Post by fqwehgtui in Retro Grinder comments

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This game has a lot of promise, but it's not very playable in its current state with the current balance. I played it a lot anyway to test it, and there's a lot I like about it, and I clearly see enough potential here that I put the time in to play it and write you this feedback, so I hope you don't feel overwhelmed or like this is a negative review. (it isn't)

Unlocking things and figuring out what to do is nice. The visuals are clean and aside from some early alpha hiccups I can see where you're going with it and it seems like you have a good handle on UX/UI.

Feedback:

- I wish the bottom menu had a dedicated "close currently open menu/go back to current area" screen. When I have "map" or inventory open and I want to close it I always clumsily click the one that isn't open and fumble it a few times. idk, I get why but it feels weird anyway to have backpack open and then click backpack again to close it. It'd make more sense visually if there was a (very fast) animation and the map/backpack slid up from the bottom of the screen, and the map button turned into a red "close this" button when map is open or something.

- when you have an item details open (like a food), if the inventory gets rearranged like from an item breaking, the item you have open changes (because you have that "slot" open, not that item). this is really really annoying because if you are clicking CONSUME and then the inventory rearranges, suddenly the DROP button is there for the next item if its not a consumable, and you often end up dropping items you dont want to.

- Similarly when berries are in the middle of your inventory and you're holding down consume to consume multiple stacks, your button keeps getting held down when you run out of berries. When you're out of the item, it should kick you back out of the "item details".

- iron dagger sprite doesn't show up in inventory (you get the item, but it's blank)

- I can't buy gold cooking pot, even though I have over 1000 gold coins (the other buy screens show GOLD COINS: 1075 (PRICE), but gold cooking pot screen shows GOLD COINS: 0 (1000)) (I hope it's more interesting than just a cooking pot with more uses on it, since I still haven't even half broken the first pot I got after cooking a couple hundred fish)

- thieving isn't balanced good, for gold its best to just keep stealing from villager. check your math on how long it takes to steal from each (3s, 6s, 10s) and how much average gold you're expecting to get (treating failures, daggers, and bread as 0 gold), and how much that ends up being "per second" (not just "per steal")

- the game really needs autoequip functions to make it less tedious. if I have 10 pickaxes of the same type and I'm idle mining and one breaks, it should automatically equip the next pickaxe that's the exact same type. it's okay if it doesn't automatically equip a stone pickaxe if I was using iron.

- autoconsume would be nice too, but instead of that just a quick eat button visible on the main screen that you can assign a food to would be nice so you dont have to keep switching to your inventory. And I think the green potion is meant to help with this (and if you can autoequip the next green potion when it breaks like I said above, that would go a long way towards helping this)

- grinding out stone for stone skin potion to get from level 0 to 2 for the next potion was pretty tedious, gathering picks in the early game from chests and with gold

- I was catching stonefish for mining potion but I only had 1 slot left in backpack when I started, and it was confusing why stonefish didn't stack. same thing happened when I was getting bones. item info screen should show max stack size maybe (also why don't stonefish stack? fish stack, stone stacks, was confusing)

- I can't craft the second fishing rod and it says "OAK WOODS: 0 (1)", is it labeled the wrong wood type and it actually requires the 2nd wood type?

- to unlock cotton am I really supposed to just leave it sitting there picking red berries for a long time? I've already unlocked fishing and cooking, and cooked sardines are better for item stacks and for value, and Ive already left gathering sitting there for a while but its only level 16

- some of the unlocks are very time consuming... how much wood do I have to chop to reach 25 woodcutting? And the rate a which you reach them doesn't match up for all of them sometimes. I still haven't unlocked the blue ore yet, but I'm close. My current stats are:

Fighting: 14/99

Fishing: 19/99

Cooking: 9/99

Mining: 23/99 <-- 2 levels away from blue ore

Woodcutting: 8/99 <-- 17 levels away from 2nd wood

Crafting: 11/99 <-- 14 levels away from blue pick

Gathering: 16/99 <-- 9 levels away from cotton (robe recipe already unlocked)

Alchemy: 3/99

Smelting: 14/99 <-- 11 levels away from blue smelting

Market: 7/99

Thieving: 35/99

Lockpicking: 7/99

While playing I've also had fang necklaces equipped as often as possible, stockpiling batches snake fangs for when they break, even though I barely notice the 5% exp boost (I still haven't checked if it even works)

- it's not clear what certain bonuses do or if they even work. you should show the exp numbers somewhere (how much you get from tasks, and how much you have + how much is left) Does "+25% crafting" mean you get 25% more crafting EXP, or that crafting happens 25% faster, or that the items are 25% better? I had to screenshot the exp bar and do comparisons and use a stop watch to figure it out, and it seems like it has no effect on EXP, and it speeds up crafting. But it doesn't speed it up by 25%. Because crafting 10 wooden shields without beginner hammer took me 30 seconds (I used a split timer, and with a little margin of error since I'm human it showed 3 seconds per craft), and crafting 10 with the hammer took 29 seconds (split timer showed 2.9 seconds per craft). 0.1 isn't 25% of 3.

- I didn't directly measure the mining speed potion but it DEFINITELY didn't feel like it was speeding it up as much as it said it was, didn't feel sped up at all.

