Nice game. It’s a real RPG, quest-like. I found the music immersive and some bits about the story were also nice. I would say I would enjoy some more bits of story and even perhaps being able to walk between “battles”. Like if we could actually progress in the story not only by being in battles but also doing other stuff. That would be for a longer game though, I understand there are limitations for a jam. And in that sense, I think the game was actualy pretty long for a game jam, and very complete!
Some things I thought. I struggled with switching targets and didn’t understand how to do it, or what was going on when I tried to do it. I don’t think it ever worked. As someone mentioned in the game page, it would be important to hear their voice when switching the target. Perhaps a better way would be to tab between targets, or like a hotkey to switch between targets.
I had some gripes with the pause screen. Particularly at the start I was pausing a lot to process the instructions, but the voice saying “Press the P key to resume the game” every 2 seconds was quite disruptive and going against the very reason I was pausing the game. I think this voice isn’t needed, and saying “Pause” would suffice. Or if anything saying that indication about how to resume the game could be there every 15 seconds but not as often as currently.
Some things I love:
- The fact there is a pause button at all!
- The subtitles. Extremely helpful. If improving the game you should think about them for the battle mode as well (so we can get visual cues to when someone’s healed for example). Plus displaying who’s talking in the captions.
- The visual cues I can look at during the battle. I ended up switching them off because trying to follow their voice and button mashing was more helpful and I wanted my imagination to work more than seeing the colorful cubes! But it’s great that they were there.
- The tutorial and the learning of the spells is very friendly and progressive. There weren’t several concepts introduced at once.
Some things that were confusing:
- I think I mostly just clicked every button in sequence without a proper strategy when I was in the battle. Since I didn’t really know the status of my friends nor the enemies’ and since I didn’t understand how switching target worked, I was just button mashing and trying to face a friend, especially the female voice who I knew to be weaker.
- In the tutorial, I was confusing when I first heard the “bump” sound when I tried to cast a spell but wasn’t facing my friend directly. That is because when I was rotating I heard him confirm I was facing him, but I must have clicked on the arrow key one extra time. So I heard him confirm but ended up not facing him when i actually stopped rotating. So i didn’t know why sending the spell wasn’t working. Perhaps it’d be nice to have a hint that we need to be facing him directly for the spell to work.
Great job, I hope it can grow more!