I'd like to point out a few things:
- The lights/sections of wall flickering on and off depending on distance as you move around can be quite harsh visually, and might benefit from a bit of a fade effect?
- The tutorial gate timing is really rough for when you just boot up the game for the first time. Took me 10 tries. Either lower the cooldown for Q while in the tutorial, or nerf the gate by half a second.
- The inventory item tooltips flicker as you mouse over them. Quite a harsh transition from item to item and since that's something you do a lot, consider giving the tooltips a bit of a fade time. 200-500ms or something. This would mean smooth transition from tooltip to tooltip. Much cleaner.
- The Bear trap being 3D while being set by a 2D character feels off. It doesn't make sense to me "conceptually". I fully expected a sprite. I don't know if this one makes sense, just something that came to mind.
- Many iron bars I had no idea how to get to the other side of. Are there hidden switches? If so, what's the interact key? Are they display pieces? If so, best practice would be to make sure that you have a slightly different texture for iron bars that CANT and CAN be moved. This will improve and solidify the gameplay and readability of the overall game for the player.
- Not being able to jump on tables and tiny boxes put me off a bit at first, but I think overall it makes for a much cleaner gameplay experience.
- You might be able to detect the users native desktop resolution upon launch and scale the UI accordingly. I found the default much too small.
- TAB being default for camera and I being for inventory feels clunky. Unless there's gameplay reasons I'm not aware off that encourage switching between first person and third person often I'd suggest moving default controls for the camera to V for "View" and TAB can become Inventory, since its much closer to the other controls and the player (presumably) needs it more often than the Camera toggle. I rebound the keys a few minutes in and it made my experience much smoother.
All that being said, this is by far my favorite game I've played on DD57. It needs polish sure, and I wish the dungeon was randomly generated for infinite replayability (I'm guessing its not, because its much too well designed to be random), but honestly I've only gotten as far as the yellow area, and the bandit mine, and only on one single Lvl5 fighter. This means my knowledge on the gameplay loop and progression systems is very limited so I wont comment further on it. The animations, atmosphere, music, SFX, enemies, combat are all great, and I'll be playing this demo more in the future.
Good job, Archtower: 82%