Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous.

• Up front I should note that we're instructed to review the most recent version, including post challenge, and that the game would have scored lower if I was reviewing the version I originally played just after the challenge. It's changed quite a lot since the end of the jam. Dungeon Crawl is, like its title, a pretty straighforward affair. It looks decent enough - a bit repetitive but nothing to seriously complain about from a 7-day game. I recognise some of the stock graphical assets from elsewhere, but one or two might be original creations and look pretty good. I enjoyed the fact that traps are right there for you to see, so spotting them relies on the player paying attention rather than an arbitrary trap-spotting role. Monsters are functionally the same as far as I can tell, but I appreciate that a few different sprites were used to give them a different feel. The interface is generally clear, with a simple and comprehensible log of XP, character level, and potions found. I'm not a fan of the control scheme. I generally don't like mouse-based control, but setting aside my personal preference, it's still executed a bit awkwardly here. It works just fine for picking up potions, performing attacks, etc but it's a unwieldy when it comes to doors. Clicking on a door opens or closes it, so I found that I was constantly having to shimmy the pointer back and forth to walk along a corridor instead of re-closing the door I'd just opened. It sounds like a small niggle but the game has a lot of doors, so it's actually a small niggle which is constantly in effect. Not a major problem but a notable one. My biggest criticism/suggestion relates to the combat. In some ways it works well enough - at first enemies seem to just sprint straight at you, but with a bit of experimentation I found that they don't always follow if you run away, so there is actually a bit of choice involved in how you handle them. However, when you do fight, hitting your target seems to be a percentage-based thing and misses happen quite frequently. Every single time I died in this game, it was because I had a string of arbitrary misses. This is sort of the opposite of the compliment I paid the traps. I like the trap system because the more agency the player has in their success or failure, the more satisfying the gameplay is. Spotting traps is satisfying because it's on me, not on a secret roll behind the scenes. Combat is the other way round - it's frustrating because it's based on random chance rather than player actions. Although the game was mostly bug-free, which is no small achievement in 7 days, I have to remark on one game-breaking bug I did stumble across. It's possible for a trap to spawn on the stairs, and because you can't enter a trap space, you then can't leave the level. I only saw this once in my (fairly numerous) runs but it still bears mentioning. I ran into this in my longest/most successful run, which obviously wasn't ideal. It probably sounds like there's a lot of criticism here, and I suppose that's true, but I still feel Dungeon Crawl was a fair effort for a single week. Its main shortcoming is that it's pretty rough across the board, with a significant bug, slightly awkward control, and somewhat frustrating combat. All of this seems like an issue of polish, and given more time it could probably all be smoothed out. And this newest version does suffer far less from those issues than the previous version I played before. It's harder than people think to make a game in 7 days, and I respect that this is a reasonably functional game . I just can't particularly recommend playing it with its current rough edges and lack of variety in the content. Fair effort though.