Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• This is a brief room-based roguelite with extremely limited variety. Even though you are only asked to go through 5 rooms before fighting a boss, you'll often encounter two of the same room, since the only options are: a "puzzle" of pushing two blocks the game always starts with; fighting a few of the game's only two monster types (unarmed green orc and purple spider drones with guns); fighting one really big orc or spider drone; outlasting increasing spawns of orcs until they all go away after 15 seconds. None of this is remotely challenging, as the orcs are very slow and tend to just stumble around their initial spawn, not trying to chase after the knight, and the drones are not much better. Their one advantage are weird collision damage hitboxes, and the big drone can inflict quite a lot of damage that way before going down, as your own sword swing feels slow and lacking in reach, and the grappling hook is essentially useless. However, you get so much HP (either bonus hearts of full heal) after clearing every screen that it does not matter. Even the final boss "battle" is simply about surviving the laser from the drone 40 seconds - a "feat" that can be achieved by simply not moving from the starting position, as the laser never reaches either corner of the screen, and any monster that does make it to you is easy to cut down. However, your "reward" is just a grey "Restart" screen - same as if you had run out of HP earlier. All in all, not recommended.
• ## General review A nice prototype for a "Binding of Isaac"-like. I am looking forward playing a version with more content in future. ## Detailed review Completeness: 3 It's a complete and has no bugs. The enemy AI could could be improved, and a different screen for win/lose would be appreciated, but it's all fine for a 7DRL Aesthetics: 3 Original tileset, character animations, clean interface. A few things could be improved: - tiles/monsters have different level of details, the character and the orc-like enemy are more detailed than other monsters and terrain. I think it's better to have a consistent style. - the "tank" enemy exists in 2 versions, using the same sprite at different scales. The larger version looks very blurry. - in rooms with a door to the North, the door is drawn over the health bar, partially hiding it. Fun: 3 I like "The Binding of Isaac", and this game is similar. It's fun. Currently there are only a few room types (5 + boss ?) and 2 loot types (heal, increase max HP) so you will see everything in a couple of playthroughs. Good job on implementing different types of enemies with their own behaviour. Innovation: 2 Nothing new here. Scope: 3 What I expect for a 7DRL. This game is complete, no bugs, it has music and art. Congrats ! Traditional Roguelikeness: 3 Disclaimer: For me, a roguelike game must "feel" like Rogue. It does not have to be a procedural dungeon crawling with perma-death, but I need to feel the sense of exploring the unknown, the chess-like thinking to get out of tough situations, and the relief when you succeed. "Rogue-ish" is very similar to "The binding of Isaac", so definitely a RogueLITE.
• For me, this was lacking polish to the extend that impacted gameplay. It was hard to tell when I got hit or when I hit something. The first time I died and I got the gray game over screen, I thought the game crashed. I think I won once and I got that same screen, and I'm not sure if I won, or if I died, or if I encountered a bug. Perhaps there is a good core of a game here, but unfortunately I simply could not tell what was going on. There needs to be more audio and visual feedback to the player, as well as some UI polish.