You forced me to spell discombowluahte gaaah! Cool entry, interesting concept and all in all a nice game.
I loved the intro and the general tone of the game with rhymes and all. It was a fun concept of playing with spelling spells. But there were several things that were off with the fight.
The enemy-phase of the game was much much to slow. I found myself looking out of the window or just staring into the void while waiting for my turn again. I think a huge part of fun could have been making that cycle several times faster.
The options I got didn’t really give me much risk/reward either since most enemies would die from two fire balls or two blizzards I just used the one that felt easiest to type. That did change a little bit in the last level or so. But in general, I think there’s a need to force the player to adapt. Either by enemies being sensitive and resistant to certain spells or if there were combo effects.
Next thing with fighting that was really annoying with healing. Especially the “HEAL” spell. Having use my turn and get 4 point only to have 2 or 3 taken away made it a chore. There wasn’t much risk involved in the fighting either with the spell being that easy to type so I would have it heal something like 50% or more and recovery heal up to 100%.
Or… rework the whole fighting logic so that if I only use up say 40% of the time allotted to typing HEAL then I still have 60% action time left on my turn so I could hammer out a quick FIREBALL. In general such a mechanic, I think would elevate the game immensely. It feeds into the speed-typing core mechanic and gives a risk reward system for being fast.
Then as a somewhat minor thing that got a bit irritating was all the [ENTER] pressing. I think it was great that I didn’t have to select spell I wanted to cast but that it got selected based on the first letter typed. In similar fashion I think it ought to have cast right when I typed the last letter. I also think it should cast as soon as any combination of letters that filled up the slots were entered. I’d urge you to try removing enter from the game pretty much.
As for the movement, since my hand needed to be on the letters, I would have loved WASD bindings when moving around so that I didn’t have to press enter and then move my hand down to the keys. Please also consider adding strafing and backwards movement.
I think that was pretty much all for the complaints. :) The game was great though and I had fun playing it to the end. Movement was nice in my opinion, the levels were good, though I got lost a bit at some points. And I really liked the graphics too.
Btw there was a glitch on the final stairs it felt with something that looked like a missing background.
Great entry!
Playthrough: https://youtu.be/M1r0hukA3lQ