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Some feedback

A topic by P. R. Saseta created Feb 02, 2022 Views: 305 Replies: 1
Viewing posts 1 to 2
(+1)

If I hadn't been forcing myself to try the game, I would've instantly bounced off of it before getting past the character selection screen.

This game has big problems with information delivery. It frontloads an staggering amount of text, forcing the player to read several pages of text before even getting into the first fight. Anyone that doesn't have any vested interest in the game is going to just close it if that's the first impression they get. This is specially aggravating when the game is a free one in alpha/beta.

Building on that, it doesn't help at all that all common names have been replaced with "thematic" ones - for example, rather than health, you have Anxiety. However, enemies have something else acting as health, which only complicates things further. The beauty of common videogame language - health, damage, etc - is that it allows players to instantly recognise what something is and have an idea of how it works. When you rename it all, you have to reteach it from scratch, with all the issues that creates.

Cards have a lot of mechanics, even the most basic ones. Combining that with how there is no visual or audio feedback and with the naming issue mentioned above, it makes fights an unintelligible mess. Just having damage popups or sounds would go a long way to tell what is going on, but even things as basic as those are absent.

The UI is also pretty bad, with a lot of important stuff (such as enemy HP and intents) being too small, and some parts of the screen being barren while others are cluttered.

After I managed to understand what I was looking at, I realised it was basically a Slay the Spire clone, down to the attack/block dichotomy and character positioning on the screen. Which begs the question: why should I play a much worse version of a game that already exists?

Perhaps there are some nuggets of good ideas in this game - theming it around dreams gives a lot of flexibility for encounters and events, and making cards have more going on for them a la Magic The Gathering could be good, if done correctly. However, all the issues mentioned above make this game feel like half-baked prototype with an exaggerated amount of content and features in it.

The best advice I can give is to give many, many more design passes to the UI, usability and new player experience: even consider dropping some of the mechanics or changing them to only appear further in the game. Because, even if there is a good game under it all, nobody will ever know as it stands.

Developer(+1)

Hey there thanks for the feedback. I am painfully aware that the UI is very bad at the moment. However I am not a frontend person and I have no skill to improve on this. I am hoping to onboard someone who can help me out.

Yes, this is very clearly inspired from StS, much like the whole genre StS spawned, I don’t try to hide this fact :) As a solodev, I am aiming for something I can implement on my own in a reasonable amount of time, as such I cam lifting mechanics from StS when relevant and adding my own twists to the genre. The main difference from StS is the infinitely expandable card-pool and combination therein without watering down any particular mechanic. That and the overall theme.

Just a clarification the game is not even in alpha. This an unfinished open source game in active development.