Your characters are wonderful and your writing is great. It hits precisely the "videogame style." Graphics in the 'illustrated' scenes are sweet. The game flow felt professional.
In terms of game-play, I was disappointed. From the first battles and the game title, I started with the impression that this is a kinda fun approach to turn-based RPG combat. And I really think it has huge potential. But increasingly it became clear in the game that the only party you will ever control are these 3 characters, with their 2 special moves each and that is it. In any sort of monster-collector type game, or at least Darkest Dungeons type, I would be hyped about AG’s combat system. But the outlook of using this one fixed party through the whole game is rather dreadfully boring tbh desu.
I’ve collected these other notes on game-play:
- Imho you should either have multi-tiered perks, and everything cost just 1 point, or nothing but singleton perks, that may come in different costs. Your mixture of different costs + different amount of tiers is annoying.
- Idk why special moves are 2 clicks away. There is enough space to list them straight-up.
- First time I visit a store, I leave, come back, inventory has changed. Also when I bought something and left and came back, the inventory was restocked. If these are intended, the restock should just happen immediately.
- 3v1 situations are boring to finish off, many RPGs have an "Autofight" button for this. Imho in your setting it would be fitting for the remaining enemy to just give up / run away.
- Enemy positions are very irrelevant, right? So the character movement is just a glorified recharge bar? [Flavour-wise, this running back and forth makes no sense.] Maybe combat could be better/deeper, if everything was much related to position. Idk.
- In many RPGs, you largely fight weaker enemies. You may even grind them as long as you like for XP, "make you own difficulty" as Horbror put it. In AG, every battle is decisive. But the battles are in teams, and there is terrain-supplied RNG. That means you can die to the enemy getting lucky, and the AI choosing (randomly, I guess) to focus down one of your chars.
- I missed the trinkets for a while it seems. Don’t know if I missed an explanation. I saw a message "new trinkets unlocked" briefly, but needed another 30 minutes until I understood what that meant.
- Very surprised that losing a battle is just game over. After all the talk about the eternal afterlife tournaments and all.
Eventually, my savegame was bricked by a bad item. First, some shopkeeper wouldn’t sell to me (angry reaction) though I had one slot open; afterwards when I clicked Items in battle, the game would segfault. I can give you the savefile and coredumps if needed. Find me in the Hypercoven discord. ;)
That's a lot of feedback and I appreciate it. Trinkets are a recent addition that I haven't integrated all that well yet, although the trinket slot has an animation to let you know when you have unlocked some. I think some of the things you have brought up make more sense in-universe after reaching certain points in the story. As an example, skills that affect positioning become more prevalent later on and you also may get to play as other characters. Who knows.
I'll look into the issue with the store too. Thanks again.
Nice game, it's quite a bizarre experience in a good way. I felt atracted to the characters as the game progressed, I only got past the first round tho but the story did keep me intrigued about what was going to happen later. The world itself feels interesting.
The combat was satisfying as well, nice turn based mechanics and the mana system was easy to understand and manage. Interesting setting you have here. Good work!
The combat was easy to work out but there is a lot of information given to me without any context for the first couple minutes of the game that sort of overwhelmed me.
I've found it rather difficult to balance the rate at which information is presented. I think a lot of RPGs have this problem. As an example, you are often asked to create a character before you know what skills are useful, but I digress.
I don't think the player needs to know the finer details unless they hit a wall or don't understand what a specific icon means although I tried to make them as intuitive as I could. I also shouldn't discount the possibility that by simply having that information available I'm implying that all of it is going to be relevant in the near future which isn't the case.
I also think I should add an exclamation icon on top of the tutorial or something.
Slight improvements to UI, new slides for demo end slides, new trinket system allowing each character to equip an additional perk-like item, and a new fishing minigame.
Comments
Part1 https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2193013382
Part2 https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2193163328
Your characters are wonderful and your writing is great. It hits precisely the "videogame style." Graphics in the 'illustrated' scenes are sweet. The game flow felt professional.
