This game was painful to play in the sense that it felt like a wasted potential. The individual parts are good: custom art, cool world building, neat concept of deadline and activities: but putting them together with the rest doesn't make it shine as it should.
My biggest problem with presentation was the mapping: art was pretty and custom, same with facesets, but the maps using he materials were slipshod and barebones. In general it would have helped to make maps smaller and size up tiles to x2 or x3 the size. Small, nice maps would have been much preferable to large, messy ones with tiny graphics. The mapping wasn't very good either, too much empty space that made it look unfinished.
It feels like there's not much to do at all, and everything you can find costs too much time and money. Obviously I only played through once and the game wants you to repeat the cycle, but if the first go didn't hook me I don't have much reason to.
Balance felt off: the mine job was purely positive, giving money and stat, but the job at the waterways gives money an takes away a whole whopping 50 MAX Hp, not even current HP. That feels like a very large penalty for an activity that doesn't have that big of an upside.
I could only find one follower: the jellyfish girl. I saw a couple other portraits which I assume mean they were playable but one disappeared (the jellyfish dude in your hometown) and the other didn't give me a quest (the demon girl in your hometown gate). The other one in the game page (big person) i never even saw.
The bandit running around your home town is bugged: you automatically win.
The demon lady in the bar (i think) of the demon town doesn't talk.
It feels like the game tires to cram a bit TOO much world building in, especially terminology. Some looser, simpler terms would have been welcome.
With nothing else to do and NOT at all prepared I went to the dungeon to see what it was like, and got my ass rocked, of course.
Again, the custom graphics were very pretty (faces and tiles) but the tiles are wasted being so tiny and used in barebones maps.
Balance feels iffy, but I'm not sure how to address it. Some suggestions off the top of my head:
Improve the mapping and double up tile size.
Make time NOT advance from walking around in maps,activities already take up a lot of time.
Have more activities to do, even for smaller rewards/times.
More hints as to activities would be nice, especially related to party members.
I might be wrong but this feels unfinished, and that's a pity. It could have been a very neat game.
Hi! Thanks for the review! I appreciate the criticism, and hope to address alot of it.
Admittedly, we had planned for a lot more in regards to things to do (originally had options to train stats, different jobs, etc) but we had to cut a great deal of it by the end of the jam. Some features (bandits, etc) were only half done by the time we submitted. Regarding job balance, there are a total of three jobs in the game, the mines, the customs house during the daytime, and the customs house at night. If you are an Avarga (big crab race), you will get paid extra at the mine, otherwise, the night-time customs house pays the best, at the cost of max HP. I do agree though that the money from the customs house should be increased, and more jobs would help.
As for Tilesets, we realised early on it would probably be really difficult to get the custom tilesets for each of the areas done in time, so we decided to go with other assets instead. I would have preferred to go with full custom tiles but half-custom, half-premade tiles would have looked out of place and not meshed well together. Going forward I would push for more custom tiles, but we simply didn't have enough time :(
A big thing we could have done before we submitted was more hints as to followers, and more methods to get them. There was going to be alternate methods of getting some of the followers, but towards the end I ran out of time and was worried about breaking something last second.
We hope to have an updated release after the conclusion of the game jam with fixes to these issues and clarification with player options.
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This game was painful to play in the sense that it felt like a wasted potential. The individual parts are good: custom art, cool world building, neat concept of deadline and activities: but putting them together with the rest doesn't make it shine as it should.
Balance feels iffy, but I'm not sure how to address it. Some suggestions off the top of my head:
I might be wrong but this feels unfinished, and that's a pity. It could have been a very neat game.
Hi! Thanks for the review! I appreciate the criticism, and hope to address alot of it.
Admittedly, we had planned for a lot more in regards to things to do (originally had options to train stats, different jobs, etc) but we had to cut a great deal of it by the end of the jam. Some features (bandits, etc) were only half done by the time we submitted. Regarding job balance, there are a total of three jobs in the game, the mines, the customs house during the daytime, and the customs house at night. If you are an Avarga (big crab race), you will get paid extra at the mine, otherwise, the night-time customs house pays the best, at the cost of max HP. I do agree though that the money from the customs house should be increased, and more jobs would help.
As for Tilesets, we realised early on it would probably be really difficult to get the custom tilesets for each of the areas done in time, so we decided to go with other assets instead. I would have preferred to go with full custom tiles but half-custom, half-premade tiles would have looked out of place and not meshed well together. Going forward I would push for more custom tiles, but we simply didn't have enough time :(
A big thing we could have done before we submitted was more hints as to followers, and more methods to get them. There was going to be alternate methods of getting some of the followers, but towards the end I ran out of time and was worried about breaking something last second.
We hope to have an updated release after the conclusion of the game jam with fixes to these issues and clarification with player options.
Thanks for playing!
Looks good 😊