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Hungry For Loot's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Fun | #6 | 3.625 | 3.625 |
| Sound/Audio | #8 | 3.375 | 3.375 |
| User Interface (UI/UX) | #8 | 3.250 | 3.250 |
| Overall | #13 | 3.375 | 3.375 |
| Visuals(Graphics) | #14 | 3.250 | 3.250 |
Ranked from 8 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
DevLog Link
https://dragonsisle.itch.io/hungry-for-loot/devlog/1553349/0160-lorecompendiumbestiary
Developer Feedback Questions
We have released several updates and devlogs this month.
What parts of the game do you like?
What parts do you dislike?
Would you prefer if this was done as a JRPG?
Would you prefer more focus on combat such as an endless or roguelike style?
Is there another style that has aspects you think would improve the game?
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Comments
Hey! I played once again!
I see you change game to be much easier, it's not bad thing but I was able to pass the game without any death of my teammate. Probably it will change in development process but for demo purposes it's a good decision.
I really like your latest changes to simplify fights with common inventory for all characters, it's a pretty great change that makes the game enjoyable!
the inventory popup after a fight could have more context like "loot after the fight" so I understand what is going on. The same goes for closing this window - button "end looting" or "continue" would be much more convenient than closing the window with X button or ESC. I imagine it's pretty obvious for you but someone else could not really understand why the window is showing.
Is there way I can equip my items? Maybe there is but I couldn't find it, if yes probably there should be button "equip" so it would be more clear.
Bestiary mechanic is really cool! great job!
In part of UI/UX the game is really polished, you should stop making it any better, just focus on core gameplay :D
What parts of the game do you like?
Fight mechanic, RPG parts of the game, UI, UX, developer of the game
What parts do you dislike?
lack of exploration, limiting RPG potential of the game.
Would you prefer if this was done as a JRPG?
Yes, but with reasonable approach. Just take what is good from JRPG without blowing up scope of the game. For sure giving player ability to explore would change the game in much better way.
Would you prefer more focus on combat such as an endless or roguelike style?
Rougelike style could be cool but it's RPG game so it could not work well together. I feel looking for some randomness could give game some more fun to play.
Something like Pokemon games - you take random fights during traveling so exploring is not boring. It's still RPG game.
Is there another style that has aspects you think would improve the game?
I think game has pretty great foundation for RPG game but still lack of excitement that should come from exploring the world and story.
I would encourage to brain storm about exploration feature for the game. it's a big change but it should open up a lot possibilities and excitement.
Thanks for playing and the great feedback.
The post-combat inventory screen was there for the Inventory Management gameplay. I missed disabling it when Inventory Management is disabled, but it will be done in the next update. When you need to distribute your loot to each Slime for them to use it in the next combat, it made sense to have it show after each combat. It can be turned off in the settings, but should default to off when not needed.
There are currently no equipable items for the Slimes. We plan to later add special Slime helmets as their main armor, along with some accessory type items. It didn't make sense for the Slimes to be able to equip normal human body armor. We do plan to make some updated to the character stats screen that shows equipment slots to hide the ones the current character can't use to make it more clear.
Most of our current UI work is done when a new feature requires changes. There are a few more things we think will need some improvement to better fit the change to make Inventory Management off by default, but they are lower in priority at the moment.
"Fight mechanic, RPG parts of the game, UI, UX, developer of the game"
Thanks!
So, the reason for our questions is that what we have feels stuck between styles. The story feels like it deserves a full RPG game. Our movement through the world limits the feel of exploration that is needed for a good RPG, and is one of the complaints we often hear. We've had several ideas on how to change this, but it is a lot of work, and will add a lot of time to development. Stepping back and looking at the game, the parts that are most polished are the combat and movement, which are not really RPG. The combat can work in an RPG, but it is also not a standard style for it. In order to get a game to release that is good enough, and can sustain our game dev work, we are planning to take the pieces of the game that work, and split them off into a new game that focuses less on the story and RPG elements and instead finish up a game with them.