- As you level up skills I expected you'd get better at that skill and do it faster. Like pick berries faster at level 10 than at level 0. Fail less often when stealing at level 20 than level 10. Maybe even make better potions at higher level. But none of this happens it looks like it's just an unlock meter.

- Similarly I thought the iron pick might be faster than the basic one, but it was just more uses. That's okay, it's nice that I'm able to craft them, but hopefully at least the blue pick makes you mine faster.

- status screen should show all your stats (like defense and any exp bonuses or skill speeds), but you probably have that planned

I hope you found this useful and good luck with your game.

axilirate2 years ago(+1)

these are some really good suggestions and ill come back to this multiple times.

already working on some things mentioned here.

thanks a lot.

fqwehgtui2 years ago

I'm glad you found it helpful.

I found a couple more bugs in the current build, so I'm reporting them here. I'm writing this in the itch.io inbox reply screen, I don't know how readable the list formatting will be when seen on the comments page but it should be readable in the inbox.

DISPLAY ERRORS:
- Cotton Robe is named "COTTOBN ROBE" in crafting list
- Aside from LOCKPICK, items in the shop location are in "Title Case" instead of "UPPERCASE" like all other locations
MYTHRIL ORE NOT WORKING:
- no items are obtained when mining for MYTHRIL ORE (but skill EXP is given) (tested both pickaxes)
BUGGY "IDLE" BUTTON:
- STEPS:
  - unequip proper tool (like AXE)
  - go to a location (like OAK WOOD)
  - click "IDLE" to turn IDLE on (it turns on, but doesn't start (no AXE))
  - then, equip the proper tool (AXE)
- RESULT:
  - IDLE will not start working even though the proper tool is equipped, until IDLE is toggled off and on again
STACK ITEMS GET OVER-DELETED:
- STEPS:
  - have two stacks of any item (like two stacks of 25 RED BERRIES) (stacks do not have to be next to each other)
  - click the second stack, and hold down DROP (not CONSUME) until the stack is destroyed
- RESULT:
  - the second stack will be destroyed properly, but in addition 1 item will be destroyed from the first stack you weren't touching
  - (you had 25 + 25 RED BERRIES, and after dropping the second stack you now have one stack of 24 RED BERRIES)
ISSUE WITH ALL SPEED BOOSTS:
- I tested some more with a stopwatch and think I realized the problem, I think speed boosts (all of them) are an order of magnitude less powerful than they claim (20% instead of 200%, 2.5% instead of 25%)
- BEGINNER'S HAMMER:
  - Clocked time to craft 20 LOCKPICKS:
    - 60.08 seconds (no equips)
    - 58.71 seconds (with BEGINNER'S HAMMER)
  - that's (60.08/58.71) = 102.33% faster (human error with stopwatch)
  - most likely 102.5% speed (game is adding +2.5% instead of +25%)
- MINING HASTE POTION:
  - Clocked time to mine 1 IRON ORE:
    - 5 seconds each (no equips)
    - 3.9 seconds each (with MINING HASTE POTION)
  - that's (5/3.9) = 128.21% faster (human error with stopwatch)
  - most likely 127.5% speed (game is adding +27.5% instead of +275%)
EQUIPPING MULTIPLE POTIONS:
- Multiple potions of the same type can be equipped at the same time. I think this might be ok because its kind of self limited by the inventory space limit (which I like), but might not be your design intent and I can see this breaking with mining potion especially, so I wanted to point it out. Since right now, MYTHRIL ORE takes 10 seconds to mine without potions, but with 10 potions (making it actually add +275% (27.5% * 10) to 100% base = 375%) it currently takes 2.66 seconds. If you fix it so it really gives +275%, 10 potions would make it be 2850% speed and take 0.35 seconds.

Once again, nice work on the game!

axilirate2 years ago(+1)

thanks a lot again.
I'll try to fix as much as I can today.

this is the math for speed boost
completion_time *= 10 / (10 + total_speed_boost)

I did it so there wont be crazy speeds like 0.00001 with a lot of potions or items.

multiple potions are intentional because as you mentioned, you sacrifice inventory space for them.

fqwehgtui2 years ago

That's how I thought you'd do the speed boost equation and I agree the logic makes sense.

The issue I'm pointing out is the scaling you're using for the things contributing to "total_speed_boost", vs how they're displayed in the game.

For example, MINING SPEED POTION's boost is displayed as "+275%" in game. I'm guessing that the value stored for that effect is "2.75", but in your equation you're using "10" to represent "100%". That means "2.75" is actually contributing "+27.5%" relative to 10, instead of "275%", which gives the value the results I'm seeing in-game for mining iron ore:

completion_time *= 10 / (10 + total_speed_boost)
completion_time = 5 seconds
total_speed_boost = 2.75
5 seconds * 10 / (10 + 2.75) = 3.9216 seconds

(and 3.9216/5 = 1.275, or "127.5%")

So either the effects in-game aren't showing properly (gold cooking pot should show +20% instead of +200%), or you need to adjust your equation or the values (probably just by changing the "10"s in the equation to "1"s)

Added note: I didn't get far enough to be able to check if these were giving their items properly or how the items worked: red and gold mining locations, mythril bar smelting, great woods, cotton, level 50 gathering, last 2 potions, last 2 enemies. Might want to double check to make sure they give items, as well.

If you can't fix everything quickly, don't beat yourself up about it!