Been meaning to try your game for a while now, so I did this DD even if there are "only lighting changes."
You have a lot of extremely, extremely interesting mechanics. And you're clearly a good programmer able to implement it all very well. The graphics (obviously) will never appeal to "the masses" like this, but FWIW I felt the island had a lot of SOVL. I was excited just walking around discovering. I had forgotten how fun this part of Zelda is.
Difficulty I felt was through the roof. I have little experience with this style of combat (not Zelda - Dark Souls), but I felt that if you were to flesh this game out to 8 dungeons or so, this current dungeon would end up being one of the later ones. Then I found out that I can stunlock enemies just as they stunlock me, and it got a bit easier. Still some of those boss-type encounters were a bit ridiculous, having beaten 2 tentacleguys at the same time, I now have to beat 3?! Damn. Felt like it's either get oneshot, or cheese it from afar with the crossbow. Thankful that at least those enemies don't respawn.
I think there is great promise in spacing all the mechanics out. Like, key to the first dungeon would be to eat the right thing. After that dungeon, crafting would be introduced and would be key to beating the second dungeon. Then you get the special stab or so and that's key to beating the third dungeon. Fourth dungeon is doing the stunlock, or whatever. Fifth dungeon is some ranged combat. Etc. Basically you have enough mechanics already to fill a complete game with progression and learning. There is such a huge amount of cute little puzzles to be done just with the food alone!!
I mean, you're spacing things already -- but your "first dungeon" is only two rooms long... and for the second enemy one is instructed already to use a different attack than for the first one; even though I had actually more success still using the "grab and kill" method. All three mechanics taught between tent 1 and tent 2 could already benefit from needing to be done like 5 more times before reaching tent 2. It's quite similar as with Project Nortubel really. Believe in your mechanics being fun on their own (and make them be), don't rush the player to the stage where there is combat with 5 different moves and 4 different loadout axiis.
Scattered notes:
- At first I thought that everything (food, crafting material) would be consumed on usage, and thought the whole game was more of a survival-type thing. This could easily be improved with better phrasing and removing the "1/1" thingie from crafting (it implies there could be a 2/2 or 1/2) and so on
- Unlocking crafting material somehow feels less sensible than just finding the gear directly. Especially the intermediate crafting step (rope from hemp) makes no sense, does it? It's not like I have a limited supply of hemp and could dedice to make something else from it. Maybe the whole thing should be more like a "tech tree" where you can see that "discover Iron in order to unlock Body Armour equipment option" and so on.
- Water pipe riddle felt a bit too involved, final part was trial&error on my part, did not understand it fully
- You fight through the whole dungeon in order to find... a fucking lever?! I could've made that on my crafting bench!
- Maybe a button to "return home and start the next day"? Sometimes I felt I should just suicide to save time rather than walk back home. (Guess makes sense only with the XP preserving food)
- Leaflets are very cute, but I did not immediately understand how they were teaching things. I kept pressing Alt looking at the page with the Alt key, hoping to unlock a secret
- The difficulties swinging your weapon in corridors, visually make no sense. I understand it's a neat little mechanic, but it's also annoying..
- Leveling is another system that is in the game. I could not feel an impact of the choices I made. (Or did it enable me to do the stunlock?!) I guess the system in principle is nice to enable progress even if you keep dying to the same enemies, making you able eventually to overcome them by sheer damage numbers.
- In the menu I kept wanting to press "Quit" to close it
- Why is ammo capacity limited in addition to bag capacity? Would be nicer if it was balanced just through how much bag space arrows take up, so you can have more build variety/trade-offs.
- In the very beginning, "press WASD" is instructed before you can even move
- Food choices could be pre-selected from previous day, or even locked in like the equipment loadout (even if that's a bit of a flavour fail, maybe?..)
- Respawn point is not automatically set to new tents you discover, this felt unintuitive
- Falling down that one hole into the river below was very cool. Too sad that in the other places you just lose some HP and get respawned.
- In the video around 1:09:00 I knock an enemy down the cliff and get surprised by it respawning. I did not expect this courtesy to extend to enemies
- Loved the morning music and how it gets more silent moving away from the tent
I believe the game has great potential to be a success, if eventually you find somebody who would make sick graphics for it. (And if not, it can still find a nieche audience.) Keep going!
Hey thanks for playing, and thanks for both taking a video and leaving such detailed feedback. I just finished watching the whole video.
At first I thought that everything (food, crafting material) would be consumed on usage, and thought the whole game was more of a survival-type thing. This could easily be improved with better phrasing and removing the "1/1" thingie from crafting (it implies there could be a 2/2 or 1/2) and so on
It is actually planned that you'll be able to find more of each material, but I'm going to try to communicate it like low grade, medium grade, and high grade iron, for example.
Unlocking crafting material somehow feels less sensible than just finding the gear directly. Especially the intermediate crafting step (rope from hemp) makes no sense, does it? It's not like I have a limited supply of hemp and could dedice to make something else from it. Maybe the whole thing should be more like a "tech tree" where you can see that "discover Iron in order to unlock Body Armour equipment option" and so on.
