Tbh I think this comment kinda ruined my day here. But thanks for giving me the first taste of harsh criticism since I'm sure I'm going to have to deal with it a lot in the future.
It won't stop me from doing what I want to do, though.
That's good! I don't want to stop creators making stuff, I want to help them make it better. But if you want to get genuine feedback, there's no point me sugar-coating that I enjoyed it if I didn't.
If you want specific criticism of the combat, aside from it taking far too long to get to, it'd be something like this:
a) I didn't feel like I was being effective. The point of taking out enemies is to stop them from preventing you achieving a goal, right? If they just get back up again, I don't feel like I was really achieving anything in that regard. If the goal in that area was to kill a lot of enemies to unlock the next bit, then I don't feel that was very apparent; perhaps a kill counter or some kind of feedback that killing them is what you're meant to do. Instead what it felt like was that I was trying to get to a goal, and when I got to the end of the map and realised there was no path 'up' to the circle and got cornered by like a dozen zombie rocks, I just felt dispirited.
b) The combat itself is clunky to control. This is to some extent because it's been put into a engine that's not really built for it, and to be honest having the strafe option really made it work better than I would have thought, but it mostly meant that I was just kiting enemies into a straight line then backpeddling while firing. Over and over again. Again, if I only had to do that once or twice and then the next map opened up, that's more paletable, but I felt like I had been doing that for quite a while to no effect.
c) This is a more minor thing but I found the giant explosive FX that you got on a successful hit to be a mismatch for the apparently tiny amount of damage each shot actually did.
Returning to the story for a second, there's aspects I like. I thought Mikka as a literal cat turned human was cute, the weird magician dad was fun, the animation scripting for the cutscenes reminded me of old-school Harvest Moon cutscenes, it was all sort of cute. But again, the pacing was just extremely long. Even the intro cutscene with villagers, that cutscene alone, the exploration of peaceful life before the lightning strikes - I was already anxious to get going by that time the lightning hit. Especially in game jams, where the people playing are often looking at a whole bunch of games in a row, I think it's important to grab people's attention quickly and effectively.
a) You have to defeat a specific number of enemies for the path to appear. Since it apparently wasn't obvious, I guess I'll add an 'objective' texts that will tell you what to do. (Along with number of enemy required to defeat in order to move forward)
b) This version I'm working on should fix the clunky combat to some extent. Also, after I read your comment I also went to find a way to make combat faster, and the result was.....spectacular. Once I upload it I bet no one will complain about this issue ever again.
c) Each shot actually deals 200 damage. Since the stone enemies have 500 HP, you'll be able to defeat them in 4 hits (1 extra hit because of my shoddy programming XD) So I don't really understand where this problem is coming from, and you're also not the first to report it. I think it's more because the combat was so slow that the enemies seemed tougher than they actually were. Again, the next version will fix this problem.
I'm glad there's some aspect of the story that you liked. Apparently, even the initial 4-minute cutscene was still too long? Hmm...I think I know how to fix this. How about you immediately get right into the action after that cutscene? That'll fix the slow pacing, right? I need to modify the story a bit this way, though. Actually, this seems like a pretty good idea, I'll do this in v.0.1.3.
Not to say that v.0.1.2 will be a trivial update, though. Rather, it will be something that'll certainly fix up the slow pacing and combat issues quite a LOT....though not in a very conventional way.
Tbh I had a pretty negative view of you before, but now I've got a lot of ideas on how to improve my game thanks to you. So, thank you for taking the time to review!