Post by spillz in Something In The Tall Grass comments

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I've been persisting. Still confused by the torch -- I assume that's what's beeping as it runs down? But pressing e sometimes works sometimes not but I don't notice a lot of difference in lighting. I'm sure this is user error.

Also I'm struggling with the difficulty/variance. Some levels I find the needed item very quickly and can zoom to the next level. Others I have to search for quite a while and usually get killed before I find it. Enemies are brutal but some more brutal than others even on the first field. E.g., sometimes enemies have 7 health vs others that have 2. There's not often a way to escape them once they have you in their sites and you quickly run out of ammo.

Also the game says "1 of 4 fields cleared" from the very start of the level but I assume that means I'm starting the 1st of 4 fields?

Classicwook1 year ago

First of all, thanks so much for playing! It means a lot to get feedback. It sounds like my UI/UX is quite opaque. It's definitely not a strong suit for me yet.

So yes, you progress to the next field by finding and picking up the blue-purple component. After finding 4 component you make it to the last level where you must defeat a few waves of enemies.

The enemies can be tough and there isn't much ammo unless you search pretty intensely. You should stumble upon caches every now and then.

The beeping indicates your lantern ticking down. Visually it's not that obvious what's happening until your lantern get REALLY low, at which point you FOV radius can get down to one tile.

I agree that there is some lag during enemy turns. In previous games I didn't have FOV so it was obvious when the enemy was moving and it wasn't the player's turn. And I didn't really account for that here. :(

So my take aways are:

1. every thing happening in the game should be obvious to the player e.g. lantern light increasing, decreasing, enemies are moving etc.

2. 7DRLs should err on the side of easy so that players can actually experience the content.

3. A tutorial level of some kind would go a long way. I should work on teaching the game during play. That just wasn't on my radar this year (or previous years)

Again thanks so much for trying it out.

spillz1 year ago

Don't be too hard on yourself! You only had a week and you really accomplished a lot in that time and it's a very distinct roguelike. I can also see this would have been tricky to design because your survival horror theme benefits from a bit of opacity in the systems and mystery as to what's going on. But yeah, a more player friendly on ramp would undoubtedly increase your potential audience a bit. A lot of 7DRL's have accessibility issues like this though. My collaborator this year, James, has a friend he uses to give his entries a test around Day 6 and often gets some good feedback on accessibility from that.

Re the torch, I was often in the tall grass where the torch doesn't do much so what I was missing is that you are in fact winding the torch, which gradually increases the range. There might also be a bug here because sometimes winding seemed to not respond to the key press even though it looks like it should.

I plan to give it one more session this weekend and hopefully I'll at least get to the last level. I still haven't figured out how fear works yet either so hopefully will sort that out too.

Cheers!

itch.io

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