I played it until after defeating the big robot in the factory, I still have to finish it.
I liked a lot the music in the game, specially the track in the first area. The sprites are charming and very expressive. The christmas games genre doesn't have many good games so if you manage to polish this game and release it you will certainly stand out!
The controls are a bit strange and I think they should be simplified or made more intuitive. The camera pan button is used mainly to do jumps, but you can replace it by building the levels in such a way that it is not needed. Maybe lowering the character speed and compacting the level so jumps are not bigger than one screen. Or automatically manipulating the camera when the player needs to jump. For example, in the initial after the intro is over the camera pans weirdly and keeps the main character on the bottom of the screen.
Talking about jumping, the height difference was easy to understand when it was an horizontal jump but not so much for vertical ones. I would recommend to use vertical jumps very sparingly. In some levels there is not tell for how high a platform is so one cannot be sure if a jump is possible. I believe that the height can be communicated properly by level design alone, so you should experiment a bit and find the best way to communicate it.
I got confused by how selecting a skill in battle works. All symbols changing place at once was very confusing. I never got the hang of it and mashed left/right until it cycled to the option I wanted. I dont understand why there are so many options for attacking. Some options are not worth it compared to others (horns vs hoofs, green magic vs squawk), it feels a bit overwhelming specially after getting the ring that reduces stats in exchange of traits spots.
It is strange that the character can stand all the way on the top of the square during dodge round. Also some enemies are incredibly powerful compared to others (the first robot is a beast compared to the final boss) and some battles just take a lot of time to beat like the first boss battle. After focusing one of the two enemies, the difficulty drops to 0 but you still have to be there for 3 minutes spamming attacks.
I believe that the story flow and dialogue have room for improvement, but I'm not sure how.
I think the game is fun since I played it for an entire hour before writing about it. I hope you can keep working on it and release it in the future.
That's a decent point about the controls/platforming, I'll review the level design and character jumping mechanics/speed.
Regarding combat I see what you mean. I probably went overboard giving the characters 3 different attack types character. I think I'll simply it down to two Melee and Ranged/Magic and make them in a straight line rather than the current diamond pattern (currently Right --> clockwise , Left --> Anticlockwise but I can see why that'd be a bit confusing) .
I'm in the middle of re-doing the battle zone/square, in this demo it's a pre-set size but I'm changing the logic so it's a logical grid of squares sized 16x16(same for enemy attacks) and the top of the grid being slightly higher so that the player doesn't look like they can stand ontop of it. So I can potentially have different sized Battle Zones or ones which can change in the middle of gameplay based on enemy attacks.
I agree enemies/bosses/balance has a lot of room for improvement. One of the things I've got planned is enemy/boss behaviour/AI . I'm planning on making a scripts to influence which attacks they have available/choose and how powerful their attack is (or letting a boss use 2 attacks in 1 turn) based on factors like how much HP they have left, number of turns in the battle, and how many other enemies are present. I think this will help make boss fights get more intense as you progress through a battle.
But I also want to play with some more ideas with the battle zone, like the Robot that's in the middle. I was considering boss battles where the Zone is a lot bigger and you have to do certain things, press buttons, interact with things during the enemies attack.
Dialogue and story I'll probably need to make snappier. Someone else on /vg/ said the scene with the other Reindeer should have only been 3 lines long, and in retrospective while it wasn't a wordy scene, a lot of the lines were basically just a different character saying the same thing.
Glad you enjoyed playing it, but also for a feedback. Those points regarding the platforming and the combat complexity are very good ones, I really didn't think about how accessible it was.
- in the ingame menu (with ESC), the "exit" button doesn't seem to exit the game, had to alt+f4 - the fights feel a little slow, especially since at start idk what i'm fighting for (exp? gold?)
Comments
I played it until after defeating the big robot in the factory, I still have to finish it.
I liked a lot the music in the game, specially the track in the first area. The sprites are charming and very expressive. The christmas games genre doesn't have many good games so if you manage to polish this game and release it you will certainly stand out!
