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Thank you so much for the lovely feedback. Great point regarding the heat indicator, I agree that could do with some work there.

Hey, well done on getting your game posted. The updated graphics and music work really well. Being able to launch full screen would be nice, so I can see them cutesy graphics up better. 

Unfortunately, I didn't quite understand what I was supposed to do. On the tutorial level I was able to move my character, next to the blue block and receive that resource, then I moved again and I got a game over screen. On the main game I was able to move my characters to receive resources but I couldn't figure out how to do anything else. 

Thank you so much for your lovely feedback :-)

Thanks for playing and the feedback, I'm glad you enjoyed :-)

Hey thanks for playing my game and providing some feedback. I'm glad you had fun, and enjoyed some of the effects. 

Interesting comment regarding the overheating effect. I dialled this back from how it was in earlier builds as it felt too much, and at one point I considered taking it out of the game completely, but I really like the mechanic of it to make players use their bullets more wisely and not just mindlessly shoot continuously. At that point however I think enemies were faster and stronger, so I might be able to get away with dialling back up a notch. Thanks for the feedback :-)

Congratulations on finishing your game! I really like the concept here and your pixel art and presentation are done well. 

I felt like the movement and combat was a bit too slow and clunky, I was barely able to keep out of the orcs reach whilst doing my best to attack whatever I could without loosing health. I know the objective is meant to be survive 3 minutes, but as player I felt I had no other tactics than to run and hope for the best, making the character feel underpowered and slow. I noticed that I was able to move diagonally faster than in a single direction and that gave me a bit of an upper hand but generally this is considered a bug. 

I also thought the enemy arrows were way too slow, and they also seem to change direction mid-flight though this could have been my imagination or a weird effect of being able to outrun them and having them move around the screen in unexpected ways. As a player my general expectation is for arrows to fly straight and quickly across the screen. This would make them harder to dodge, but I noticed I could attack arrows to destroy them but I felt like some more options could spice up the gameplay, for example, being able to deflect them with a perfectly timed attack, or perhaps adding a shield to be able to block (but shielding slows movement speed for example). 

I think you've got a great start to some really fun gameplay. 

Thanks for coming back to me on that point. I'll have a think about how to improve on this bit. :-)

Hey, I played your game following your #2 update and wanted to provide some further feedback and let you know about some bugs. 

Controls & UI

• Walking continuously feels much smoother now—great improvement!
• I was unable to click on the bomb to blow up a wall from the left side.  I also noticed after explosion (from the right side), the background image didn’t appear leaving a black square. 
• It would be nice to review spells outside of battle, similar to stats and potions.
• Adding the ability to click on the icon itself to close windows (in addition to the "X") would be a small quality of life improvement. 
• The new Thralled Sage tips are excellent and really help players understand enemy strengths and weaknesses—great addition, or maybe I didn't read them properly the first time around!

Battle

• Seeing enemy health is helpful, but I noticed enemies can end up with negative HP.
• This meant when using the sap spell, I still received full health even when the enemy had less HP available.
• Items make battles more dynamic, but they currently seem to have unlimited uses during fights.
• The vortex spell’s description appears to match the mana sap spell—might be a small mix-up.
• Some feedback for poison damage during battle would make it easier to track its effect.

Balance & Gameplay

• The increased gold range is great but makes it easy to buy everything, reducing the impact of player choices.
• Scaling the cost of stat increases based on current levels could counteract this. Maybe offering a choice of stat to increase too?
• The lightning trap is currently always resistible due to starting with a toughness of 12.
• Introducing randomized starting stats or class options could make builds more engaging and varied. 
  

I hope my feedback isn't too picky - I just really enjoyed playing it through again and I still think you've got the beginning of a great game here. Looking forward to seeing this develop further!

Hey, thanks for playing my game and taking the time to provide your feedback. There's some interesting stuff here for me to consider. 

I just wanted to pry into the 2nd point - was it is just the forced reset to the central location and/or loss of control of the character that felt unnecessary, or something else entirely? Initially I planned to a power up animation but didn't get around to it. Do you think that collecting a specific power up would feel better? Or possibly being able to click on them?

Thanks for playing and submitting feedback it is greatly appreciated :-)

Congratulations on finishing your game Smuz. I really like the concept here, and your dialogue is well written and engaging. 

Whilst the audio and dialogue are enough feedback to gauge the suspect's composure, I quite liked the emoji you had in the alpha representing it previously. 

Really interested to see if you do anything else with this idea as it's really

Nice work!, thanks for letting me know. I have just played through and been able to beat the demo. I really like where this is going. It's got mega original Resident Evil vibes whilst being distinct enough that I don't immediately think of it as a clone. I find the atmosphere and glimpses of story are intriguing and I want to know more. At one point I did wonder around aimlessly for a while after I obtained the key card, I looped back to the control room but didn't go near enough to the PC to unlock it to make the progress, though I could see the path leading on from the lower right. I'd suggest making that a little more obvious or dropping a clue when trying to interact with the door. 