To make a fun game out of what we have, we are thinking the best option is to go with a Roguelite style. In looking things up I found that Roguelite is the more accurate term for what we are thinking, as we are not going for the true Roguelike experience. We will keep it in the same world setting, and are currently thinking of even being in the same area. The town our demo ends at, Wildemore, will be the starting point. You will start with 1 Slime character, and a party size of 1. You can unlock additional characters, including non-Slimes, and increase the party size. At the start of each run you pick your party. There will be the typical unlocks for permanent stat boosts, and other stuff you'll be able to start with on future runs. We figure storywise we are going to center it around fighting off various generals leading groups of the invaders, rather than going for the big bad. You can keep playing and building up, fighting ever harder forces. We will have less travel along the main road and fewer towns. The player will eventually be able to pick different directions to travel from the starting town.
I'm currently doing an overhaul on our systems for handling events and placing the segments that make up the world, which has long been planned anyway. Once that is done, we just need to add in the unlocks for future runs and build out the world for this new mode. It will be far faster to complete than an overhaul to make exploration more core to the game, especially if we go with more traditional JRPG type free roaming exploration. We also hope that keeping it in the same world will allow cross promotion and help get more interest in the base game.
I enjoyed the combat!
I found myself skipping through the story, and not doing anything at each town besides rest at the inn (unclear if that did anything). I enabled inventory management, which started getting tedious.
I think the endless or rouguelike setup would be a fun way to experiment with more challenging encounters.
Nice work!
Thanks for playing and the feedback.
Resting at the inn heals your party and advances the story available from talking to NPCs.
Hey, playing as slimes fighting humans where you can shoot loot that you pick up is a really interesting twist and I like that part of the game. I wish that I didn't have select which enemy i'm attacking every time I decide what loot im firing. Because I can already choose between enemies at any point in time, it seems like an unnecessary step. The game gives you a lot of information all at once, right at the beginning. There are tonnes of different loots, i'm not sure if it would be better to slow the amount of types the player gets a bit so its not overwhelming (Idk, I don't usually play these sorts of games, so maybe this suggestion isn't useful, it just came to mind). Youv'e got lots of good game feel in, but i'd also reduce the size of the text boxes to fit the text, and have some sounds on text coming up and clicking buttons. Cool game.
Thanks for playing and the feedback.
There are shortcut keys you can hold while clicking an action to skip the additional selection steps. For example, if you hold Shift while clicking on an action, it will skip the Select Target step and use the currently selected one. We are working on redoing the tutorial to just show useful tips like that, or find a better way to slip them in. We also are looking at options so you can set the default, and the key press would reverse it. We can't remove the ability to select your target manually, as it does have more value later in the game. We will look into other ways to perhaps simplify this process when you don't want to see the extra steps.
The dialog boxes being a larger size fits the style for a story heavy game like this. We do have plans to add sounds for the dialog boxes. We started to add it, but the sound we had chosen didn't work out once we tested in game, so we need to go back and find something else.
Ah, didn't realise there was a shortcut, thats cool.
I'm Impressed...
My Thoughts...
Well done!
Thanks for playing and the feedback.
The power of an item is supposed to go up mainly in line with the level of the item, so the basic sort by level is meant to cover this. Still, I can see the use of a sort purely by the power level. We only started displaying the power to the player recently, and should update the sort to fit.
We are working on a world map. We have the base outline in place, but are still working to refine it. The game is story heavy, so we are trying to work out some story details to make the world map feel like it fits. The map will also have details about each town you know of. For the early game you really only know about the area around your hometown up to the end of the demo. The demo leads up to your party leaving their home forest, and that is where you really start to have a larger goal than just go to the next town.
We recently updated the demo to try to give a feel for the later game with the big fight in the final town. The Demo Dragon gives you a big level up to a point well beyond what the main game would have you at for the final fight, just as that fight has enemies intended to be faced much later in the game. We had hoped to show off a bit more of the later content, but it probably dumped too much on the player too quickly, and we should have given the player a few regular fights to learn about the new abilities.
