felt like a living world and I was motivated and excited to move around and be a part of it. Really nice work. Aesthetics 3 The game's pallete and 8 bit nature worked well and looked clean throughout. Every sprite was drawn intentionally and I felt clearly represented the thing it was supposed to. Part of the score for Aesthetics is based on controls and that is the only place where this game lacks. I'm not sure if it was intentional but despite having arrow-based movement, diagonal movement and attacking is both possible and quite annoying. I found being attacked by enemies diagonally early on to be frustrating, and when I found out I could move diagonally myself (by pressing 2 keys at the same time) I found that just as frustrating as I would occasionally miss. Fun 3 I'm very torn on this category. The things you managed to include in your submission were all fantastic. The quests, the upgrades, the mix of land and sea fighting were all well thought out. However, the tuning of the upgrades and money was an absolute miserable grind. 500 gold for a +1 to your attacks was absolutely insane given that the hardest quests were barely worth 50 gold AND certain death for an under-leveled character. I found myself either aimlessly wandering around the map buying items for 9 gold and taking every Green quest I could and even after I purchased my first Swashbucking upgrade I was disappointed that 30 minutes of effort barely made a difference in fighting tough foes. And then the cost went up to 1000?! I will say that the fact I'm frustrated about aspects of the game speaks well about my enjoyment because I would like it to be tuned differently so I could play it again sometime! Innovative 3 Due to the excellent mix of land and sea combat, I feel pretty positively about this game. It doesn't necessarily improve on aspects of either of those mechanics, but seeing a mix of the two in a 7drl submission is quite impressive. Well done! Scope 4 Implementing 2 kinds of combat, an upgrade system, procedural island generation, quests, trading and maybe more is certainly beyond what I would've expected to see in a submission. Even though each feature was mostly basic at it's core, getting them all working together and mostly bug-free from my experience is quite a feat. Roguelike 4 Turn based, permanent death, (frustratingly tuned) upgrades. Your game checked many of the boxes for me and I would consider it a fully featured roguelike.
• I thoroughly enjoyed your game. Even though there are only 3 types of quests, and limited number of enemies, Rogue Sails manages to convey a sense of exploration and wonder. I never managed to reach the unknown seas, mostly because the game keeps crashing every 10-20 minutes. Some feedback below: -Would be nice to have a map or some other way to remember what cities and coves are out there. Arrows pointing at quest locations are very helpful, but don't assist in choosing quests optimally. -I assume enemies moving diagonally is a balancing feature, but I've played several games that only allowed diagonal movement on numpad (which I don't have, playing on built-in Mac keybord), and wondered for a while if I'm handicapped. -Looting a chest for the first time brings up the "I have already looted this" message -Chests being selectable with Tab/Q, and even shootable (nothing happens to the chest, but player ends up needing to reload) is a bit uncomfortable -Enemies (at least pirates) don't know how to go around stairs and gold -Sometimes the CPU usage spikes to 100% Notes on scores: -3 for completeness due to endless crashes - I lost patience trying to remember to save the game frequently. That said, the rest of the game is reasonably polished for a 7DRL! -3 for aesthetics due to the animation lag (I know you called it out in the devlog), and just in general I think the sprites are a bit too pixelated :)