Hello! Welcome to Feedback Quest 6! My name's Hythrain, and I'm one of the hosts and streamers for this event! This feedback is being written live on my stream.
So admittedly, I didn't get outside of the first area before I stopped playing to write this. This was primarily because, in terms of gameplay, I had a good idea of what was going on and felt I could comment on it. The story is already interesting despite having very little to go off, I like the artwork and the use of voice was certainly interesting. Anything that I can comment on lies in the gameplay, which is what I think needs to be adjusted.
Now before I get into anything, I know Renpy is typically used for visual novels. Trying to do anything outside of that scope can be a challenge. However, with how far you're already going trying to make it be more than a visual novel I would argue you should just go a bit further and make the luck more controlled.
I found the dice rolling system to be very infuriating for a number of reasons. The first was just how often I would see the computer get doubles. There was one "battle" where, no joke, the computer got doubles 7 rounds in a row. Trying to do something about it to reduce the number of times doubles and triples happen, particularly for the computer, would go a long way.
The second issue was how little morale could mean in a LOT of rolls. I had a lot of "morale is only added one, but the rest of the roll is super low so I'm really screwed" rounds. I think a better idea for morale is that using it raises the stage of dice for each of your units. Maybe it doubles it? So someone with a 4 sided is now 8 sided, 6 sided is 12 sided, and 8 sided is 16 sided. If this seems like the same thing, it's not. Currently, using Morale is two luck rolls: the morale value itself and then the value of the actual roll by each unit. If you move it onto the other model, however, you remove the first luck based option and you expand the second one to have a chance for even higher rolls. This sort of thing in the system could turn what was going to be a 1 into something like a 9 or 10, simply because the conditions for the roll were different. Of course, this could always work in reverse but at least it's only a single roll.
The third issue I had was just how often I got into fights. I hadn't even been playing the game for an hour as I tried to navigate the maze, yet I encountered at least 20 fights while trying to find the exit. For a tutorial area to get used to the game, fighting so many fights and having each one take so much time just sucks it out of you to keep going. Then when you find the exit, it has this super boss who just breaks the rules of the game and has special skills like you? The luck was already against me, that just put me off.
The last thing I felt was bad with the dice rolling was rerolling. No joke, rerolling ended up getting me hurt more about half the time because it allows the enemy to reroll as well. This is just very bad design. The idea of a reroll should be if you lost, only you reroll for a chance to win. The computer shouldn't also get to reroll and potentially get an even higher roll. This is especially true if reroll isn't going to guarantee a higher roll than what you got before. No joke, at least three times I would use reroll then immediately lose the first roll, reroll into a SMALLER number while the computer rolled an even higher number. So in short, it resulted in me taking MORE damage. That should not be the case at all. I can suggest a few different ways for Reroll to work:
1. It will always roll higher than your previous roll. You can do this simply by making each roll's minimum be the number they already rolled.
2. It will always use the higher of your two rolls, so that if your second roll is weaker then it you won't take more damage for it.
3. If the reroll is overall less than before, it gets added onto the previous roll. That way, you always retain the previous roll as a minimum. If it's more, then it doesn't add onto it. In this option, you could also make it where adding a lower roll onto the previous roll can only result in a tie, so it'll cap at whatever the computer rolled.
Those are all the things I can think of. I do hope to see it improved more. :)