OK I did two playthroughs and I have to say you did an amazing job! What I loved:
- The whole concept of utilizing time to give you the best advantage for the coliseum
- Different locations to train with different enemies and activities
- The music during combat gives it a fast-paced feeling that many turn-based combat games do not have
- Diminishing returns on choosing the same action
Feedback:
- The opening art background is very cool and detailed, but its immediately completely covered by a textbox. Maybe add a smaller box that introduces the town before the larger text box
- After choosing an action in the wilderness locations, there is a black screen that states the location and time that feels a little unnecessary, unless it has a function I don't know about
- Typo in wound exploit "deals bonus damage equal its duration"
- Small glitch in the text when moving through items in the equipment menu (I have a screenshot if you need it)
- The "friendly bout" is not as friendly as the name implies, since you die if you lose
- Possible to be stuck in endless combat loop where opponent heals faster than you can deal damage
- It's not immediately clear what "SP" means
- Broken build: I used Wald with rending cut, mordhau, and defensive tactics to roll every enemy to the end
- Takta's skill feels underpowered compared to Wald's
- There is an SP and Gold gain error where the total and amount gained are mixed up
- The combat action bar takes up a lot of the screen and there is unused space under the MP counter. I think it could be like 30% smaller to enlarge the size of the combatants
- Maybe reduce the number of active skills you can equip
Ideas: Some of these might not be practical for the playdate or this specific game, but just some thoughts I had while playing:
- Fatigue bar
- Split the $5 and $10 skills in the shop into 4 tiers ($5/$10$15/$20)
- Reorder combat skills function
- A good/bad sound for the exploration outcomes
- Add movement to one small area of each background (like the water in the cave)
- Different travel times to scale locations
- Use the crank to play and rewind the combat animation instead of just hitting "a"
- Use the crank for an animation to train/meditate (could also add minigame function for higher gains/consequences)
- Real time countdown for additional difficulty
- Item unlocks
- Add a status effect counter above the combat action bar