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ahoy Webcough

It's been a minute since I've played and I booted it up again today. In the spirit of fairness I treated the game as if it's my first playthrough instead of relying on old knowledge of Demo Days passed.

So,

The Good:
Your room design is great. When the dungeon crafts a nice pathway, it feels smooth as butter to play through. I'da thought it difficult to make good randomly generated dungeon where the main gameplay would resolve around speed/time trials, but it works. While some motifs repeated a bit, nothing felt repetitive despite having already played before. I don't think I've seen the same layout twice, except for the starting room. My favorites are still the water room, especially if it involves floating water. Your lever placements are very fun as well, I had one on the roof of a hallway which I thought was especially clever.

It's also clear a lot of thought went into first impressions/tutorials/whathaveyou, especially with the helpful overlay on starting a dungeon, telling you what's what. I think that's the #1 issue DD games face, since they expect players to understand complex mechanics from the get-go, and you've taken steps to make playing your game all the easier. 

The Almost-There:
New sounds are good, except some sounds like the dash are MUCH louder than everything else. Walking around and jumping a bit is great and the dash was at least twice as loud as everything else. 

The first screen, while not daunting anymore after playing a handful of times, is surely a nightmare to anyone coming here for an Adult Game experience.  The first screen (I think it was the Reception one) has 8 slides to go through, and most importantly, the first one isn't a "Welcome" slide. It immediately starts off talking about important game mechanics, without mentioning things that your game advertises (FPS platforming). I think a super simple, perhaps an expository "You are Mr.Bones and this is your Resort, you'll need to do a lot of jumping!" screen would work better than immediately talking about spending resources. This is made much scarier because of the immense amount of Tabs available. You've got 10 (+ Manage room makes 11) buttons on your first screen after pressing New Game. Surely somebody quit by now because they think this is a text-only management sim or something at this point, without ever making it to the great platforming. I think you can scrap all the tabs the player can't interact with immediately upon starting a new game, and put them all together under one tab, and try and IMMEDIATELY get a player to the platforming. Afterwards, slowly unlock (and reveal in the UI) tabs one by one. A new player shouldn't really have access to seals (or any modifiers) if he hasn't even completed his first baby steps run


I'm known for having weak UIs, so take this with a huge chunk of salt. Either way, I think your goal should be to minimize the overwhelming feeling a player might have on their first start. A minor thing would also be that Manage Rooms is perhaps useless? Clicking on a tab again should minimize the window anyway. I guess the only thing it does differently is that it allows you to inspect different rooms (backgrounds)

Moving on to gameplay, some Dungeon layouts felt like traps sometimes. The problem that happened to me was stumbling upon a large room, where reaching the end (or in my specific case, the top of a long winding ramp) offered very little rewards. I see that there's a door frame visual, which tells me a room could spawn there, but I spent a large chunk of time only to get 2 orange coin-things. It would go much smoother if this "hallway room" had a connected room following it, but instead it came up empty. Something I'm working on in my dungeon generator is trimming the end of a room if it's known that it has no follow up room. Perhaps that's something you could look into, since I can imagine a player focusing on speed would feel cheated since they spent a lot of time for very little reward.

Another thing to think about is how punishing falling off can be. The obvious one is the first heart mirror room, where if a player fucks up (which they might on their first heart room), they will fall down into the liquid (goo?), and will then slowly crawl through until they reach a vine to start back up. While it makes sense gameplay wise (you fucked up, you now have to slow down), I think it kills the pacing a bit due to how slow you move. Maybe the player can start off slow, but build up some speed until they move at 50% movement speed, instead of the 20% 


Either way, it's a clear improvement from before, and while I did write a lot, there weren't really issues I experienced but more like issues I think people will experience.

Keep it up!

(+1)

Hey osur! Thanks for coming back for another build.

As you might be aware from threads, and playing the game, the ui and providing information to player is not omething I am good at, so your feedback is very useful.

I never realized the dash sound might be too loud compared to the rest. I will need to adjust levels some more.

Welcome screen would be yet another window message, but I agree it is necessary. I would like to have cutscenes in future, but until then I will need to go with more text... expect to see that next DD.

>The first screen (I think it was the Reception one) has 8 slides to go through

Yeah, it's my latest change. I decided to go with those explanation messages you can go read once, and then close them instead of having a wall of text whenever you enter Reception. My idea was that breaking all the information into smaller chunks of text would be easier to digest.

As for Jumping straight to platforming, there is the tutorial stage in the title screen. I am probably going to ask players if they want to play the tutorial before throwing them in the Reception whenever they start a new game.

I don't know about hiding more information on the hub screen, especially making players click more buttons to get to more tabs. I cannot really hide the bottom tabs, because holding right mouse button over them shows what you need to unlock them, but maybe one more click to do that is not too bad.

I definitely want to keep Reception, Sealing Chamber, and Dungeon tabs visible at all times, because they are the core parts of preparing and entering the dungeon.

>A new player shouldn't really have access to seals (or any modifiers) if he hasn't even completed his first baby steps run

Maybe I could unlock it after first day. I want to reward player exploration (as in them opening the sealing chamber, and changing seals right away), but it is true maybe I shouldn't let them do that if they don't have a point of reference being the first dungeon day. In past DDs, I saw many people skipping The Sealing Chamber altogether, so I equipped some Seals for the start of the game just in case they ignore it. Do you think I should change the starting Seals if I were to lock that room for the first day?

>A minor thing would also be that Manage Rooms is perhaps useless? Clicking on a tab again should minimize the window anyway. I guess the only thing it does differently is that it allows you to inspect different rooms (backgrounds)

Yes, that button is just for hiding the window so in future the players will be able to look at backgrounds. I got plans for making unique hub rooms, and NPCs inside them e.g. the reception is going to have a receptionist, treasury a treasurer, and so on.

>some Dungeon layouts felt like traps sometimes.

Yes, it is actually mentioned in some Template descriptions that they might have dead ends. It is fully intentional for harder Templates like "Maze" Template, which on its own I consider the hardest in the game. As for just bigger rooms that you might end up traversing only to find out they lead nowhere (bigger rooms, which you generally cannot see doors right away  I call BSrooms) can be made easier with Seal "Ability: Door Sense", and Seal "Radar: Doors".

>Another thing to think about is how punishing falling off can be. The obvious one is the first heart mirror room, where if a player fucks up (which they might on their first heart room), they will fall down into the liquid (goo?), and will then slowly crawl through until they reach a vine to start back up.

Falling into Sticky Slime Pools is not so bad when you know where you can get out of them. The Magic Mirror room has vines at the front, and back, platform in the middle, and end. I can see how new players who don't know those things can get very punished when they fall into them. I think in future I might make more Magic Mirror rooms, so that it is not always that one giant room, and have easier one put on starting Templates.

>Maybe the player can start off slow, but build up some speed until they move at 50% movement speed, instead of the 20%

That doesn't too bad. I see many people having problems with sticky slime pools, so I might make some cheaper seals to make them easier.

Thanks for all the feedback osur. I am unfortunately not going to be able to try out your game, because my pc fried last week. I really look forward to seeing it streamed, because it looks like you added a lot to the game. I might play it at friend's place in couple of weeks.