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hythrain136 days ago (1 edit) (+1)

Hello! Welcome to Feedback Quest 7! My name's Hythrain and I'm one of the hosts and one of the streamers for this event! This feedback is being written live as I stream your game! If you're interested in seeing my live reaction, let me know and I can send you a link to the VOD once it's posted to YouTube!

So my normal approach for any game in these events is simple: I get the game, make sure it's not a virus, then play it with as little information on how to play as possible. This way, I can judge how intuitively someone can figure out the game. Only if it's obvious that I need to read more will I do so. I note this so you can get a sense where some of these feedback comes from. In addition, I want to note that feedback and rating are different; don't use this feedback to gauge what I'll rate, nor should you view my rating as entirely indicative of my feedback.

I'm not going to comment on the visuals since when attempting to play this I did learn you were going for something specific. However, that doesn't mean I can't speak on gameplay.

So first, I think a map would be a good idea. This place is a maze and I kept getting lost. You can make it where you have to explore an area to put it on the map, but once you do it'll label things if you open the map. Otherwise, it can be pretty easy to get lost.

Second, there needs to be a reason to engage in combat. Beyond characters having a kill counter, fighting provided nothing it seemed. Alternatively, the length of battle and how things are programmed means RNG can really rake you over the coals. I got to a point where I just ran from battle because I had no reason to do it.

Lastly, please add sound. It's so quiet and lonely. D:

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Daniel "MontyOnTheRun" Monteiro135 days ago

Hello Hythrain, thank you very much!
I would like to have the Youtube link, please.
As for your feedback, thank you for pointing out those things.

The map is something that's been pointed out before, but I'm unsure if that's a matter of bad level design or if I should really add a map (something I believe might take the player out of the context of the simulation...but the prequel to this game had a map).

As for the motivation for the combat, it is a very fair question and one I've been considering even before I first released this demo. The prequel didn't have combat, only puzzles, and I felt like it missed something, but I didn't stop to properly craft into the narrative for a reason for this combat to happen.

My previous games (such as Dungeons of Noudar and The Mistral Report) had combat quite woven into the level design, almost like a environmental storytelling and without a "combat screen". This time I decided to try something different, but I kind of prefer the other way - I totally understand why older games required this kind of separation, but I honestly don't need it (even with the meager 288KB of RAM on the GBA). 

On my way forward, I want to add more life into to the world and have the player interacting and conflicting with other characters.  This might even help making the places more memorable and easier to navigate without a map.

The saddest part is that this combat screen took me a long time to code :(


Regarding the sound, I'm still trying to find my way around the GBA sound hardware in way that makes it compatible with my other systems. Right now, the DOS version has *some* sound, as well as my (still unreleased) native MacOS version.

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hythrain130 days ago(+1)

Here is a link to the VOD.

I will say, one of the things I wanted to make sure of when I played this game was I kept in mind the intended limitations of the game. I'm a proponent that old hardware doesn't mean bad game, and that games  designed today on retro hardware should still meet with today's standards. When in doubt on what the real problem is, this is a good question to ask yourself: is this to modern gaming standards and sensibilities? If not, why? Once you know why, ask if that reason why is intentional on your part? If it is, ok. You're trying to reflect an aspect of older gaming. In that situation, you should implement a tool that is designed to help people deal with it but make its use optional. A map in this scenario would work.

As for combat, you can save that combat so long as you put it to good use. So let's change a few things.

First, we need a reason to participate in combat and not just run. The answer is to make it that killing enemies gives something to the player. What could that be? Up to you if you want to add an RPG leveling system or an item drop system or something else. However, whatever the case may be you need to ensure that the value for victory is greater than the cost of fighting. You want people to engage in fights.

Of course, you can't make rewards way too strong or it'll break things quickly. The level of reward depends on how long a fight takes, so an easy way to ensure you don't give an OP reward is to make sure fights are shorter. This just involves changing some numbers and making it that enemies have less HP or you deal more damage to enemies. Not too hard to fix either way.

These two things alone will fix the "why fight" problem.

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