This game is off to a great start. It's fun and playable, even in its early alpha state. I hope it does very well!
Here are a few notes, in hopes that they're helpful?
I was confused by this navigation:
I was expecting the navigation menu to work more like this:
...or this:
...with a single contrasting style to indicate what is selected.
...whereas the navigation menu in the game has a variety of seemingly-random color states, which I found to be endlessly confusing (especially in the beginning).
In reality, the menu is super simple: it's just a row of tabs, with a context-dependent submenu below. But it's difficult or impossible to work this out from the visual presentation *alone*: you really have to play around with it to figure out how it works. I think the structure / behavior could be made obvious at a glance with just a few minor visual changes: little things like an increased amount of whitespace between the menus to separate them, and a clear visual style for the selected tab. That would have helped me a lot!
The second biggest issue, in my opinion, was in the Forge tab, in the Equipment panel: Each item in your inventory appears to have a maximum level, and those maximum levels appear to be different. When an item reaches its maximum level, it would have been helpful for me if the word "MAX" had appeared somewhere near the item level.
(Also, the item level starts at "0". I would have preferred to see the first level displayed as "1", instead of "0": That way, a level "3" item would have had 3x the base stats. I would have found that a lot more intuitive!)
The biggest *gameplay* issue is that the optimal strategy seems to involve very short runs that start and end within sixty seconds, where you almost immediately earn around 10 phoenix feathers. You can quickly purchase all but the most expensive upgrades that way.
To unlock all of the jobs, you need about two longer runs--but that's it. Everything else can be very rapid short runs. It doesn't take *too* long to beat the game that way.
By the time you've unlocked the resource generation, and have begun to forge items, then you are well past the point where you should have leapt into the well: You would have been much better off if you had completely ignored the resources and equipment. The Talent trees are so much more powerful. Furthermore, the Talents persist across runs, whereas the equipment resets, so there's really no point to it. And that is a shame, since the resource generation, resource trading, and equipment forging, were all fun and interesting the first time I encountered them. It's a shame that this part of the game is disincentivized. (This might be different if the resources could be developed more quickly, and if the equipment payoff were greater? Or, from the other point of view, if the shorter runs were made less lucrative somehow?)
There are a few other major balancing issues. You're probably already aware of them, but I'll mention them briefly:
The T1-T2 jobs require some grinding to unlock, but they're not *too* difficult. In contrast, the T3-T4 jobs are excessively difficult to unlock. They only became practical for me after I had purchased nearly the entire Talents tree. (And, at that point, the game was practically over.)
Another minor observation: In the Talent tree, in the Military section, the "Battle-Hardened" talent is *super* powerful, while the similarly-expensive "Precision Strikes" talent has comparatively little effect.
In the Talents tree, there were lots of minor issues: In the Prosperity box, in the "Silver Tongue" talent, the text refers to a "wheat" resource that doesn't exist in the game. In the "Artisant's Touch" talent, there is a typo (it should read "Artisan's Touch") and the completion bonus is "WIP." I won't mention the others like this, since I'm pretty sure you know about them already.
I imagine that you're already planning some big changes to the Talents tree. (Likewise, I imagine you're already planning to replace the placeholder icons in the Equipment section.)
In the Equipment section, here's something that would have been helpful to me: *most* of the equipment items are labeled with the resource that is needed to craft them, but not *all* of the items have this information. (For example, an item might be described as "training" instead of "wooden"). I would have liked to have known which resource was needed to craft the item--so I could boost its level--and this wasn't always apparent from the item. I would have liked a naming convention more like this:
Training Sword Wooden Set
Anyway! I just wanted to say that I really liked your game. When I first started playing it, I thought it was going to be a basic prototype without too much content. But then things kept unlocking! As it turns out, there is a lot more to it than I thought.
It's a lot of fun. I know this is a super-early alpha version, but you've done a great job already.
Thanks for making it.
All right, here are some ideas for improving the game, in order of how much I wanted them. (For the record, I was playing version 0.5.2 on Firefox):
The biggest thing that would have helped me is: a tooltip for every stat! For quite a while, I was confused about things like the subtle differences between Armor, Defense, and Mitigation, or how HP5 differs from regular HP.
Next, I was confused by some of the numbers I was seeing. For example:
Here you can see that my red health orb is at 155, whereas my Max HP is at 150. That seemed impossible to me--and, yet, there it was...
There were other things like this. For example, my HP5 stat was initially at 1, until I ate a carrot with an HP5 value of 1, and then my HP5 stat jumped to 3. Later, when I had eaten both a carrot and a chicken leg, by HP5 stat was also at 3--which seemed impossible to me. I became less confident in the game as a result.
Next, I was not able to find a merchant that would allow me to sell some of my items (e.g. Club 1, Armor 2, or Legs 2). What I really wanted was a "Sell" button below the "Equip Item" button when you examine the item. It was frustrating not to be able to clean up my inventory, and (occasionally) I needed the money and really didn't want to hunt through all of the previous merchants to find the exact one who would take my item. A "Sell" button would have solved all of my problems!
