Skip to main content

Indie game storeFree gamesFun gamesHorror games
Game developmentAssetsComics
SalesBundles
Jobs
TagsGame Engines
(+1)

Well done with your entry. We had a few notes we took while playing that we hope you'll find useful:

  • Nice AI start-up images. There was too much text initially which stopped you from getting into the game.
  • Nice to be able to create your character  and you can still spend them in game which is handy in case you press OK to soon (as we did).
  • The fonts were good, but... At one point there were three on a UI screen at once which was jarring. It felt like parts of the UI were done at different times by different people, each with their own font. We'd suggest keeping it to a single font or 2 at most and make the font functions be very distinct, like a UI font and an in-game message font. 
  • The default controls don't have strafe, other than a single modifier or joystick. We'd suggest having individual left/right strafe keys. There was also no move backwards, on a rotate 180 degrees. The only downside here is that other games in the genre don't normally do this so you're fighting the muscle memory and expectations of the average player. 
  • The in-game grid squares felt too small for a dungeon crawler, although this is a style choice. We got reprimanded for this last year! 🙄
  • The commands are nice idea, e.g. Look, aim, wait but we felt we should have been able to click on the icon to activate them, not just the text.
  • We didn't hear any sounds for footsteps, which was a shame. 
  • Picking up items could have been using mouse click, rather than via the F key and then a click.
  • UI items are really dark and hard to see when not active.
  • Different color fog for different areas was nice, although the scenery was a bit dark in general which made it hard to see where you were.
  • No indication of when you miss or hit an enemy or how much damage you were doing, other than them dying. 
  • We seemed to die all of a sudden when no one was around and the game ended. Was this a bug?

Great job and good luck with the jam!

(+1)

Ah! I'm pleased you took the time for this complete report!

- For the sudden death, I do think it was because of a ranged enemy who was probably hidding in a corner or on an item. The lack of indication and global darkness you mentionned are definitely combined in that problem.

- The grid the size is 8x8, not sure if said like this means something but it's definitely larger than the player or any enemy. Maybe it's the edge of the limit? I don't know, you're the first one who tells me about it ^^"

- About the font, yeah, I confess I had issues with it and you spotted me right at the fault! Though it's not because there were more people involved in the project ( I did everything alone ), it's because I've chosen one font but found out it was impossible to read it when too small, or was too wide when too much text. I had to quickly replace it with Arial so it could be understandable. If you know a good free to use font that looks handwritten, I would definitely be all ears for the next update

- The moving backward, yup, many told me the 180 deg was a completely weird choice, actually, the move exists but you have to press the strafe modifier for it. I'll swap the two commands next update. For invidual keys, I guess I'll choose the left and right keys since Q and E are already used by the next/prev item command which is too vital to be binded elsewhere.

- I didn't thought about using the mouse to click on item and take them, I was first thinking about some "default action" key of some sort. I'll give a think or two about it.

- About the rest, It's more a question of lack of time. For the footsteps for example, joke on you, the feature exists but I had no time left to fetch footsteps sounds and activate it haha (And I regret to not have finished this...)


Anyway, even if I do know the source of all these issues, that won't change the fact they do exist and thanks to you, I'll perfectly what to do first before extending the content

Thank you very much for these detailed notes and good luck with your entry as well! ;)

(+1)

We use Google Fonts for our game fonts. They're free to use (as we understand it) and you can reuse them on your itch.io game page and for your devlogs. We used New Tegomin for our typewritten notes in-game for example:

https://fonts.google.com/

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/New+Tegomin?query=teg

Ah! Thank you very much for these links!

This might be very useful for the update! :D