Hey, I'm a student in Game Development from the South of France. Me and my team (4 people) are doing some playtests session and giving some feedbacks to projects !
We played your game and then we did a playtest with 3 students.
Although they weren't especially the audience target, one of them was a bit more than the others.
The game sessions lasted about 30 minutes each.
So here's the feedback.
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PROS (what works well with this prototype)
- The aesthetic is great, quite immersive, its pretty cool
- VFX/ SFX are nice and well integrated
- It evokes danganronpa style - inscryption / persona vibes and still remains quite original
- Lots of ideas, and a thoughtful game / combat design
- The combat system has good systems (ram/spells/predictions)
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CONS (the problems)
UI
- the font sizes, for some parts, don't reflect the importance of the information (ex : equipped spells name in menu)
- while in combat, we don't have enough informations on game elements (no hover to read even if there is the shift key for spell details)
- a lot of indications of inputs for interactions change from time to time for each step
FEATURES
- Tutorial is buggy and not present on second run (when erasing tutorial save) so most of the game’s notions are not intelligible / understood
- Table navigation for missions is difficult to understand (we do not know what we target / it's quite messy to point an element)
- The FPS part works and feels good, a bit like Inscryption but the additional camera's rotation by the mouse is frustrating.
BUGS
- Need to restart the game in order to unstuck during moving part in FPS view
- Enemies are not instanced (combats ends in 1 hit). Only the first boss works sometimes (this was on 0.1.1 build)
- No tutorial
FLOW
- Well thought out rhythm and phases but broken by the absence of enemy
- a lot of management of contracts / mandatory phases that breaks the player’s involvement
MISCELLANEOUS
- audio mixing for some parts is too loud (combats)
- Inputs aren't intuitive (keys from across the keyboard to make an action then another)
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To conclude, the game caught our eyes thanks to its visual style and pitch.
Your game design is very well put together, a lot of great ideas!
The combat system has a lot of potential.
The sound design is great.
Very impressive for a solo dev, we know what it takes, keep up the good work mate !