Hello. Here are a few issues I noticed with Bainok while playing it.
1. The doors to the immediate right of the first building you exit in the game have no collision so you can walk through them and up onto the parts of the map that should be unreachable.
2. I alt-tabbed out of the game and came back to the game being windowed and in the same resolution but now scratched inwards (ultrawide 2560x1080 -> what seemed like it'd be a 16:9 window except still my same resolution so pixels were squashed).
3. The cursors that represent the combat order should be colored separately to more clearly show *your* turn and the enemy's.
4. Some of the moves don't bring up info when you click on them and instead just immediately go into effect when you click on them (the evasion skills). This is odd, and I know hovering over them shows the turn order, but there should be a secondary confirmation for every skill or not at all (feels unintuitive to have to be on the lookout for ones that show you the turn order on hover so you make sure you don't accidently click them if you're curious about what they might do).
5. I lost the first fight and was immediately transported to a place where there were three guys on podiums I could fight. Not sure if this is intentional. 5a. I tried to heal myself at the vending machines in the abovementioned area and they had no effect.
6. I had 5 moneys on hand at one point and tried to buy a hotdog that cost 5. It did not work. I don't know if this was just for that vendor or a general issue.
7. I got into an event where I was sneaking into and stealing from a warehouse after talking to someone at some couches near a TV in one of the more open areas. I got into the same(?) or a similar event later on after walking through an alleyway and was given some error dialogue once I was in the warehouse (see image below). I then tried to interact with everything in that warehouse as I did before but was never able to trigger anything to allow me to leave of progress the story forward.
The combat mechanic for Bainok is interesting and certainly a break from typical turn-based RPG's. I think this part of the game is the most well-executed while the world you walk through still feels almost empty in a way. A lot of the sprite styles clash with each other and there are many of the same-looking NPC's. There's a ton of dialogue going on here in a world that's hard to care about. I feel like if you shrunk the world down a bit, or at least only had a slice of the game's world that was a bit more hammered out (more sprite variety, less large empty spaces), it would be a more interested world to explore.
Apologies for the somewhat harsh criticism. I hope future Demo Days will see this game with the combat UI improved and a far richer world to explore!
Oh crap, I am sorry. I've got fully into working on the feedback I've got, and didn't notice you've left me one too.
I appreciate you taking the time. Some of them area already fixed, others are actively being worked on. I've completely forgot that I didn't put in anything in the case of the player losing that fist fight, but I've meant to.
I like the combat mechanics, but overworld needs work. I didn't get invested in the story - the loredump after the tutorial felt very meh, not engaging. Also didn't get too much into RPG mechanics, they probably need more explanation (if they do work).
Stamina doesn't get restored after combat, which is kinda weird, and the "restore health" doesn't change if you don't have enough money to purchase pills. Also they barely restore any health.
Some more UI QoL would be appreciated, like knowing who can be talked to or who has quests.
I feel like the game has a lot of potential, but it's too rough around the edges right now.
I like river city ransom RPG. Just please add descriptors to the actions in the battle scene so we can check what they actually do.
I'd also try to cut down and make the dialogue quicker and more dense. 15 minutes of intro is too much, and you lose out on the combat tutorial too!
I also liked the random events, but you might need a more dramatic transition so people don't htink your game bugged out. In general events and their choices seemed really interesting.
Focus on improving the presentation and player experience and you might have a good game in your hands.
The systems for combat are interesting and have a lot of potential. I played the tutorial up until reaching the market, but I wasn't really interested in anything aside from the fights and didn't feel interested enough in the city to wander around after that. I feel like the combat has enough potential to be its own game (roguelite or whatever) without having to bother too much about the story and exploration.
Some notes:
When your turn overlaps with the enemy, the enemy's isn't shown, so it appears like he just doesn't get a turn.
Holding CTRL is kinda annoying, I wish it was a toggle instead, although the turn display on the right is good enough that I realized I don't need to have the CTRL menu open all the time.
Having to select an attack just to see the current accuracy% for each enemy, and then cancelling it only to be returned to the top of the list is annoying. I think you could just show the % for all enemies at once for the given attack instead of having to switch between different interfaces.
Thanks, making the city interesting enough is a challenge I'll have to face through development. Thank you for your suggestions, I'll try to implement them all in the next iteration.
your game didn't really click with me i'm afraid. i have always been a huge believer of the idea that what players search in a game is "familiarity" above all. they look for things similar to others they have played in the past, maybe with a twist or two to spice things up. your game is very experimental, but in a cryptic, non-intuitive way. first i tried playing without following the tutorial and of course i was met with a large interface with tons of different attacks with no idea of what any of them meant. then i played the tutorial instead but i was still left confused, like there are way too many options thrown at the player at the very beginning and it leads to a very disorienting first experience. furthermore, there honestly is a lot of talking considering that it's seemingly a game about street fighting, but that's just my personal taste. after a while i got to a level up screen, but i was unable to close it in any way.
Interesting combat system, though it can feel like the variety between the different moves can be short. For example, when picking between moves that are both "high", the small variations in shock and haul are a little too granular IMO to be interesting. Chaining moves together to build special combos though could make them more meaningful. Game crashed when I went with Leon to help with Rory - index out of bounds exception for the dialogue apparently.
Thanks for playing. Bug have been fixed up, sorry about it.
In defence of the moves, the idea is also that you get to train and level them up later, so the differences become more pronounced. This was to be revealed after that mission to have some gameplay between the waves of tutorial infos.