That's odd. There is sound and music. Did you play through the randomizer page or directly on the game's itch page? I've noticed issues with other people's games when trying to use the randomizer, like not being able to maximise the screen.

Thank you so much for the great feedback, I'm glad you enjoyed it. I did have an intro in mind but I  had no idea how to do a cutscene so that's something to work on. Was there any particular things you thought could use a sound?

Thank you so much for the lovely feedback!

Ah yes, great, I'm glad to hear that :-)

Congrats on finishing your game. I really like presentation of this one and the pinball-esque feel of the levels. I had fun and managed to beat the game. 

I think you've polished this well as I really have no issues other than a desire for more content. Well done!

Hey again. Well done on your 1st game. Pretty much all my previous feedback still stands, I think this is a really fun core gameplay loop. I'd have liked to see some more polish and content on this game. One thing I didn't pick up on last time was the background image seems to inverted or flipped in places, it doesn't look natural once noticed. 

Congrats on getting this out, I recall you started quite late, so what you have is accomplished in the short time is good. I really like your sprites, and got some vibes of an old game I used to play on either the nes or mega drive, though I can't remember what it was called (I'll have to go and figure that out now).

I'd echo some of the feedback you've already received, faster bullets, sfx, winning conditions and more variety of encounters etc... Another thing to consider would be power ups.

Hope you get time to work on this some more as it's a great start. 

Congratulations on making your game! I really like the look of this and I think it is presented very well. 

I'm with Darkgecko on the controls, using the mouse to rotate the character doesn't feel very intuitive and made it harder to control the character than it really should be, to the point where I gave up rather than struggling to make it through the level. 

I think you've got a solid base here and I'd love to try again if you do change the controls!

Congrats on finishing your game and publishing it up. Card Shop Kid is full of personality. I really like the dialogue and each character feels like they have their own distinct personality, great job!

I found myself wanting some quality of life improvements, such as the ability to sort or search the card list for the right card, and click through dialogue quicker (only for the dialogue I had already read though). 

I like the introduction of the haggle feature. This made it a bit more of a gamble whether to try to haggle or not. 

I eventually got a crash, I should have screenshotted this for you but it was some html error and I was playing in the browser. Did you get the save feature working on the downloadable version?

I think you've got a really strong game here, with plenty of options for additional features and improvements.

Wow, the sound track is amazing! This has really cool vibes from the get go. Full of attitude and style. 

It took me a while to spot the 'press enter to play' down the side of the screen. I would suggest making that a bit more obvious, but I really like the idea of the vinyl coming out of the sleeve, so cool. At least it gave me more time to enjoy the soundtrack. 

I had no problems with the gameplay other than fans clipping through scenery and that getting hit by a car makes the character lose clothes. 

Great job on finishing the game and I think you've got tonnes of style!

Thanks for the great feedback! I'm glad that's the impression you got from the yellow one as that's what I was going for! :-)

Hey there thanks for the feedback. I'm not quite sure what you meant by "so you keep going when they touch you for a while", do you mean that you feel there's a better balance of damage / health? 

Congratulations on publishing your game. I think you've got an interesting concept here with some promising gameplay. I like the grainy visuals which give this a retro futuristic vibe, really neat. 

I enjoyed the blade jump ability. I think this could be made more juicy with some sound effects, and maybe some death noises from the bots so there's some feedback I hit them. After a while I figured out I could stay in the air and launch the blade indefinitely to murder everything. Whilst satisfying, it is a bit of a cheese. I aways seemed to land a bit higher than where the blade was. 

I noticed that there were some objects I could interact with but they did not seem to do anything. I like the verticality of the levels, but where the enemies are ground based and stop running towards you when you are in the air I found that it was a bit easy to avoid being hit unless a large number of them were bunched up as the blade did not seem to hit more than 1 or 2 enemies in this situation. 

I think you've got a good idea here with lots of potential. Great job!

Hey there, congrats on getting your game out! I really like where this is going. Your pixel art is impressive, and the feel of the game is spot on. I am a sucker for RE and this gave me some throwback vibes to the very first ones. Great job. I initially wanted to do a zombie game but I have not done pixel art before so they ended up becoming little alien creatures. 

I had issues playing however, the zombies were patrolling very fast, so fast that I could not get past either of the two first ones and was unable to progress. It seemed I only needed to step in their pathway to die. I am wondering, did you optimise the movement by time? i.e. so the zombies move at the same rate for everyone regardless of framerate. 

It's a shame as this game looks super promising. If you think you can fix it let me know as I'd love to try again. If there's anything you need from me to help with this let me know. 

Hey Angelis, well done on getting your 2nd game out. I really like the aesthetic and style and I'm a lover of card games. I actually had to check this wasn't already a game because I thought I had seen it before, but it turns out there are similarly named games but not quite this one. 
I know you have already disclosed this, but to me at least, the use of AI is very obvious and became a bit of a turn off the more I played. I'm not saying AI is a bad thing, they are very useful tools, but personally it was too obvious when I noticed problems, such as the game title image being spelt incorrectly and inconsistent art styles. 

