itch.io

Ah it works now! Ok so a few things that could use some polish.

I think I've already said this before, but this will add a lot to the aethetic of the game: variation. Since the game is inspired by Pokémon, I'll take it as an example. Imagine Pewter City from the original Pokémon Red and Blue (not the remakes). Now imagine Viridian Forest, or Cerulean City, or Mt. Moon. Even though that game relied on 1-bit graphics, it was able to use it to make highly memorable places, such that just looking at the layout of those places is an orientation compass for the player, the player can recognize where they are instantly. The general shape of these places, the layout, the style of the buildings, the props, the trees, the NPCs, and the ground tiles all variated from one place to the other, and worked together to building a memorable location. Pedro Medeiros, one of the artists for Celeste, talked about how they were finding the levels too repetitive and uninteresting in the visual sense. To solve that, they created a lot of "decals", which were basically a lot of useless background props, like torches, stop signs, broken huts, and whatnot, and those gave the levels very distinct personalities. If you're able to, if that won't be too much deviation from your focus on the moment, I'd love to see more variation on that and, a bit more polish on the ground tiles maybe.

In that sense, the music could use a bit more of variation too. I like the instruments and the general feel of it, maybe it was just me but the rhythm feel a bit off. But what's lacking really is a bit of variation on the music loop, maybe make it longer, with more sections, maybe make it so the music changes from town to town. It would be a great addition to the game!

For bugs, even though I choosed fire, I could only use water moves on the battle. I felt that the Wave attack was too op, and I was kinda confused about the difference between each attack, maybe there could be a tutorial or some help box explaining what each attack does. The dialogue also broke when the battle ended. I found a bug too where I spoke to Sensei Lin before Peter when I arrived at the new town, and that kinda broke the progression.

Last thing, though it's more of a question than anything: have you considered using or at least prototyping your game in RPG Maker? It seems the game you're trying to make would be way easier to do in that engine than in Unity, since it's got all the tools for making a Pokémon-esque RPG, like isometric view, turn-based battlingmechanics, XP and leveling... Maybe you just feel comfortable using unity and that's fine, but you should take a look on that too, because the particularities of that engine might allow you to focus on the parts you really wanna work on in your game (which, if I'm not mistaken, is the story) and get through everything faster.

I think that's about it. Cheers, love to see your progress ^^