I downloaded, i played and i liked it.
Has been a long time since i played Healed to Death, so im pretty happy about the option to turn the hover selection to click only. Theres two little things about the settings that i dont like though: just like the button to exit the game in the main menu, there is an "exit" button to go back to said main menu. At first i was anxious to click it and looked for another one because i thought it would quit the game. And the other thing is, when you are in a fight and you want to check keybinds, the white enemy labels make the white settings tab labels harder to read. Maybe put a dark transparent background on the whole screen when in settings to get some contrast. But thats minor things.
As a fellow Godot enjoyer i recognized some issues i had myself:
- when being prompted for the next level, the star particles freak out. If i remember correctly, i had the same happen to me in my game and it was due to the process mode of the particles. The prompt probably pauses the game and the particles inherit the process mode from there, thats why i set my particles to "always", so they still emit when the game is paused. Its less jarring, but of course in some situations this doesnt convey the pause state very well.
- hitting the space bar sometimes triggers "random" UI elements. Its not really random as its always the last one the player used (like the map or the inventory), but its confusing at first. I didnt find space in the keybinds, so i guess this is default Godot behavior? At least i had some issue with the focus behavior of buttons in the past and my fix was to turn them all off, so they only trigger when i hit the key i assigned to them
- stutters, but thats something im working on too. Trying out to do threaded load requests for all kinds of things in the loading screen, instantiating and adding them to the scene and removing them again, just so they existed at one point in time before you actually encounter them. Will see in the future how smoothly that works
Speaking of loading screens, i noticed you have one when you start the actual run, but you dont have one in other scene loading situations and theres just the grey background. Also small thing, but easy to make a bit nicer to look at.
Gameplay wise i have little to complain about. The party members mindlessly walk against walls if their formation is blocked, which is the most annoying if you stand at a shop and want to look at things. Inspecting items is mostly great, however i couldnt figure out what some looted spells do until i slotted them in because they didnt have a tooltip before. The orbs are hard to read at a glance due to the waves. They have little contrast to the empty space above, so they act more like a distraction from the actual numbers which you need to rely on. Finally, i found a ring and its sound effect was pretty annoying, especially when moving it between members and hearing it more than once.
In the end of my second run i had a crash, which happened when i was finishing casting my healing circle spell with the protective circle upgrade. Sorry i dont have more information about that crash, but maybe that helps.
Despite all that i really enjoyed the game and am amazed by the progress. Its really coming together and you can already see where its going and how addicting it could be. Different healer classes also feel different. I played the templar on the second run and felt like he was more of an offensive guy which needs to look more after his resources than the chill priest man. The town building is nicely done, it felt intuitive and gives you the metaprogression feeling you need when playing such a game. Looting, equipping and managing your group is awesome, but i may be biased having build my own party system for my game.
Keep it up man, it seems pretty bug free at this point. Hope you will tackle the aesthetics of the characters and the enemy diversity soon. Looks like most of the important systems are in place and work well together. Great game!