When it came to the gameplay I found that I had no idea how to play, what actions were available to me each turn or how to meaningfully impact the gameplay. Cards appeared to have abilities to do damage but then did nothing and the game moved on so I was not able to figure out why and I ended up giving up. 

I think you've got a good base for a game here with lots of potential but I think some more work is required to polish it. 

Well done on publishing your game. I really like the aesthetic. 

It took me a while to realise I was able to jump consecutively, but once I did I found the game pretty easy after that, except in the wind tunnels. They're a cool feature, but I felt I had very little control once inside, though it didn't cause stop me from progressing.

I felt the jump sound could get a little tiresome after some time. I thought perhaps you could give the character cute little fairy wings that make a flutter noise, and give a bit more context as to how she can jump consecutively. I think I'd also like to see a sort of momentum mechanic in there to make controlling the jumps a bit more interesting and challenging. 

Like others, I had optimisation issues. I am on a fairly decent gaming laptop with upgraded ram and I feel like I've played much more demanding games on it in terms of size, functionality and graphics. I suspect part of the optimisation is the use of all the reflective surfaces, and the particle affects really hit framerate too. I think the auto save is unnecessary, and made death irrelevant. 

All in all I think it's a neat little idea that has lots of potential.

Hey, well done on publishing your game. I played an earlier build and the visual improvements are really good. I think you found a really intriguing style, but like others I just didn't get it. It's not the controls, that's pretty simple to get, but more so the consequences of my choices and the seemingly randomness of the prompts. I found that after a while I did not care what choice to pick because I didn't feel I could meaningfully affect the characters or narrative, resulting in the eventual death of all my characters. 
I think there is potential here. Your writing is intriguing and it is an interesting idea. I appreciate you are not intending to return to this project, but in case you do, or you do something similar in the future I think this kind of game could benefit from a branching narrative, and making it a bit more apparent how stats affect gameplay.

Thank you so much! 

Thank you so much. I'm glad you enjoyed the death animations. I wasn't sure if they were a bit over the top, given the (hopefully) cuteness of the characters.

Well done on making good progress with this game. I really like the fantasy vibe you're going for a the simple graphics are well done. You've got some well written dialogue in there too!

I was unable to play the game in the game jam page as the Fullscreen button was not working, but I could overcome this by going to the actual game page and playing in Fullscreen mode. It wasn't obvious that the game needed to be in Fullscreen to function correctly however. 

I think you have captured the mechanics of Humans, Please perfectly, and added your own twist to make it unique by being able to pocket some gold. I was able to exploit the toll please button to get a seemingly infinite amount of gold, and I didn't really make use of the advanced interactions buttons. At the end of the day I was not able to continue onto another a day. 

I think you've got a good base for a game here, and with some further development you can iron out some issues. I really like the world building and I think you could build upon this further. It would also be good to have something to spend that pocketed gold on in between shifts too. 

First of all, congratulations on finishing a game, and you did a great job on what you have accomplished! I really like the dark/gothic fantasy atmosphere and style of your game. Also, claw wizard - brilliant!

I had a few runs and here's what I thought of gameplay and balance. 

The first run I tried to explore everywhere and bought the first upgrades that were presented to me. I found I ran out of gold very quickly and so many rooms presented upgrades I was unable to obtain. This was a little bit frustrating as not many rooms contained gold. I died about half way up when the difficulty of the monsters increased and I didn't know the best way to beat them. 

The second run I also explored everywhere but this time was more selective in the upgrades I chose, which helped, but I still struggled when the claw wizard absolutely destroyed me. It seemed to do quite a lot of damage, however, maybe I wasn't paying attention to my hp as I was focusing on trying to sap it's mana. 

The last run I mainly headed up the tower as quickly as possible only stopping the at rooms on the way or visible from the stairs. This time I got all the way to the top to face the tyrant but struggled to defeat him before dying as I had no way to heal myself. 

Hopefully that will give you some insight into how a player might approach the game. I wouldn't want to comment that the game was too hard as I feel like this is probably intentional, and to make the player make conscious choices about which skills to increase and which resources to use including mana. 

One suggestion I would make is to make items available in combat, as this would allow a player to have at least 1 way of healing during battle. I think on one of my earlier runs I had a hp sap type spell but this was offset easily by the damage the enemy would inflict on that turn, making it less effective as a healing tool. 

Some of the skills had more obvious uses that others, for example, strength, toughness and arcana have obvious benefits to combats and traps. I felt dexterity only had a use for traps, which I could use something else to overcome. I didn't see any use for faith so it was unclear what this would affect. Other than more damage, I think having some more feedback that the elemental spells were more effective would be helpful. 

All in all I think you have a very good base, and I'm really impressed with the progress you've made in the bootcamp with this. I think there's a lot of room to build upon what you have already to make this even more great!