I really like this idea. If I can't figure out a better way to communicate what I'm going for, I'll see about pivoting in this direction.
Water pipe riddle felt a bit too involved, final part was trial&error on my part, did not understand it fully
You fight through the whole dungeon in order to find... a fucking lever?! I could've made that on my crafting bench!
Yeah, this dungeon was very much a test dungeon to see if I could make one. Also funny enough, you missed a few rooms and a map upgrade that let you better see the water pipes.
Maybe a button to "return home and start the next day"? Sometimes I felt I should just suicide to save time rather than walk back home. (Guess makes sense only with the XP preserving food)
Not a bad idea. I'll see about replacing the quit button with something like that, and putting the quit button else where.
The difficulties swinging your weapon in corridors, visually make no sense. I understand it's a neat little mechanic, but it's also annoying..
I absolutely need to make that more visually obvious what's going on.
Leveling is another system that is in the game. I could not feel an impact of the choices I made. (Or did it enable me to do the stunlock?!) I guess the system in principle is nice to enable progress even if you keep dying to the same enemies, making you able eventually to overcome them by sheer damage numbers.
Leveling didn't affect your ability to stun lock, you just hadn't been doing consecutive swings most of the time you had the sword. I need to find a way to tutorialize the fact that swinging the sword can be done constantly unlike the frying pan.
Why is ammo capacity limited in addition to bag capacity? Would be nicer if it was balanced just through how much bag space arrows take up, so you can have more build variety/trade-offs.
This is something I'm planning on having be an upgrade. Furthermore, I want to disincentivize cheesing with ranged. Funny enough, in ancient Hawaiian culture, which this game is based off of, it was believed a warrior could acquire the mana of their fallen foes, kind of like a leveling system in an RPG, but they could only do that if they were close enough when the foe died so they hardly used ranged weapons. I've been seriously considering making that how it works in Moku as well.
Food choices could be pre-selected from previous day, or even locked in like the equipment loadout (even if that's a bit of a flavour fail, maybe?..)
Good idea. I'll implement that.
Respawn point is not automatically set to new tents you discover, this felt unintuitive
Respawn point is not automatically set to new tents you discover, this felt unintuitive
Fair enough. I'll think about changing that.
I mean, if the game were to become somewhat non-linear (which would be cool), this could also be a nuisance. Maybe one can have the ability to ghost-travel from one tent to another during the night, as a "quick travel"? I don’t know if this fits any Hawaiian myths. FWIW in the old 2D Zelda games I think backtracking through the map without quick travel was quite fun. But in "Nobody Saves the World" the quick travel system is needed, since some areas will be so low-level that it’s not at all interesting anymore to go through them.
Comments
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2139497126
Been meaning to try your game for a while now, so I did this DD even if there are "only lighting changes."
You have a lot of extremely, extremely interesting mechanics. And you're clearly a good programmer able to implement it all very well. The graphics (obviously) will never appeal to "the masses" like this, but FWIW I felt the island had a lot of SOVL. I was excited just walking around discovering. I had forgotten how fun this part of Zelda is.
Difficulty I felt was through the roof. I have little experience with this style of combat (not Zelda - Dark Souls), but I felt that if you were to flesh this game out to 8 dungeons or so, this current dungeon would end up being one of the later ones. Then I found out that I can stunlock enemies just as they stunlock me, and it got a bit easier. Still some of those boss-type encounters were a bit ridiculous, having beaten 2 tentacleguys at the same time, I now have to beat 3?! Damn. Felt like it's either get oneshot, or cheese it from afar with the crossbow. Thankful that at least those enemies don't respawn.
I think there is great promise in spacing all the mechanics out. Like, key to the first dungeon would be to eat the right thing. After that dungeon, crafting would be introduced and would be key to beating the second dungeon. Then you get the special stab or so and that's key to beating the third dungeon. Fourth dungeon is doing the stunlock, or whatever. Fifth dungeon is some ranged combat. Etc. Basically you have enough mechanics already to fill a complete game with progression and learning. There is such a huge amount of cute little puzzles to be done just with the food alone!!
I mean, you're spacing things already -- but your "first dungeon" is only two rooms long... and for the second enemy one is instructed already to use a different attack than for the first one; even though I had actually more success still using the "grab and kill" method. All three mechanics taught between tent 1 and tent 2 could already benefit from needing to be done like 5 more times before reaching tent 2. It's quite similar as with Project Nortubel really. Believe in your mechanics being fun on their own (and make them be), don't rush the player to the stage where there is combat with 5 different moves and 4 different loadout axiis.
Scattered notes:
- At first I thought that everything (food, crafting material) would be consumed on usage, and thought the whole game was more of a survival-type thing. This could easily be improved with better phrasing and removing the "1/1" thingie from crafting (it implies there could be a 2/2 or 1/2) and so on
- Unlocking crafting material somehow feels less sensible than just finding the gear directly. Especially the intermediate crafting step (rope from hemp) makes no sense, does it? It's not like I have a limited supply of hemp and could dedice to make something else from it. Maybe the whole thing should be more like a "tech tree" where you can see that "discover Iron in order to unlock Body Armour equipment option" and so on.