The controls are a bit strange and I think they should be simplified or made more intuitive. The camera pan button is used mainly to do jumps, but you can replace it by building the levels in such a way that it is not needed. Maybe lowering the character speed and compacting the level so jumps are not bigger than one screen. Or automatically manipulating the camera when the player needs to jump. For example, in the initial after the intro is over the camera pans weirdly and keeps the main character on the bottom of the screen.
Talking about jumping, the height difference was easy to understand when it was an horizontal jump but not so much for vertical ones. I would recommend to use vertical jumps very sparingly. In some levels there is not tell for how high a platform is so one cannot be sure if a jump is possible. I believe that the height can be communicated properly by level design alone, so you should experiment a bit and find the best way to communicate it.
I got confused by how selecting a skill in battle works. All symbols changing place at once was very confusing. I never got the hang of it and mashed left/right until it cycled to the option I wanted. I dont understand why there are so many options for attacking. Some options are not worth it compared to others (horns vs hoofs, green magic vs squawk), it feels a bit overwhelming specially after getting the ring that reduces stats in exchange of traits spots.
It is strange that the character can stand all the way on the top of the square during dodge round. Also some enemies are incredibly powerful compared to others (the first robot is a beast compared to the final boss) and some battles just take a lot of time to beat like the first boss battle. After focusing one of the two enemies, the difficulty drops to 0 but you still have to be there for 3 minutes spamming attacks.
I believe that the story flow and dialogue have room for improvement, but I'm not sure how.
I think the game is fun since I played it for an entire hour before writing about it. I hope you can keep working on it and release it in the future.
Thanks for the thorough feedback.
That's a decent point about the controls/platforming, I'll review the level design and character jumping mechanics/speed.
Regarding combat I see what you mean. I probably went overboard giving the characters 3 different attack types character. I think I'll simply it down to two Melee and Ranged/Magic and make them in a straight line rather than the current diamond pattern (currently Right --> clockwise , Left --> Anticlockwise but I can see why that'd be a bit confusing) .
I'm in the middle of re-doing the battle zone/square, in this demo it's a pre-set size but I'm changing the logic so it's a logical grid of squares sized 16x16(same for enemy attacks) and the top of the grid being slightly higher so that the player doesn't look like they can stand ontop of it. So I can potentially have different sized Battle Zones or ones which can change in the middle of gameplay based on enemy attacks.
I agree enemies/bosses/balance has a lot of room for improvement. One of the things I've got planned is enemy/boss behaviour/AI . I'm planning on making a scripts to influence which attacks they have available/choose and how powerful their attack is (or letting a boss use 2 attacks in 1 turn) based on factors like how much HP they have left, number of turns in the battle, and how many other enemies are present. I think this will help make boss fights get more intense as you progress through a battle.
But I also want to play with some more ideas with the battle zone, like the Robot that's in the middle. I was considering boss battles where the Zone is a lot bigger and you have to do certain things, press buttons, interact with things during the enemies attack.
Dialogue and story I'll probably need to make snappier. Someone else on /vg/ said the scene with the other Reindeer should have only been 3 lines long, and in retrospective while it wasn't a wordy scene, a lot of the lines were basically just a different character saying the same thing.
Glad you enjoyed playing it, but also for a feedback. Those points regarding the platforming and the combat complexity are very good ones, I really didn't think about how accessible it was.
- in the ingame menu (with ESC), the "exit" button doesn't seem to exit the game, had to alt+f4
- the fights feel a little slow, especially since at start idk what i'm fighting for (exp? gold?)
other than that, great game anon!
will be playing it to the end at some point.
Cool, thanks for the feedback, glad you like it enough to consider playing to the end.
The ingame menu's "exit" meant closing the menu screen rather than quitting the game. But I could add an option to quit the game as well.
And I'll have a bit of a think about the battle pacing near the start . But yeah rewards for battles are exp, gold and items.