Comments
Hello. Here are a few issues I noticed with Bainok while playing it.
1. The doors to the immediate right of the first building you exit in the game have no collision so you can walk through them and up onto the parts of the map that should be unreachable.
2. I alt-tabbed out of the game and came back to the game being windowed and in the same resolution but now scratched inwards (ultrawide 2560x1080 -> what seemed like it'd be a 16:9 window except still my same resolution so pixels were squashed).
3. The cursors that represent the combat order should be colored separately to more clearly show *your* turn and the enemy's.
4. Some of the moves don't bring up info when you click on them and instead just immediately go into effect when you click on them (the evasion skills). This is odd, and I know hovering over them shows the turn order, but there should be a secondary confirmation for every skill or not at all (feels unintuitive to have to be on the lookout for ones that show you the turn order on hover so you make sure you don't accidently click them if you're curious about what they might do).
5. I lost the first fight and was immediately transported to a place where there were three guys on podiums I could fight. Not sure if this is intentional.
5a. I tried to heal myself at the vending machines in the abovementioned area and they had no effect.
6. I had 5 moneys on hand at one point and tried to buy a hotdog that cost 5. It did not work. I don't know if this was just for that vendor or a general issue.
7. I got into an event where I was sneaking into and stealing from a warehouse after talking to someone at some couches near a TV in one of the more open areas. I got into the same(?) or a similar event later on after walking through an alleyway and was given some error dialogue once I was in the warehouse (see image below). I then tried to interact with everything in that warehouse as I did before but was never able to trigger anything to allow me to leave of progress the story forward.
The combat mechanic for Bainok is interesting and certainly a break from typical turn-based RPG's. I think this part of the game is the most well-executed while the world you walk through still feels almost empty in a way. A lot of the sprite styles clash with each other and there are many of the same-looking NPC's. There's a ton of dialogue going on here in a world that's hard to care about. I feel like if you shrunk the world down a bit, or at least only had a slice of the game's world that was a bit more hammered out (more sprite variety, less large empty spaces), it would be a more interested world to explore. Apologies for the somewhat harsh criticism. I hope future Demo Days will see this game with the combat UI improved and a far richer world to explore!
Oh crap, I am sorry. I've got fully into working on the feedback I've got, and didn't notice you've left me one too.
I appreciate you taking the time. Some of them area already fixed, others are actively being worked on. I've completely forgot that I didn't put in anything in the case of the player losing that fist fight, but I've meant to.
I like the combat mechanics, but overworld needs work. I didn't get invested in the story - the loredump after the tutorial felt very meh, not engaging. Also didn't get too much into RPG mechanics, they probably need more explanation (if they do work).
Stamina doesn't get restored after combat, which is kinda weird, and the "restore health" doesn't change if you don't have enough money to purchase pills. Also they barely restore any health.
Some more UI QoL would be appreciated, like knowing who can be talked to or who has quests.
I feel like the game has a lot of potential, but it's too rough around the edges right now.
Thanks for the stream mate, it was very educational. I am at full steam now to polish up this baby.
I like river city ransom RPG. Just please add descriptors to the actions in the battle scene so we can check what they actually do.
I'd also try to cut down and make the dialogue quicker and more dense. 15 minutes of intro is too much, and you lose out on the combat tutorial too!
I also liked the random events, but you might need a more dramatic transition so people don't htink your game bugged out. In general events and their choices seemed really interesting.
Focus on improving the presentation and player experience and you might have a good game in your hands.
Yeah editorializing the dialogue is high on the to do list, I'll try to do a more juicy transition. Thank you for playing it.
The systems for combat are interesting and have a lot of potential. I played the tutorial up until reaching the market, but I wasn't really interested in anything aside from the fights and didn't feel interested enough in the city to wander around after that. I feel like the combat has enough potential to be its own game (roguelite or whatever) without having to bother too much about the story and exploration.
Some notes:
Thanks, making the city interesting enough is a challenge I'll have to face through development. Thank you for your suggestions, I'll try to implement them all in the next iteration.
your game didn't really click with me i'm afraid.
i have always been a huge believer of the idea that what players search in a game is "familiarity" above all. they look for things similar to others they have played in the past, maybe with a twist or two to spice things up.
your game is very experimental, but in a cryptic, non-intuitive way. first i tried playing without following the tutorial and of course i was met with a large interface with tons of different attacks with no idea of what any of them meant. then i played the tutorial instead but i was still left confused, like there are way too many options thrown at the player at the very beginning and it leads to a very disorienting first experience.
furthermore, there honestly is a lot of talking considering that it's seemingly a game about street fighting, but that's just my personal taste.
after a while i got to a level up screen, but i was unable to close it in any way.
Thanks for giving it a shot even it if wasn't up your alley. Reinforced some feedback I got earlier, so I shall rethink some approaches.
Interesting combat system, though it can feel like the variety between the different moves can be short. For example, when picking between moves that are both "high", the small variations in shock and haul are a little too granular IMO to be interesting. Chaining moves together to build special combos though could make them more meaningful. Game crashed when I went with Leon to help with Rory - index out of bounds exception for the dialogue apparently.
Thanks for playing. Bug have been fixed up, sorry about it.
In defence of the moves, the idea is also that you get to train and level them up later, so the differences become more pronounced. This was to be revealed after that mission to have some gameplay between the waves of tutorial infos.