I am The Spiked's #1 Fan.
As a long time enjoyer of the Megaten franchise, especially the oldest of the bunch, Monastic Inversion was right up my alley. I've been following your excellent posts in the Acerola Discord since the beginning of the jam and it has been rather insightful to see the complete thought process of another dev so clearly laid out. Truthfully I wish that I were to have created such design documents before jumping headlong into my game, I imagine the experience would be a little more focused as yours.
The combat system is interesting in that I desire to see how you might develop it from here on, ultimately it's a card game, something I don't think I've seen in this specific context so to me it's a novel idea. I rather enjoy the potential concept of modifying your 'deck' of spell sigils as you traverse the game, stumbling upon new and interesting things to incant behind hidden walls or through other interesting interactions.
Ultimately as it stands in its current form, I found myself near exclusively using flare and not considering any particular strategic implications of the other sigils I had, though I very much imagine that with greater enemy variety, new spells, and other mechanics you might implement into what I see as the potential of a 'Deckbuilding RPG' of sorts, this could be alleviated.
I do have to echo your own thoughts from Discord, the movement is a small bit on the sluggish side, I do rather enjoy grid movement in first-person dungeon crawlers so to speak so I'd hope you stick with it, though I realize I have some niche tastes haha.
All in all, I like Monastic Inversion, more for what I am certain you can (and will) make it into than anything else. It's promising conceptually, and I think your solid structuring of thoughts in your design documents will really pay off. Thanks for the experience!
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Spiked was the winner in the enemy design department. 👍Happy to make a fellow Megaten fan happy!
Ultimately as it stands in its current form, I found myself near exclusively using flare and not considering any particular strategic implications of the other sigils I had
Definitely an issue. I had to refactor the encounter system late because of an oversight and a last minute rebalance killed some ideas. Originally the big candle man would hit hard and have a lot of health, so you just hitting him with the red sigil would kill you and you had to stun him for two turns with yellow so you can buy time to heal with green, wait till your garbage was full and hit him with the blue sigil, or get him alone and use the orange sigil, which kills single enemies outright.
Truthfully I wish that I were to have created such design documents before jumping headlong into my game, I imagine the experience would be a little more focused as yours.
The trick to that was I made a card game in the past which was pretty janky, so I knew about a lot of the pitfalls going in and I didn’t try to plan everything out all at once, but did it in steps, so I was reasoning less about a grand design and more about individual ‘changes’ to the current system. Also, good whiteboarding takes experimentation so it’s all about stacking projects I think.