Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• Rogue of the Seven explores combines is a trading and pirate fighting game that reminds me of games like Sid Meier's Colonization and pirate games of my youth. Starting off with a small boat and 100 gold, you need to trade, explore, and upgrade your ship. I did not find an end state, though I was strong than any enemy and had a massive fortune, so it seems more sandbox than narrative. The game's strongest asset is the pixel art and graphics. As I noted before it reminded me fondly of past exploration and colonization games. The ships are clear, the chain of islands you are exploring feels thematic. Different island configuration are created each game, but in my game it was easy to find two nearby towns that had arbitrage potential on some goods and rapidly double my money over and over again. Once I had thousands of gold, I could quickly upgrade my ship to endgame. I wish combat was a bit more in depth, primarily auto attack with an opportunity to surrender to lose some currency. It was hopeless until I upgraded, and after than I auto-won everything. The setting of pirates exploring, trading, and fighting is ripe for continued development. I could imagine turn based battles as you pillage native settlements and forgotten temples, in depth ship battles, and a random land to discover every game. The entry gave me a taste of that, and because of that it will remain memorable for a long time. Well done!
• Unfortunately it was hard to enjoy this game because the economy is completely broken. You can buy goods at your starting port and immediately sell them at the same port for more than you bought them for, so you immediately have access to infinite money. At least there's no cargo limit, so you can basically grow your wealth expontentially by going back and forth between the menus and holding Spacebar. So with a fully upgraded ship coming out of the primary port, including tens of thousands of coin and energy, nothing stood a chance and we just blew everything and everyone out of the water right away. It was interesting having a minimap/world map sort of thing but not actually indicating where you are on that map (whether intentional or not), since that meant having to figure it out from the island shapes, but movement is slow so exploration isn't fluid at all, and although I did check out a bunch of islands I never found any treasure, or saw the kraken. It felt odd that Enter can't be used to select things (like on the main menu), despite a bunch of other keys working for that purpose. Same with ending the tutorial, which is done via Spacebar rather than Escape, although there's no prompt for this. Some playtesting and work on balance would've gone a long way towards making this game more playable.
• Pirate roguelikes are like buses: absent for many years, and then several turn up in a single jam, and we suddenly get the luxury of picking and choosing. Unlike some other submissions, bread-and-butter of this game is not combat but the buy-low/sell-high trading between ports and ship upgrades with the resultant profits. It is inherently satisfying and there's a good variety of goods to trade, even as you recognize just how ridiculous price differences and profit margins can be (i.e. buying gunpowder for 9 gold per unit and selling it for 100). Simply moving back-and-forth two nearest ports and playing on price differences is bound to realize enough profits to fully upgrade your ship after a dozen trips or so - especially if you can find a port that sells food for just 1 gold, as the savings from not paying 2 or 3 pieces per unit quickly add up. Even in the fixed version, there's the weird abstraction where everything is bought "per kilo", including crewmembers and cannons, while running out of food ("Energy" bar) simply ticks down your ship's HP - same HP that gets damaged by cannons. Yet, increasing the size of crew does not increase ship's HP - however, it does increase food consumption every single turn. Meanwhile, combat isn't much to wrote home about. It's modal, where the only options are "Attack", "Offer" or "Surrender", and only Attack is worth picking ("Offer" appears intended to intimidate other ships into surrendering, but that never seemed to work, even as my ship had several times more Fear than the opponent, and the other ship was half-dead already.) Unless you get really unlucky or reckless, you probably won't get into fights with other ships until you have levelled your ship enough to utterly outclass them. On the other hand, the game's boss, the Kraken, is fully RNG: even with fully-levelled ship, you'll still have 100 HP to its 1000, and it seems completely random if you'll get several rounds of 200+ damage while it inflicts scratch damage or no damage at all, or if it gets a couple of strikes that deal ~40 damage and thus ends the game (unless you "surrender" to it beforehand, in which case it takes your money and lets you leave). If anything, the greatest highlight is seeing AI transport and pirate ships sink each other on the map. The on-map graphics are very muddy, and are the one area where Rogue of the Seven Seas clearly loses out to similar submissions. However, it somewhat offsets it with a good range of pixelized portraits in the trade/combat screens, and its SFX, including a shanty-like tune. Altogether, this is a neat, if flawed, submission, and a solid foundation to be built upon. It would have likely looked more impressive in a typical 7DRL year where it would have had no competitors.