Absolutely life changing advice. Take note future game designers, all of the 200 word RPG winners follow the advice laid out in this book. An absolute must-download for anyone looking to publish indie RPGs.
A restart level button when I've used up all combos would be nice. The tutorial says that hints might be given in-game, but I haven't seen any beyond the star system.
Button prompts do not match well with music. Also, the "hold" notes look too similar to the regular notes and I missed a bunch before I even realized what I was doing wrong. Please fix these issues!
The scrolling was as good as I could get in a limited time. I had it set to twice the speed it is in this version originally, but it was too fast and made it feel like the screen was "snapping" to the player. I use gamemaker which (as far as I know) doesn't offer a "smooth" follow camera natively meaning I would have had to code it myself.
Fights actually can take multiple turns if you are under-powered enough. If you don't collect the weapon in the level, every "boss" character should always take two or more hits. It might be hard to notice if you're playing fast though, since it's doing a check every frame. I'm sort of torn on making the enemies health visible. I sort of like requiring players to encounter an enemy before they know for sure what its attack power and hp is because it makes fights more risky. I can understand why someone might find it frustrating though. If you have any suggestions for a middle-ground I'd love to hear them!
Pretty much the gold is there as a high score mechanic. If I had more time I would have included a tracker of your max level reached/max gold. I'm glad that you found the game balanced, I tried to come up with enemy strength and armor values that would put the player in danger, but not be too much. So long as you are able to find one or two pieces of armor in a level, you should survive most encounters and the way the maze is built, the "boss" is guaranteed to be far away from the player at the beginning.
The view is limited in that you can only see 1/4 of the maze at a time, meaning you can't head straight for the exit. I had planned on implementing something that would restrict your view to just the corridors the character would be able to see down but ran out of time. Toward the end it became more important to bugfix.
The wall jumping controls are finicky. I think using up energy to solve puzzles isn't a great mechanic. It forces the player to lose the game if they are unfamiliar or cannot solve a puzzle. Since the platforming needs to be so precise, it doesn't seem fair to punish the player for missing a jump.
The restart game function does not reset your acquired resources or research. Also, it does not tell you that you need a farmer to create spines, rendering the game unplayable if you buy 2 miners.
I think Kara worries too much. When I spoke to the boy with colorful hair he told me that he was fine and Kara took that as an affront. She also got stressed out because she didn't do well in the dancing game even though it was just for fun.
When I restart the first level after losing, it immediately makes me lose again. I cant play again. Also, the surfaces that are slanted are allowing the character to slip through.
Thanks! I was trying to adapt another simple homebrew system. I like a bit of crunch in my games, just enough to provide a structure for encounters. Reading other 200 word rpgs from different competitions, many of them seemed more like parlor games than proper tabletop fare.
I'm glad you like the random generation table. I tried to think about what unique features make sci-fi planets memorable and drew from Faster Than Light and other videogames for inspiration.