Thanks!
I am really impressed by the amount of work you and your team put into this project! Very well done!
I played until I reached the third town (I can’t remember the name sorry…). Also, I didn’t read all the devlogs, so sorry if I suggest ideas you already have or if I ask questions that you already answered.
I am going to start with what I liked about the game (sorry, English is not my native language):
Now for what I disliked:
Overall, very nice game I liked it! Good job!
Thanks for playing and the great feedback!
The only plugin we are currently using is for Git. We will be adding the SDK plugins for things like Steam, when we get to integrating them. The dialog system is custom. I've always preferred to make my own stuff when I can. It gives me more freedom to ensure it does exactly what I want.
The game started as a combat focused side-scroller, and then gained more story and RPG-like elements. As it stands it feels caught in-between them and is not working for most people. The reason we asked the questions about genres/styles is that we are planing to fork the game. The story heavy parts are intended to go more towards and RPG style with free roaming movement for exploration. We will take the current side-scroller and add some roguelite elements. We intend for both to be in a shared world, and currently, intend for them to be in the same general area, covering different events and threats in the greater conflict. This version will still have some story, but will be much more cut down.
The quests are intended to give you rewards, but they will be delivered to you by the Traders at the next town you visit. That piece has not yet been implemented. Currently, completing the initial goal unlocks the next tier of the quest. At each tier you will get more powerful rewards. Also, the demo does not go far enough for this to have an impact, but completing certain quests will have a large impact on the game. If you send items back, both for the main quest of feeding your clan, and the quests you gain at the end to supply the towns fighting back, it helps to limit how powerful the enemy can get. If you ignore the quests and keep all the loot, then the enemy grows stronger. We plan to introduce this concept to the player and give a key item, with a UI element for tracking the enemy power level.
Part of the issue right now is that the story starts off too slow. We have a lot more for the later parts that doesn't show in the demo. We may need to change the demo to start later in the game so players can see the additional elements.
The complexity of the inventory screen is for the Inventory Management mode, where you will be distributing your loot to each of the Slimes. In older versions the filters were hidden in a tab and rarely used. We wanted them to be always available for quickly managing the items when distributing them ans the filters are very helpful for that part. With the recent change to disable Inventory Management by default, the inventory screen is a bit bloated and not well designed for the simpler gameplay. The last update hid the Slimes' individual bags, making the shared party bag much bigger than it needs to be, but removed potential confusion for people of why they would need to use the individual bags. We need to take a look at the UI changes to make this mode feel more natural.
We will look into the UI scaling issues. We believe in letting players play how they want, so don't want to force anything on them. We have support for fullscreen in the game itself, and through Itch adding a button for it, and would rather leave that choice up to the player. During jams I often don't play in fullscreen as I take notes while playing and not all fullscreen games like constant switching of focus. Still, players should be able to play in a window and still read everything, so we will see if we can improve readability at smaller sizes.
I played the game for around 2 hours with occasional breaks. I reached Wildemore and completed the boss fight.
The game started to lag at around 1 hour mark twice on my laptop browser. (windows moz) Now my laptop is not a gaming one so that could be a problem but there could also be a memory leak.Once the lag started it kept getting worse before the game crashed. The first crash was around Windberg and the second around Wildemore.
Ok apart from that the game ran quite smoothly with no noticeable issues.
Parts of the game that I like
Combat
The turn based nature of combat and the mechanic of loot are by far my favorite parts of the game.
I like the high variety of items that I can use.
The stats are fun to follow and abilities are quite self explanatory
Loot mechanic is unique and one I have not seen before. You always have to think about what to use or if not to use anything. That part I enjoy.
It always feels good to use less loot than you get! You have that balance down almost perfectly. I am never spending anything more than a forth of what I am getting.
There is a high amount of polish in the little things even tho the game tells you at the start that it is in early dev.