In terms of game-play, I was disappointed. From the first battles and the game title, I started with the impression that this is a kinda fun approach to turn-based RPG combat. And I really think it has huge potential. But increasingly it became clear in the game that the only party you will ever control are these 3 characters, with their 2 special moves each and that is it. In any sort of monster-collector type game, or at least Darkest Dungeons type, I would be hyped about AG’s combat system. But the outlook of using this one fixed party through the whole game is rather dreadfully boring tbh desu.
I’ve collected these other notes on game-play:
- Imho you should either have multi-tiered perks, and everything cost just 1 point, or nothing but singleton perks, that may come in different costs. Your mixture of different costs + different amount of tiers is annoying.
- Idk why special moves are 2 clicks away. There is enough space to list them straight-up.
- First time I visit a store, I leave, come back, inventory has changed. Also when I bought something and left and came back, the inventory was restocked. If these are intended, the restock should just happen immediately.
- 3v1 situations are boring to finish off, many RPGs have an "Autofight" button for this. Imho in your setting it would be fitting for the remaining enemy to just give up / run away.
- Enemy positions are very irrelevant, right? So the character movement is just a glorified recharge bar? [Flavour-wise, this running back and forth makes no sense.] Maybe combat could be better/deeper, if everything was much related to position. Idk.
- In many RPGs, you largely fight weaker enemies. You may even grind them as long as you like for XP, "make you own difficulty" as Horbror put it. In AG, every battle is decisive. But the battles are in teams, and there is terrain-supplied RNG. That means you can die to the enemy getting lucky, and the AI choosing (randomly, I guess) to focus down one of your chars.
- I missed the trinkets for a while it seems. Don’t know if I missed an explanation. I saw a message "new trinkets unlocked" briefly, but needed another 30 minutes until I understood what that meant.
- Very surprised that losing a battle is just game over. After all the talk about the eternal afterlife tournaments and all.
Eventually, my savegame was bricked by a bad item. First, some shopkeeper wouldn’t sell to me (angry reaction) though I had one slot open; afterwards when I clicked Items in battle, the game would segfault. I can give you the savefile and coredumps if needed. Find me in the Hypercoven discord. ;)
Cheers
Thank you for playing.
That's a lot of feedback and I appreciate it. Trinkets are a recent addition that I haven't integrated all that well yet, although the trinket slot has an animation to let you know when you have unlocked some. I think some of the things you have brought up make more sense in-universe after reaching certain points in the story. As an example, skills that affect positioning become more prevalent later on and you also may get to play as other characters. Who knows.
I'll look into the issue with the store too. Thanks again.
Nice game, it's quite a bizarre experience in a good way. I felt atracted to the characters as the game progressed, I only got past the first round tho but the story did keep me intrigued about what was going to happen later. The world itself feels interesting.
The combat was satisfying as well, nice turn based mechanics and the mana system was easy to understand and manage. Interesting setting you have here. Good work!
Thank you for your kind comment.
The combat was easy to work out but there is a lot of information given to me without any context for the first couple minutes of the game that sort of overwhelmed me.
Video:
Thanks for trying the game.
I've found it rather difficult to balance the rate at which information is presented. I think a lot of RPGs have this problem. As an example, you are often asked to create a character before you know what skills are useful, but I digress.
I don't think the player needs to know the finer details unless they hit a wall or don't understand what a specific icon means although I tried to make them as intuitive as I could. I also shouldn't discount the possibility that by simply having that information available I'm implying that all of it is going to be relevant in the near future which isn't the case.
I also think I should add an exclamation icon on top of the tutorial or something.
What is new since the last time:
Some bug fixing based on DD 56 feedback, new slides for the intro, new store assets and some proofreading.
https://bakar.itch.io/afterlife-gladiator/devlog/733923/devlog-28-the-secret-ing...
New combat animations and more proofreading.
https://bakar.itch.io/afterlife-gladiator/devlog/741861/devlog-29-six-frames-per...
Slight improvements to UI, new slides for demo end slides, new trinket system allowing each character to equip an additional perk-like item, and a new fishing minigame.
https://bakar.itch.io/afterlife-gladiator/devlog/750882/devlog-30-obligatory-fis...
More new slides, new card game minigame and, you guessed it, more proofreading.
https://bakar.itch.io/afterlife-gladiator/devlog/760034/devlog-31-born-to-sleep