Please make it so you initiate combat only if the MC collides with an enemy and not the companions. This makes fleeing really frustrating. It's a huge time waster.
This is a tricky issue. I can probably tune it a bit, such as not including the last character or two. Stealth and Talents can help you manage encounters as well. If the collision was just the main character you could almost avoid every single fight in the game with enough speed boost, and I'd have to increase monster speed by a lot for balance, which would likely be more annoying.
I'll play around with some different things and see if I can tune it to feel less frustrating. I do get what you are saying. It is not a great feeling when the last guy in line get tagged by a monster as you are running away.
Maybe the solution is not in the actual collision itself, but the overall combat fleeing experience. Being able to exit an encounter quicker could probably improve the situation as well. For instance, you could implement a flee button that:
- Speeds up turns / animations 10x.
- Automatically attempts to move every character to the edge of the screen in a direct path, in their turns.
- Skips the combat result report page.
Whereas the current experience is:
- Wait through turns until you can move a character,
- Manually move each character to the edge of the screen
- Press the flee button
- Repeat until every body is out
- Wait a few seconds for the report menu to appear then click out of it,
- Be given very little time to orient yourself back in the world, to even click away from the enemy
- Have your last companion get caught by the enemy
- Repeat until everybody is dead, so you are left with only one character who now has a realistic chance of escaping.
Anyways, I really like the game, but I think some of the interactions you have with the gameplay are seriously hindered by bad design.
I have issues with the UI as well:
- Overall i think the layouts should be reworked. This includes the inventory, the spells menu, the skills menu, and the camping menu.
- In general i think every UI element takes too much space, without actually improving visibility (eg. buttons, item icons, etc.)
- This is exacerbated somewhat by the low-poly font making it hard to read item descriptions, etc.
- The tooltips should appear much faster on mouse hover
- The button (and general UI element) placement could be much tighter
- UI elements don't feel great to interact with (eg. buttons don't give proper feedback).
- Use scrollbars instead of paging.
Some specific points:
- The inventory menu could perhaps be improved with a searchable list design, instead of the current icon-based design. In a pixelated game, the icon quality really matters when going with a visual approach. As is, it's very hard to tell what an item is, just by its icon.
- Again, a scrolling system would be easier than a paging one.
- There should be a way to filter items based on type. It's very difficult to navigate and find stuff when they are all dumped on the same page. I know there is a sort button, but it's still not enough.
- In the camping menu, you have to hold LMB while you click on the camping role buttons to assign someone to a task. This is odd and inconsistent with every other UI element, which makes it frustrating every time you camp, because the player is not taught by the rest of the UI to expect something like this. So every time, i try to assign someone to a role at camp, i click and let go of the button, and then realize i have to hold it down instead.
- In combat, clicking on an AOE does not immediately show the area of the effect of a spell/ability. Instead you have to click LMB first for them to show up. This is kinda similar to the issue with the camping assignment thing, but not exactly the same.
- I might be dumb, it's not clear to me at all how you can cancel a combat move / ability order. There really should be a option for this.
- The save / load menu is really strange. Again, just go with a list instead of laying out blockly elements like this over the whole screen. I think you tried to improve visibility by utilizing the entire screen in the menus, etc. But I really think it has had the opposite effect. You can achieve a lot here by just using a tighter, better planned layout. People give AAA UI design a lot of shit, and i often agree with them, especially with how soul-less and samey they all look. But I think one reason is that these layouts are battle tested over decades of video game design. They might be soul-less, but they are very functional and use screen real-estate really well.
Overall i'm not a big fan of the block / boxy UI design philosophy.
I realize some of these are very nit-picky, but i think a UI rework could greatly improve the player's experience in an otherwise great game.
