I could not stop playing. I did not kill the doppleganger, 20 freezing spikes and the wand were not enough, one more reason to play the next demo, although' the truth is I will replay with a mage party to kill it eventually.
First thing first, the game runs perfectly on my antique pc, I won't spend time on loading times, I know some people kind of don't care much but that's super important to me, it's one thing that could make me play this game instead of another one and to be more precise in this case will make me buy it on release day without a second thought.
The game looks great, in case you wonder the enemies' idle animation are perfect to give some impression of movement instead weird rigidness. The different gfx mesh well enough, I guess the portraits in town are a bit weaker than everything else. The game also sounds great, the default volume of the music is good and I liked the songs which remind me in particular of Eye of the beholder series' intro music and you can't go better than that.
UI's pretty good, 100% intuitive and 100% accessible. I think right-clicking on an item on the floor could directly add it to the shared inventory, not sure if it should work exactly the same for chests, right clicking adding everything into the inventory with a text detailing what's taken could work I guess, maybe there's something better to think about. One thing, I'm not sure if it's a resolution issue, but I have to click a bit to the left of levers and key locks, not directly onto it, I tried to take a screenshot but it does not work.
I loved the gameplay, of course, and chosen party was for sure much better than a unique imposed one for the demo.
I think there's no way to get neither the stats of a piece of equipment nor the actual stats of the character when you've equipped it directly in the inventory, I'm sure that's already planned or there's a way I missed but just in case that could help.
Enemies' turn is possibly a bit slow, it could be faster at very least as an option (I'd see default a bit faster anyway). Since it switches afterwards I think there's no reason why you'd need to click on End turn if you want to instantly switch to the next character after using your two weapons, so I guess it could automatically immediatly switch after you use those, without having to either press End turn of wait for the last attack's feedback. Combat's feeling is great anyway.
Very good job, can't wait to play the full game.
Wow, I wholeheartedly thank you for this thorough review on the demo, its greatly appreciated!
I had to read it a number of times, I liked it that much because it shows devotion to the genre. Thank you.
About the Doppelganger, you are quite the patient one
The event's intention was more to "trap" you there against an unbeatable monster. If you check the accompanied rulebook, you'll find out that it its a level 10 monster, has around 100 hp and a high protection, leaving you only the magic option. Perhaps with a party of 4 wizards with good intelligence, you'll be able to beat it after a while. But kudos on trying to kill it!
Thank you about the performance notes. The game is written on bare bone low-level native code and tested on low-end machines & embedded devices, trimming a lot of nowadays goodness in favor of total control. Nowadays, this might sounds hilarious but one of my hidden intentions is to create a game in the old, standard way. The total file size is an indication of this; in fact, the final release will still be around that size. Everything is tighty packed, everything is used and I'm always on the hunt to eliminate bloated stuff. I just laugh hard on the 1GB size restriction of itch.io. I also like to see the games I play on technical level (I can't help it) and I'm delighted when I spot optimized builds.
The monster's animation is greatly inspired on the way Jon animated his own on M&M3-5
That is, cutting the animated parts out and making frames out of them. Ive implemented a way to automate the whole procedure and the final game will contain a boatload of such animated sprites. This seemed to me like a great convention and I chose to use that, instead of just moving the sprites here and there. I also paid great attention on sound part, given those sounds are heard all of the time. I'm easily annoyed s that greatly helps eliminating such issues
I'll be using a lot of such tunes on different environments and situations.
I tried very hard to assemble an easy-going GUI. I'm easily annoyed of lengthy procedures to achieve something through the UI so thank you for your confirmation! Yeah, I like your suggestions. There are a lot of ways to streamline this to compact it even more. About the issue, I will implement some keys to provide screenshot ability to the user to debug this better. Perhaps its a resolution and/or shader not finding a proper texture size.
About the stats, I need to invent a way for instant comparison between the equipped items, without making it look like MMO. The current way is not the optimal of course; I usually change weapons of portait blocks with stats window opened to see the updated values but for other body parts thats not easy to tell. Its planned, yes. I will also work out more into speed and provide some more options on settings for that matter.
About the 'End Turn' buttons, its very helpful when your character is a caster and you're out of spells or your bare fists can't do much against a boss-like entity, such cases
It was not added for speed but also to get rid of useless moves, which weirdly make things faster as well.
Thank you overall for the great review!
