Okay, I was stuck in an infinite loop so I didn’t play too much, so I’ll just post my findings so far and then edit my comment later as I progress. I will also give my notation once I see more of the game.
Bug:
- First, the infinite loop that got me stuck. In the building at the bottom-left you can listen to a podcast between an AI researcher and a journalist that keeps interrupting him. At the end of the dialogue, the dialogue starts again. I try holding escape to avoid pressing Space or Enter and restart the dialogue by accident, to no avail. I had to refresh the game page to restart. I thought I just had to reload the last auto-save, unfortunately, that auto-save was taken right at the beginning of the infinite dialogue! And I didn’t save manually before entering the building. So I basically have to redo the game intro to get back to this point. It takes a bit of time in Difficult mode. I could try Easy mode to finish the intro faster, but can I switch back to Difficult mode later so it’s not Easy all along? Alternatively, if you can patch the bug, I’ll be able to jump back to my browser save and resume my journey from here.
- Some clamped text on the right of the dialogue on long sentences. Not sure why since resolution is fixed. It may be an engine bug:
- Pressing Escape to open menu also exits fullscreen mode. I had the exact same issue in another game (a Unity game with WebGL build). It was not fixable but at least I added an alternative input: Tab to open the menu. In your case, you need both menu and back nuttons. There is already have the Touch button with a Back icon, but a keyboard shortcut is better, so you could pick Backspace or Z or whatever as alternative Back, and Tab, E, M, etc. as alternative open menu button.
Pacing:
- cool moves at the beginning. The characters move very dynamically as in Sdorica, although they don’t have many sprite animations. It’s rare for games with sprites like these. It almost makes me forget about the standard RPG Maker Sprites
- dialogues also go fast and fun
World:
- you actually knock to people’s doors and talk with them instead or breaking into their house! That’s incredible innovation for an RPG! (although maybe some games did it before, I don’t know the whole history) And this means you spend less time opening chests and fridges in other people’s houses, while still getting a feel of how the main character is integrated in the city in their new life. I would have preferred seeing the outside of the neighbor’s house though, seeing the inside if you don’t enter gives too much information and the impression you could enter at first. Also, if you only see the outside, you can make the neighbor appear behind the door immediately instead of having them walk down all the way to the door.
Battle
- Cool intro, but a bit too overloaded for an intro demo battle. The fighters have almost the exact moveset they’d have at the end of an actual RPG adventure. But that also makes it hard to decide what to do, you need to pay attention to colors to distinguish MP and TP costs, etc. Unfortunately that’s a difficult problem to solve. My advice would be to reduce the number of available skills and make the battles shorter, as it matters more to know if the player is good later in the game when the actually get a grasp of the system. In Xenoblade intro, you start with a bunch of heroes with a set of skills too, but 1. Xenoblade limits the number of skill slots in its core system, 2. Xenoblade battle system is real-time, based on auto-attacks and then you can trigger skills when you want, so even if you hesitate, something will happen on screen, 3. the battles are short, I even wonder if it doesn’t get interrupted at some point in time. So basically if it’s just for the show, you don’t have to make something too complex. Although I appreciated I had to pay attention to my party’s health in Difficult mode to actually beat the intro boss.
- Some skills require charge time and it’s not indicated. You could distinguish Instant vs Charged skills like Othercide, using icons and/or colors; but I suspect it’s a limitation of the engine. So at least you could indicate the required time in the skill description (although without a timeline, it’s hard to visualize, but that’s a limitation of the engine without plugin).
- I would say there are many other unexplained battle mechanics, but it all relates to that intro issue. If the battles are fast in the intro, it doesn’t really matter, as you’ll relearn the mechanics later in the game.