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The Deadly Dungeons of Baron Backslash

A fiendishly challenging retro pixel-art dungeon escape game. · By RedMarsDigital

feedback on a good game

A topic by elater created Feb 15, 2018 Views: 363 Replies: 1
Viewing posts 1 to 2

this game is really good! thanks for making it. here's some things i've been thinking about while playing.

the controls are unusual but simple and easy to get used to, and i like that.

the graphics are good too, although at first, it's kind of difficult to distinguish between "objects you can pick up and interact with" and "objects that are just obstacles or background scenery." and there's one object sometimes dropped by enemies that looks like maybe a gold necklace but could also conceivably be a transparent gold-bordered mushroom...

i like the mechanism where the score counts down like a clock. it's a good incentive to move quickly without the usual stress of a time limit.

the enemies should flash or something to indicate that they're taking damage.

it seems like weapons have varying properties besides differing reach/color, and it'd be cool if you could tell what those properties are. as it stands, it's hard to tell whether switching weapons will be an upgrade unless the new weapon is the same color but longer.

it would also be cool if you could see the effects of wearing different hats (if there are any).

and it would be cool if the player could clearly see the status effects imparted by various mushrooms. also, the mushrooms pretty much all look the same... well, maybe that's intentional? and once, i saw one that was flashing either red or gold (i don't remember which) but it didn't end up doing anything special when i ate it, as far as i could tell. and the mushroom that makes you feel invincible doesn't actually make you invincible...

the levels are awfully big and hard to navigate. it would be nice if they were smaller or if there was a minimap (or an option to zoom out or something) to aid navigation.

the only glitch i've seen was when a stealth skeleton tried to rise up out of its pile and got stuck at the point in the animation where it's almost done getting up, so it was just kind of bobbing up and down forever, harmless and unkillable. i have only seen this happen once.


keep up the good work!

Developer

Hey, thank you so much for taking the time to give feedback - I'm so sorry I only just stumbled onto it! Evidently I need to take a look at my notification settings...

I'm really glad you enjoyed the game, despite the rough edges. Every bit of your feedback is totally valid, I completely agree with all of your comments. 

To be honest the last couple of weeks I spent making the game ended up waaaaay more rushed than planned, because midway through the project I was offered a new full time job. So instead of being able to take my time to give things that final polish, send out to some playtesters, etc, I ended up instead just rushing to draw some kind of line under it all and releasing it to get some closure ahead of starting the new job. I basically sank 6 weeks full-time into developing this, and although it was an insane amount of fun, it was never going to pay the rent!

At the time I published the game, literally nobody else (except my gf who was sick of the sight of it) had played or even seen it, which I now see is a massive rookie mistake. When you're totally immersed in the code you kinda forget that everybody else is coming at it with fresh eyes, and stuff that's totally obvious to you may well be completely opaque to everyone else. That's an early step on the  game dev learning curve I guess!!

Anyway, excuses aside - the big issues you've identified are all on the cards for tackling in a major update, whenever I can find time to make that happen:

  • Add a mini-map, and / or some sort of helping hand (pointer arrows?) to guide towards the next 'objective'
  • Have all interactable objects / scenery make themselves a bit more obvious (eg by pulsing or flashing)
  • Blood splats / flashes to indicate successful hits on enemies
  • More differentiation to weapons / helmets, and for it to be more obvious what the differences are (nb there's currently a pretty weak 'elemental' style mechanic going on here, in which some weapons give significantly better chances of critical hits against some kind of enemies - and ditto for the helmets, which prevent critical hits on you from certain types of enemies - there are also a couple of other hidden mechanics with some types)
  • A pretty serious overhaul of items & pickups, particularly mushrooms (nb the 'invincible' mushroom effect gives a 50% chance of negating any damage you take while it's in efect - there's a metallic 'ching' sound effect when this is triggered, like a sword bouncing off armour - so now you know!)
  • ...etc (loads more ideas than time to code them)

Thanks also for flagging the glitch - not something I've seen myself yet but I'll try to replicate and squish it.

Anway I'll stop rambling - thanks again for playing & giving really constructive feedback, cheers!

Robin