Post by New Retro Games in Playtesting thread

My First Game Jam: Winter 2018 » Community

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Hey there! My game is inspired by old school RPGs, with a dash of incremental/clicker games (though more on the RPG side). It's my first proper attempt to make a game:

https://newretrogames.itch.io/incrementalrpg

Being text-based and browser-based, it's really easy to whoosh through everything, and I want the final game to feel more "solid" and rewarding to get through, so...

I need help on: ways to make gameplay take longer but in a rewarding sense - without artificial difficulty or padding.

I know there's a LOT of content that still needs adding/fleshing out, and that the game is still an early prototype. But... thinking ahead, my feeling is that regardless, it will be too easy to breeze through the game content.

This is in part from my lack of game/design experience - I am good at coming up with ideas for things to add, but not so much on how to properly "gamify" them. I'd like the game to take longer, but preferably avoiding artificial padding, wait timers or other forced things like that. Rather, I want it to feel enjoyable and involving, like eating a good steak.. and rewarding when you finally make progress.

I have various ideas about how to do this, but not sure what's best! So would be good to hear ideas!

I'd like feedback on:

If you beat the game (you get a "final dungeon" msg), how long did it take to get there?
Any parts felt too fast, or too slow?
Of course, any bugs, etc

ps. It *should* run fine on android browsers (tested on iPhone and it doesnt, sorry!)

Escada Games6 years ago

Hey there Retro! I played your game for about one hour, and didn't finish it. But I have my reasons for such, that I will say on my feedback below! I played more or less until when skeletons start appearing, I believe it's when you start to explore the tunnels.

From what I could experience, I can say that it feels like a good clicker game. The RPG elements don't feel forced, and actually reinforce the loop of click -> buy upgrade -> click -> buy upgrade -> ... . From the description of the game -- " Build up your farm as it grows into a town. [...] " --, it sounded very interesting.

Then, the why I did stop playing: two bugs.

--The first one is that I couldn't sell Bronze Pieces to get Copper Pieces (the inverse, selling copper pieces to buy bronze ones, worked fine). So, at first I thought that buying a high value coin would be a good choice, but later in the game I noticed I couldn't do the inverse, and got stuck, since I had no money to buy upgrades, I couldn't get more money because the storages where full.

When I tried to sell the BP to get the CP, the following message appeared on the console:

Exchanged -1 Bronze piece(s) at a market rate of -79 per Copper piece(s).

While when selling CP to the BP, the message was:

Exchanged 1 Copper piece(s) at a market rate of 111 per Bronze piece(s).

I guess it might have something to do with the minus sign? I don't know.

--The second one might not be a bug: it happens that I could not craft any equipment. I guess I needed to click, or click and drag, but it didn't work. Also, I'm pretty sure I had the materials. This is not a game breaking glitch, but I believe it severely impacts the tempo of the game, and that is why I stopped playing.

Oh, and I'm using Google Chrome 63.0.3239.132 64 bits. Maybe that has something to do with these problems.

Continuating, in my opinion you could try make the game more fleshed out by expading on the RPG part. The clicker elements could then become kind of a way to break the constant battling, or a way of supporting the RPG part (like hiring better Blacksmiths for your city: however, you might have implemented this already and I just didn't get to it yet. Monster Hunter does something like this.).

Also, if you want to raise the difficulty and make the game more rewarding using the battles, I highly recomend checking out the Shin Megami Tensei 4 battle system. It is outstanding: extremely hard, but very, very satisfying once you understand the mechanics. For example, even low level monsters can kill your party if you are careless; however, the opposite is true, that is, the player can defeat high level monsters if plays correctly. Searching for "smt4 battle system" will give info on it.

I guess that's all I can say for now. When the problems I pointed are fixed, I believe I'll play it again, since what I saw during my short gameplay was nice!

New Retro Games6 years ago (1 edit)

Thank you so much, this is excellent useful feedback!

Those bugs should definitely not be happening - coins shouldn't have been showing minus signs, and I could craft equipment last time I played. All you need to do is click on the item name.

Luckily I was easily able to replicate and thus fix the bugs. Crafting was easy fix - my last update added a skill check (some items have higher skill req.), but it failed if you have not yet learnt the skill at all (from trying to craft something at least once). The coin trading was completely borked up somehow, the code there is particularly messy - will need to do a complete rewrite later... but for now it seems to work again! I tested trades in all directions with 1/10 at a time and seemed to all add up.

The city-building idea isn't in the game yet, sadly, currently there's a small bunch of upgrades for the farm. However, I've definitely still go plans to flesh that side out more soon!

Edit: Had a quick look and the shin megami tensei battle system does look quite interesting. Looking forward to watching some videos on it more in-depth later, thanks for the tip!

Escada Games6 years ago

Nice! You're welcome!

Just played a bit more of the game. Now I on the Old Dungeon Floor #2 (took about one hour and a half). Also, now I can craft items and buy/sell bronze without problem. However, found more bugs I guess and have some sugestions as well:

To craft the Copper Sword, it takes no copper, only wood;
In my opinion, as soon as the player gains the option to craft equipment, he should already be able to equip it or sell it or view a inventory with them, like the other resources. When I started crafting the weapons, I wasn't sure if they were being automatically equipped, and did not know how many I had of each;
Anyway, when I got the Party upgrade, I was able to equip a armour fine, but I could not use any weapon with the farmer (the starting character/ the player character). Maybe a skill related issue? Tried the following weapons:
- --Swords--
  Wooden sword (17 owned)
  Copper sword (75 owned) (yeah, crafted a bunch of these to be sure that they did not need copper.)
- --Staves--
  Wooden staff (1 owned)
- --Ranged--
  Crossbow (1 owned)
- --Daggers--
  Wooden knife (1 owned)
  Rusted knife (1 owned)
Also, I could not hire anyone. I guess I had to pay them, but I could not find the price (tried to hire with about 1000 copper pieces and 10 bronze pieces). The other buttons (reroll/another/reject) worked fine.

It was nice to see some fixes so fast! I think I will continue to keep checking and providing feedback on future updates, if you don't mind.

New Retro Games6 years ago

Thanks, that's valuable help. I didn't know anyone to playtest the game, so this is really useful.

Hopefully those bugs are fixed now! You were definitely correct re: equipment. I was testing the game I realised it was odd to not be able to equip stuff yet. (I should also add a msg "You crafted a sword, it has been placed in storage" or something to also make that clearer.

I couldn't figure out hiring bug, though... THAT one is weird. On my local copy of the game, you can hire no problem. But I played through it on Itch and I couldn't hire anyone either (even though it was the exact same version).. very weird. Since it works locally I can't use the debugger unfortunately --- and then it magically started working again for no apparent reason... Hopefully it works on your end too!

If all else fails, a Hard Reset (from the settings menu) often fixes the weirder problems, usually stemming from a change to the objects structures. But that means losing all your hard work progress fighting all those skeletons! I've been trying to avoid resorting to that, but could be a last resort.

You are absolutely welcome to check back and provide any feedback or input, here in this post or on the game page/comments Really helps!! Thanks again for putting up with the bugs!