Post by zonkedHistory12 in The Princess And The Tower (18+) comments

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My personal feedback having completed the game yesterday (Spoiler Warning)

Quick: enjoyable game (quality visuals), however it would do it good if you could apply some final polish (gameplay, game's performance - great candidate for 1.0 release).

In detail:

story and characters were mostly spot on, maybe apart from Iliana being too agreeable, not malevolent enough and too passive throughout crucial parts of the story (the nightly mirror image seems not sufficient)
gameplay economic aspects (played on normal) are not quite well balanced - early crafting and gold squeezing is fun (supply chest could be one time use, with everything x3), but after Nyx's arrival, acceleration is too rapid, to the point where there's plenty of story left and gold is mostly useless (shop prices are marginal), there's way too many gems and some items are positively dead (ex. fragrances, gold bars / nails); pity that some unique items from shop are not used at all
dungeon gameplay is ok, if there were more floors (generic ones) with loot more spread between them it would help balance economics a little
portal gameplay is unfortunately weak, as said before, way too many gems, so no point in moving them when you can always reinforce; personally think queen should be attacking (with appropriate power) from the moment she finds out about moves in portal space, this would spice things up, add depth, prevent excessive stacking before enemy contact (only lost some fields on the first night) and not make Gwynn's boosts such a power creep (they could also use a little tweaking down - all of them are a bit too strong); the gold chests are not really necessary and something like extra gem after takeover would be better
extra puzzles - first two castle maps are ok, latter are too tedious (skip button used); riddles as riddles are - hit or miss, enough simple ones to get 4 of them right, but I think other type of puzzle would be better
other gameplay aspects - Gwynn's researches unobtainable outside of storyline shouldn't appear in menu (wasted some time getting those extra scrolls); conditions for some events are a bit too specific and obscure (using walkthrough was necessary) so they could be broadened a little (ex. longer timespan) or mirror could give some advices in that regard (and not be mute as it is right now)
game's performance - gameplay portions and some menus lag a little (nothing too unplayable) on my laptop (low-end one, however it doesn't have trouble running more demanding titles), and unfortunately this could mean that current game code needs some optimizations or just ren'py is sub-optimal for this game (I think godot would make a great alternative); I also crashed a couple of times on scrollback and quickloads due to variable 'game_version' (or some other variation of those words, sorry didn't copy the log) being used before its declaration in some 'if' clause

Anyways, thanks for making the game and take this feedback as something to hopefully help with your future game development.

yv07512 years ago (1 edit)

Hey, thanks for the detailed feedback!

It was my first game, so I found near the end that it suffered from a few design flaws.

Balancing the grind seemed especially difficult. The scaling at the end was a bit too soft, whereas at the beginning the odds seemed insurmountable (100k, guild debt, ...).

The interactions with Illiana in retrospect should have been more in person, maybe by summoning her temporarily.

The performance hits probably occurred at the boardgame (running pathfinding, etc not ideally) and at the gallery and inventories, where I was too lazy to make thumbnails and just live-scaled down all the pictures and icons from 512x512

My next game (sci-fi) will have interconnected dungeon levels (like paradroid) and I'll cut back on the grind in favour of tactics. Also "tacked on" minigames (like the dancing game...) I probably wont use any more.

Biggest design flaw was the interwoven ending two and three questline, should have kept that apart. Will plan multiple endings better in my next game, Space Journey X.

I'll fix some of the softlock issues in the final bugfix release (V0.9c) which I'll publish in a week or two.

Thanks again for your review!

y.c.

zonkedHistory122 years ago (1 edit)

Dug up a log from one of the crashes:

While running game code:
  File "game/900_GAME.rpy", line 31, in script call
    call navigate() from _call_navigate
  File "game/400_interaction/410_navigator.rpy", line 178, in script
    call screen navigate()
  File "renpy/common/000statements.rpy", line 569, in execute_call_screen
    store._return = renpy.call_screen(name, *args, **kwargs)
  File "game/screens.rpy", line 243, in execute
    screen quick_menu():
  File "game/screens.rpy", line 243, in execute
    screen quick_menu():
  File "game/screens.rpy", line 248, in execute
    if quick_menu:
  File "game/screens.rpy", line 248, in <module>
    if quick_menu:
NameError: name 'quick_menu' is not defined

The performance hits probably occurred at the boardgame (running pathfinding, etc not ideally)

Yeah, that could use caching and similar optimization techniques and that's a kind of thing where you would really like to use godot or unity which come with set of already predefined functions for this and are better suited for the type of games you make and could speed up development significantly, however either requires some time to learn, but that's up to you; Anyways keep up the good work

yv07512 years ago

That looks like a weird renpy timing issue (not part of my game code). No idea what could cause it...

In my next game I will definitely have performance in the back of my head when coding.

I usually code on my mac and test the windows version in parallels/virtual machine, so the win code runs in an awfully slow environment. Haven't seen above issue there, though. But some timing issues with screen.rpy have occurred (especially tooltip features)

itch.io

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