thank you so much for this incredibly thoughtful and detailed review. i'm humbled by the scope and breadth of your analysis and i'll do my best to reply to key points you brought up:
- The fact that your presentation is outstanding is great, but it feels like your priorities are backwards. To me it seems that you should get a single class working without any problems before you start adding the other 10.
i believe everyone in amateur solo game development has their own approach to the problem of, "how do i make a game?" for me, i absolutely started backwards. i wanted to make my dream game from the start and didn't want to make anything else, and so i hacked a bunch of disparate systems, github repos, store assets, chatgpt scripts, and my own terrible code and into some semblance of a game, something that had all the features i wanted. soulslike 3D combat. on model clothing swapping with stats. dialogues with branching options. dynamic weather. cutscenes. physics. skill trees. etc. etc. i've been refining and reshaping this emergent, enigmatic mess over the last two years, from samsara, to roman game, to now..... this. my point in presenting this horrid, bug-ridden prototype to demo day is that i could make all these systems functional and work in the barest way possible. now that they are all there, i must go back and refine, refine, refine, until something resembling my dream game arises from the muck.
- If the lore presented in the game is anything to off this might be one of the most unique and unconventional fantasy worlds I have seen. Using something that unique as a base for an straightforward action game where the lore is nothing but background flavour seems like a massive waste. There are no opportunities to engage with the story.
the lore of R. Scott Bakker is quite possibly the deepest in any fantasy series in existence. i want my game in some small way to honor its maddening complexity. at present, only the functionality of the RPG system is in place, and none of the content. in the future, the RPG content will be the real essence of the game- the combat is just the Meat of the game, but the RPG storylines will be its Soul. each class has a different starting location and storyline, with each ending in multiple endings - what is the fate of the soul of a sinner? what does it mean to become a violence-crazed killing machine that slaughters the enemy in droves, hungry for more and more power, even in the name of great righteousness? the meta-difficulty curve of the game will really lie in the player's choices.
- graphics and UI issues
as i said in my page description, everything is placeholders. i am aware of most of these issues, and will address them in the future.
- The loot drop system is bad.
the loot that the sranc drop is meant to be low quality junk. the good loot is found in the chests and after killing Bashrag. i strongly agree with you though that i need a better pickup system. the diablo "press alt to highlight dropped items" is a nice feature and will, i'm sure, be a pain in the tushie to implement. but i think it will be worth it, as you say.
- NPC and combat issues
- Dialogue and input issues
all will be addressed in due time, i promise you.
- The interaction prompt is weirdly coded. It shows up when you're 1-2 meters away from the thing you need to interact with but not when you're standing right next to it
- The levers start twitching after you use them.
i believe you must have played a version before 7, the current build hopefully fixes both these small bugs.
- Consider having them run out of some kind of tunnel or something similar
good idea. something i've been meaning to do.
- You can still hear the outdoor sounds of rain and the horn ambiece while you are inside the Nonman's Well
that whole "level" is really nothing more than a rough test area at this point. i probably shouldn't have included it in the demo build.
- Great work on what you're accomplished but the issues need a lot of attention. The game's scale is grand but the polish and attention to quality is not there.
thank you again for your kind words and extremely helpful and detailed feedback. i know i will be spending the next year or more addressing every one of these issues and trying to extract something wonderful from this mire of jank. it's comments like yours that inspire me to keep going and make this a proper game, so thank you again. i sincerely hope you will consider playing again in the future when so many of these issues have been ironed out.