- Combat is not TB, so it won't find much appreciation on this site.
That's... weird. But okay, I can live with it.
"
on this site" - is there a magical place where people appreciate real-time combat? Can I get a link? =]
- Action RPG combat - it's all good and well, but yours looks slow and not dynamic enough to be even remotely entertaining. You have to research games with similar combat and see how you can improve yours. A lot more action - either increase the number of enemies and make it look like Diablo 1, or make things bounce, run faster, make it much more dynamic. I don't have good examples, do the research.
I know how to make fast-paced combat, but I don't want it for this game. It's the 6th iteration of combat, and I like how it feels.
The slower pace is part of the charm - every fight feels pretty significant, there's enough time to think "If I timed this better, I could have dealt 20% more damage and avoided taking some myself, so I'd have more supplies for the next fight, ...".
Then there are fights where you're on 10% health all the time, desperately trying to dodge every attack, and it goes for what feels like minutes, for that rush when you eventually survive - "Eat shit, I'm a god-damned-unkillable-badass!!!"
Don't want to lose that for generic spam clicking combat - nothing wrong with that, it's fun, I've made games like that, but I want to make "Every hit matters" kind of combat this time. And not TB.
Adding more enemies could be a solution, though I'd need to optimize more and find a solution to stop people from splitting up the enemy groups, which is very easy to do currently.
- People used to play games like yours back in the 80s when it was something new. Nowadays an experience of walking around and killing stuff is a shallow one. Unless there's a compelling story to go with the game, nothing can make me go kill things in a game for no reason. The process itself is not fun, unless there's a story.
Oh, there is a story.
Can't say if it's a good story, though I'm putting a lot of effort into it.
People still play games like that though, there are a lot of grindy games out there, and then people skip dialogues, so I don't know.
You have to go back to the drawing board.
Almost two years of full-time work on this, not the time to go back to the drawing board, heh. Got to finish it and finally get some money out of it.
Anyway, I didn't reply to just deflect, I will think about what you wrote for days to come.
I really appreciate honest, brutal feedback, it's something I get extremely rarely on the places I usually post. Much love ^_^
Here is some feedback for your game but feel free to laugh at me as most people do. Today I actually found out I am retarded so... I would probably take all this with a grain of salt.
I took a few mins to customize my character, which I like that you included that feature as well as the Multiplayer is a nice bonus. I played for 30 mins to figure out controls and get familiar with the game and then spent another 10 - 15 mins writing my friend trying to play "online multiplayer" with him when it specifically says LOCAL MULTIPLAYER. Like I said... Today I realized I am retarded. I am saying, I think online multiplayer would be fun and maybe a boss encounter or something. I realize this is only the demo and thought there was a good amount of items to collect, equip and some skills / spells and stuff. I can kinda envision how this would come together with a whole bunch of gear and alot more content and I like it! I enjoyed what I played but the only disappointed was myself - reading multiplayer but skipping over the LOCAL part.
We were a both little bit confused as to the direction until we figured out you can talk to the rogues (which some will attempt to trick or attack you while others could possible give you gear or items!). I didn't go explore the town but just focused on getting better gear, running from enemies that would kill me but still grabbing items, equipping them and coming back to fuck them up. lol. It felt good to demolish a few enemies and get revenge.
Friends thoughts : "My criticism is I suck at game but it fun to attack locals"
I'm glad you two got something out of it!
Regarding multiplayer, do you know about
Steam Remote Play Together?
It kind of turns it into an online multiplayer, it works... okay-ish.
I'm not going to make a built-in online multiplayer because that way is madness. Local multiplayer is tough enough.