I felt that the duration of the movement animation could have been about 0.5 seconds, whereas it is actually about 5 seconds. If you have to cover any significant distance, you may have to spend some 30 seconds just waiting for all of the movement animations to complete! A shorter movement animation duration would have made moving much easier!
When you're interacting with the Merchants, there is text below the dialog that says "Click here to close". Because this text is not part of the dialog itself, I didn't notice it at first, and actually wound up traveling to a nearby location, and then traveling back, each time I needed to close a dialog. Later, when I realized how you're supposed to do it, I still reflexively searched for a close button, [x], in the top-right corner of the dialog. I kept expecting there to either be a close button, or to be able to click anywhere outside the dialog to close it. Neither of those things work for the merchant dialogs!
Twice, I accidentally bought something that I was intending to sell. This can happen when you enter sell mode, and then quickly switch to another vendor, which puts you in buy mode without your explicit consent. This can have consequences: I lost a fair bit of money both times I unintentionally did this, because it was very early in the game, and it consumed all of the money I had.
When I first entered "Cave 1:1," I was unlucky enough to get seven non-monster encounters in a row. There was absolutely nothing for me to do except wonder why my character kept trying to pick a fight with a rock? It seemed very strange that he considered a stalagmite to be a significant threat, since it is well out of reach and totally inanimate. I had to wait through seven non-monster encounters before I finally got a single monster to fight, and then I got another long string of non-monsters before I found the exit and got the heck out of there.
I noticed some typos in the monster descriptions:
Sporeback: "definetly" => "definitely"
Wolf: "SCRATH" => "SCRATCH"
There may be others, but I figured I would make a note of the ones I found, in case that helps :)
Anyway, thank you for the game! I think it has a lot of potential.
I understood what was going on pretty quickly--with two exceptions: I never did figure out what upgrading does, and I'm not sure what the Bone and Ectoplasm coins are for?
The main thing I wanted was the ability to auto-summon creatures at a given rate. As it is, I spend most of my time frantically clicking: It would have been nice if the creatures came out on their own (which they technically do, but only very infrequently).
Anyway! I thought it worked pretty well! It was fun to figure out how the towers worked... and then to construct a labyrinthine path to keep the creatures busy.
I took a few screenshots of things that I thought you might like to see:
The text here says "Spirit Lantern Unlock Unlocked."
In this photo, you can see the creatures climbing up without a ladder: You can reproduce this if you summon a huge amount of creatures at once and then move the ladder. (You can also get the creatures to pass through solid towers by placing items on top of them:)
This was also confusing to me:
The text says that there are 6 Furballs, but there are no Furballs anywhere to be seen. The battlefield is completely silent, and has been for a while!
My guess is that when the Furballs do eventually appear, there will be 6 of them. Is that how this works? If so, then this confusion could be eliminated if you added the word "Next: " along with a timer. Ideally, there would also be a tooltip that say you can increase the number of Furballs that autospawn by purchasing the "Upgrade" (assuming that's how it works, of course!)
The one thing that would improve the user interface the most is: Disable the "Necro Tower" button when you don't have enough money to build one (and make the button look different when it's disabled). As it is, you're seemingly able to buy and place the tower--only to have it turn red and disappear at the very end! I think this is the main reason why a lot of people were confused!
What a cool game! It's fun to play, the idea is great, and the execution is very nicely done. It's fun choosing upgrade strategies, and then seeing the consequences. It's hard to put down.
At times, I thought things like "well, I'll never need these stone upgrades again," only to discover that you thought of everything, and they do indeed serve a purpose, even in the end game.
I was *pretty sure* that there would be no bugs at all, because it is so polished and well-thought out, but I did manage to find some very minor ones! (Wow!) See the attached screenshot:
There are several things to notice:
First, in the big desert pane (where you can see the drones working in the desert), in the top right corner, under the "Drone Target" menu, "Claystone" is listed twice.
ALSO, in the desert pane, one of the white quartz stones spawned smaller than the other two: This happens when you use the bomb frequently on areas where an animation is in progress. You can freeze the animation in any state, including some scaled-down and translucent states.
Under the Quarry tab, note that the "TOTAL ROCKS" shows a maximum of 10, whereas the "STONE" maximum is 11. Should this be capped at 10?
Another minor point: In the bottom right corner, under the "Rocks" tab, there is no scroll bar to indicate that there is additional content beyond what is visible. I was well into the Stone age before I discovered that you could scroll down--which is necessary to unlock the next stage. Because there was no scroll bar, others might *never* scroll down, and therefore never find those upgrades, and just assume the game is a toy demo version, and leave (as I almost did).
But these are all very minor issues. You have a fantastic game! Thank you for making it.
