I've only given it a little over an hour so far I think, and most of it goofing around, but let's see...
I'm sure lots of people will call the writing "generic", but honestly I like that sort of thing as long as the tone matches, and in my opinion it does. It's written like an adult despite its innocence, and balances showing with telling. I chuckled at "Are you sure you can call this a town?" / "Of course, according to Devora population legislation article 54, a town is..."
The Soule-esque music is probably a godsend. Whether that's your own work or commissioned or royalty-free or whatever, it does big favors. I think the game begs for either that style or Ben Prunty-type stuff, and either choice was a win.
The sleep timelapse surprised me, I love it.
For criticism, I'm trying to focus on how combat plays out but I may not have the design chops to make good suggestions. I wonder if you've thought about or experimented with having a skill queue such as in RTWP games. I'm usually a turn-based guy, but it kept occurring to me while playing this that it could keep the same camera perspective, skills, cooldowns and so on while making combat less of a "watch the timer" situation. The classic MMORPG feeling it has now might be nicer if it were multiplayer, but even then I think some queueing would help it out.
Sunset comes dead fast! It seems like maybe 1 minute from dusk to black. I think it's wonderful that night is properly dark, but it seems to fall so quickly, doesn't it?
Visually: I'm a sucker for low-poly flat-textured styles like this in some cases. I think they can be great with emphasis put on lighting and animation. As it is, I'm digging the characters and buildings a lot more than the terrain, but I'm not sure what I'd suggest to bring them into alignment. It may be as simple as a grass shader, to be honest.
Must say I didn't think I was going to get good feedback on the writing as it has been severely under prioritized and as English is not my primary language. I'm glad you at least feel like it fits.
I have been lucky enough to get offers from composers for free music for the game as I have had 0$ in the budget for this.
When I started learning unity I first set out to create the combat mechanics of WoW, it then stuck with the project. I have thought about maybe add a pause feature and make it more like say Dragon Age, but ended up in that it should have been stronger if I had companions in the game, which I also wanted to have added, there just hasn't been enough time to dig into such mechanics and still make a "complete" experience. If I would reboot the project right now I probably would have gone in the more action-oriented combat.
The day/night cycle is not the best right now, I know that. Unity was a pain to implement this feature with a satisfying result to begin with so I left it once i felt it was good enough to be able to focus on more prioritized matters. I will try to tweak the settings in future updates.
The terrain is also something I would do differently now when I have more experience. At the time I wanted to have a lowpoly terrain for the lowpoly characters and objects. I found great tools and techniques for this, however adding more grass as you can do with the build-in unity terrain system was not possible while keeping reasonable performance, at least not to my current skills.
Attempt 1
- Didn’t get to read the story intro text in time, please don’t put a time limit for that.
- Zero choices in dialog. Like why even make us press on the dialog option if it’s always the only option we have.
- Sometimes it’s hard to right click on enemies.
- Game randomly froze and crashed after the first 5 minutes, when talking to Cleric Joutin.
Attempt 2
- Story intro is unskippable
- Right clicking on loot that’s far away from you = your character should automatically run up to it to open it. That’s just intuitive.
- Cleric Joutin didn’t crash the game this time.
- The jump fall animation looks comical… I don’t know if that’s an intended feature.
- Some kind of shift to sprint feature would be nice.
- I slept in the cabin but I wasn’t sure what the point of doing that was.
- Then I got bombarded with endless fetch quests and kill X amount of Y monster quests. That’s not fun man.
- I don’t mind one or two bland fetch/kill quests, but when it became three, then four, with no other cooler quests to do, I just quit.
Sorry you didn't get to read the whole intro text, I probably should have increased the time for that. I was aiming for the intro in Mass Effect 1 and with time to not make it boring. I was also one of the last things I added before release so it wasn't tested properly.
My first intention with the dialogue system was to make it multiple-choice to get different conversations. Making multiple outcomes would simply be to much work if I still wanted all other mechanics that I added. There are a few moments where you get to choose a different option to get a unique answer and some other where you have to go through all options to proceed. If/When I make the full game this system will probably be expanded.
Right clicking on loot to move the character there is something that I don't want to add as I want the player to control the character. If it was a top-down action RPG I would totally get the function but I think you in a way get more connected to your character if you don't submit control of him.
The jumping animation is something that has bothered me for a looong time. The animation in-game right now was animated a older model and I have had some issues with it. Animation is also what I believe my weakest skill and in the end it too much time to redo it from scratch right now. And the people who tested it didn't really complain over it and kept jumping around so I decided to keep it for now.
A sprint function is something a lot of people have asked for, I just didn't want to add it as the island right now is kinda small so it would bring the amount of content down and make exploration less "impactful" I thought. I might have to reconsider that.
The sleep function is to speed through the night if you don't want to be out in the dark.
Right now I have 4 different types of quest goals. This is as with everything else a time issue. I have had ideas for other types of quests but there hasn't been time for me to add it.
My first plan was to have a playable demo ready sometime around new year, but I never felt that the game was "fun" enough so no one would even consider playing it. So for the last few months, my main goal was to add systems and content so that there is at least a reasonable amount of things to do. So that if you like the gameplay enough you don't run out of content in 20 minutes. Making an RPG of this size is extremely time-consuming with the amount of items needed and to structure everything in a way so nothing is forgotten and all systems are working together.
Thank you both for playing it and come with honest feedback, I really appreciate it.
If I can ask you about how you think I should proceed with the development.
Here are a few ideas I am currently considering,
1. Continue with the current systems and combat but improve everything and make a full game.
2. Have the current systems but change the character direction more toward how it is in Dragon age and Kotor with companions.
3. Rework the combat towards more action-oriented (dark souls), this would require a slight world/environment change.
4. Add coop support and rework the world/environment to fit.
5. Scrap everything and reboot it. #insert suggestion.
