Thank you for taking the time to play my game and to leave a comment.

I agree. The game lacks something that conveys the the effect of actions. The defense and healing strategy is a valid tactic and is fair play. There is a penalty for when an attack exceeds the defense, but the computer logic isn't capable of noticing repeat behaviour and capitalising on it by using a powerful attack to inflict even greater damage. 

I would like to continue development on this, as it is extremely incomplete. My goal since the start of this year is to submit to a game jam per month for this year (I'm now up to 7 with Greenlight jam being completed!) - I've learned a couple of new concepts from this game jam alone, so I want to accumulate more experience and knowledge from making more complicated games before attempting to make improvements on previous projects.

Thanks for reporting the UI issue. UI and artwork design is still a weakness of mine, so the entire UI needs to be redesigned once I get the chance to continue development.

Thank you for taking the time to play my game and to leave a comment.

I was hoping to learn to use the 2D animation rigging to animate the movement and attacks, but I just wasn't fast enough to program the things that I needed.

Funnily enough,  the defense action cost was initially higher than some attacks during early development. The defense actions requiring less energy than attacks was decided midway as I developed my initial concept and created more actions more for certain types of actions beating other actions.  The rationale was that the lower defense cost would would allow a character to wait out an opponent that spams low-cost, but fast offensive moves, but would be open to receiving extra damage if they tried to defend against more damaging attacks. Unfortunately, this interaction still needs better opponent logic to be programmed. I will need to think over energy costs when I have a more complete actions list.

Thank you for taking the time to play my game and for leaving a comment.

Yes I agree: the lack of animations and a report section blunts the impact of the actions that you take, and makes it confusing to play. There's a conspicuous space in the bottom right corner for the report section, but I wasn't able to implement it in time or even start it.  

In hindsight, I think if I just focused on fight moves and animation, or just the subsystem damaging aspect whilst showing the needed information, the cause and effect from taking actions would have been better conveyed. This would have been made the game more coherent. However, I failed to to identify which set of aspects would have achieve this result, and ended up stretching myself too thin by focusing on all of these aspects instead of a critical set. It's my first time encountering this type of problem, so it has been a  great learning experience.

Thanks again for the feedback!

Thank you for taking the time to play my game and leaving a comment.

I agree that an after-turn report, and knowledge of the opponent's available actions is needed for the body part targeting to have any meaningful impact: at the moment, it's one-way in that only the player knows what actions they lose access to once their body part is broken. Funnily enough, I only considered these elements after playing your game, which worked in these types of elements quite nicely (once again - great work!).

During the initial concept, I did consider having one body part be the critical part (chest for Mech; head for the Kaiju), but I was concerned that the strategy would simply devolve into "Be the first to eliminate the critical part". I also wanted to give the player a chance to keep fighting regardless of the loss of that body part, which is why there's an overall health bar and thr option to attack already broken parts for extra damage. 

Amusingly, in replying to your feedback, a new idea popped into my head (unless this is what you meant by "critical part", in which case I've only just understood what you meant): once the critical part is broken, the core of that character is exposed - once the core is broken, then that character is dead. This still allows the character to fight back despite losing the critical part, but now they have a new loss condition imposed on them (either deplete main overall health, have all subsystems destroyed, or have their core exposed and then destroyed)

There's still much to work on, and your feedback has given me a new venue to consider and explore - Thanks again!