I remember seeing your character designs in the Game Art class! I'm in the RPG design class now so I took your game for the first assignment. During the playthrough I tried a lot of weird stuff to see what I could find and got a list of play-test stuff that might be useful for you (if you haven't already fixed them over the summer)
First things first: love the game, would love to see it completed at some point. Curious to see what future environments pop up and new enemy and character designs.
I loved the humor, the dialogue, and the art of your characters.
The things I found that I think could use some fixing or tweaking I'll list along with possible solutions I've thought of.
- The cutscene at the beginning is great if you have the sound on. But due to a lack of captions when I saw it in class with the PC muted I couldn't get much info out of it.
- Adding captions for the intro cutscene would be nice for those with no sound.
- The default controls can feel a little jank.
- Allowing for WASD movement could help it feel better along with adding something to teach the player the basic controls so there's a little less fumbling around if you don't already know them.
- The blacksmith's house on the beach town has an entrance tile that's in the same spot as the tile to leave the building. This means when the player enters the building they can walk backward and leave the field of play. I hadn't noticed it in any other buildings on the beach and as I got further into the game I had forgotten to check for more of these cases though.
- Moving the tile the player spawns on forward a bit should be enough to fix this.
- There's a couple cases where items/enemies respawn when they don't seem like they should. The soup at Peri's house respawns every time you enter the building, this allows you to gain infinite full heals and status heals for the party. It makes the game much easier but I doubt this was intentional.
- Either having the soup only spawn once or only allowing the party to have a limited number of soups at a time should balance this out decently.
- There's a similar effect with the boss of The Shallows. when you enter the building it tells you that you cannot come back, but there is the side room. I defeated the boss then explored the side room after to see if the dialogue of the NPCs inside changed. When I came back in I saw the boss had respawned and would repeat the dialogue and fight.This is great for leveling up the party but seems unintentional.
- Having the boss only spawn once would be fine, or if you intend to let the player grind levels on re doing the boss having some dialogue or a sign to explain the reappearance would be nice.
- I love the number of interactables in Peri and Cletus's houses. I would love to see more interactables sprinkled throughout the game world.
- There's a couple strange occurrences with collision in the environment. A few buildings you can walk on the roof of from the sides or behind. And I noticed I could walk through a lot of the scenery in The Shallows' boss room.
- Double checking the collision on the maps should help with the game feel.
I hope these observations are helpful and I look forward to seeing the game grow!