- Water pipe riddle felt a bit too involved, final part was trial&error on my part, did not understand it fully
- You fight through the whole dungeon in order to find... a fucking lever?! I could've made that on my crafting bench!
- Maybe a button to "return home and start the next day"? Sometimes I felt I should just suicide to save time rather than walk back home. (Guess makes sense only with the XP preserving food)
- Leaflets are very cute, but I did not immediately understand how they were teaching things. I kept pressing Alt looking at the page with the Alt key, hoping to unlock a secret
- The difficulties swinging your weapon in corridors, visually make no sense. I understand it's a neat little mechanic, but it's also annoying..
- Leveling is another system that is in the game. I could not feel an impact of the choices I made. (Or did it enable me to do the stunlock?!) I guess the system in principle is nice to enable progress even if you keep dying to the same enemies, making you able eventually to overcome them by sheer damage numbers.
- In the menu I kept wanting to press "Quit" to close it
- Why is ammo capacity limited in addition to bag capacity? Would be nicer if it was balanced just through how much bag space arrows take up, so you can have more build variety/trade-offs.
- In the very beginning, "press WASD" is instructed before you can even move
- Food choices could be pre-selected from previous day, or even locked in like the equipment loadout (even if that's a bit of a flavour fail, maybe?..)
- Respawn point is not automatically set to new tents you discover, this felt unintuitive
- Falling down that one hole into the river below was very cool. Too sad that in the other places you just lose some HP and get respawned.
- In the video around 1:09:00 I knock an enemy down the cliff and get surprised by it respawning. I did not expect this courtesy to extend to enemies
- Loved the morning music and how it gets more silent moving away from the tent
I believe the game has great potential to be a success, if eventually you find somebody who would make sick graphics for it. (And if not, it can still find a nieche audience.) Keep going!
Hey thanks for playing, and thanks for both taking a video and leaving such detailed feedback. I just finished watching the whole video.
At first I thought that everything (food, crafting material) would be consumed on usage, and thought the whole game was more of a survival-type thing. This could easily be improved with better phrasing and removing the "1/1" thingie from crafting (it implies there could be a 2/2 or 1/2) and so on
It is actually planned that you'll be able to find more of each material, but I'm going to try to communicate it like low grade, medium grade, and high grade iron, for example.
Unlocking crafting material somehow feels less sensible than just finding the gear directly. Especially the intermediate crafting step (rope from hemp) makes no sense, does it? It's not like I have a limited supply of hemp and could dedice to make something else from it. Maybe the whole thing should be more like a "tech tree" where you can see that "discover Iron in order to unlock Body Armour equipment option" and so on.
I really like this idea. If I can't figure out a better way to communicate what I'm going for, I'll see about pivoting in this direction.
Water pipe riddle felt a bit too involved, final part was trial&error on my part, did not understand it fully
You fight through the whole dungeon in order to find... a fucking lever?! I could've made that on my crafting bench!
Yeah, this dungeon was very much a test dungeon to see if I could make one. Also funny enough, you missed a few rooms and a map upgrade that let you better see the water pipes.
Maybe a button to "return home and start the next day"? Sometimes I felt I should just suicide to save time rather than walk back home. (Guess makes sense only with the XP preserving food)
Not a bad idea. I'll see about replacing the quit button with something like that, and putting the quit button else where.
The difficulties swinging your weapon in corridors, visually make no sense. I understand it's a neat little mechanic, but it's also annoying..
I absolutely need to make that more visually obvious what's going on.
Leveling is another system that is in the game. I could not feel an impact of the choices I made. (Or did it enable me to do the stunlock?!) I guess the system in principle is nice to enable progress even if you keep dying to the same enemies, making you able eventually to overcome them by sheer damage numbers.
Leveling didn't affect your ability to stun lock, you just hadn't been doing consecutive swings most of the time you had the sword. I need to find a way to tutorialize the fact that swinging the sword can be done constantly unlike the frying pan.
Why is ammo capacity limited in addition to bag capacity? Would be nicer if it was balanced just through how much bag space arrows take up, so you can have more build variety/trade-offs.
This is something I'm planning on having be an upgrade. Furthermore, I want to disincentivize cheesing with ranged. Funny enough, in ancient Hawaiian culture, which this game is based off of, it was believed a warrior could acquire the mana of their fallen foes, kind of like a leveling system in an RPG, but they could only do that if they were close enough when the foe died so they hardly used ranged weapons. I've been seriously considering making that how it works in Moku as well.
Food choices could be pre-selected from previous day, or even locked in like the equipment loadout (even if that's a bit of a flavour fail, maybe?..)
Good idea. I'll implement that.
Respawn point is not automatically set to new tents you discover, this felt unintuitive
Fair enough. I'll think about changing that.
I mean, if the game were to become somewhat non-linear (which would be cool), this could also be a nuisance. Maybe one can have the ability to ghost-travel from one tent to another during the night, as a "quick travel"? I don’t know if this fits any Hawaiian myths. FWIW in the old 2D Zelda games I think backtracking through the map without quick travel was quite fun. But in "Nobody Saves the World" the quick travel system is needed, since some areas will be so low-level that it’s not at all interesting anymore to go through them.