The large array of items is extremely impressive! It is insane to me how you have gotten so many items in! (How long has this game been in dev?)
Boss battles are pretty good.
UX related things
Much of the UI is self explanatory
The game feels alive because a lot of the things are clickable and they respond when you do.
Art
The art is very vivid and nice to look at.
The colors of the sprites immediately make it obvious what they are good at doing.
That is good game design
The music is cheery and fun.
The NPC interactions are what set each town apart.
The aesthetic of the slime towns making them look like hobbit holes are also nice.
Accessibility
Despite the lag issue(which is probably just a minor bug somewhere) the game feels like it can run on any device.
Impressed that you also have an apk build!
Potential points for improvement
Before I get into this, I am assuming a few things. One, that you want the demo to make sales eventually, and another that it is still in early dev.
The first means I will be critical about things from a conversion perspective.
The goal of a demo is to sell the main game. I will attack anything that harms this.
Another is that I will ignore minor inconveniences that I faced because I know they will be fixed eventually once you start the polish process.
Feel free to ignore whatever you feel is not relevant. These are just my personal opinions.
Intro
I read through the entire intro and avoided skipping to get a feel of the game.
But the intro still felt a bit long. I also had the tutorial enabled.
There was a lot of explanation of things that were quite obvious and that made me lose attention a bit.
The start is quite overwhelming to be honest and that can really deter how many players play the game.
Even when someone enters the game for the first time they are greeted with a popup that they have to close. You don’t really need this. Show the play button as fast as possible, and everything else is secondary. (This is especially true for Indie games in my opinion.)
As an extension of this concept, you also need the players to get to the “playing” part fast.
Some UI
Parts of UI are overwhelming. I got used to the game in general and started having fun at around the 20-30 minute mark. But we need to cut this time short as much as humanly possible.
There are various ways to achieve this. The slimes say that “This isn’t like practice”. How about we start with practice? That acts as intro to combat+ a free tutorial without much text.
Item sorting
Some of this was not immediately obvious to me. There are a lot of options and it is clear that you’ve spent a lot of time to give the options, that is the reason that I mention this.
There should definitely be a button to sort food that is to be given to the villagers in one go.
Post battle loot window
I don’t fully understand why this opens after battle. I find myself impatient to get to the next battle. Is it to give a kind of closure to the battle? I personally get that feeling when the receive item animation plays. Perhaps, I am missing something.
If it is to show the loot received, you can show a completely separately designed windows that highlights yet unseen items with their descriptions along with icons for the rest.
Animations for abilities.
I know this is a huge ask, but animations for abilities, maybe even linked to how much power they gained for the item, and animations for consuming the items would be absolutely epic and would push this game to the next level! Given this is the best mechanic of the game (according to me) it deserves some more love!
Potential additions
Environment could play a larger role, making certain elements stronger or weaker and could also have specific effects.
Roguelike style
I would absolutely love this game as a roguelike. In fact I think that might be the format it truly shines in. You can still retain the story and the town system and everything, but the battle paths might change.
Battle after battle in foreign environments, would be great too.
So that is it for my review. If you have anything you want to ask feel free to!
First of all, thank you for such great feedback!
I will look into the potential memory leak bug. We primarily test on native Linux, and Windows in Wine. The browser tends to only get a couple of us doing a full playthrough of the game once we are finalizing a new release, so there certainly could still be some web issues we missed. We also do all our browser testing with Vivaldi, which is Chromium based. We may need to pull out Firefox, Opera, and some others for more testing.
We created this game for Godot Wild Jam # 83, which was just short of a year ago. It did not become our primary focus right away, but eventually rose to be the project we chose as what we wanted to be our first big release.
We try to be accessible in our games, and when possible develop for mobile as well as desktop. Dungeon Revolution was an outlier in not having had the time to setup the mobile controls. We have a template for them too, but it still takes a bit more work as we need extra icon art per game. It also needs a review with the recent Godot update that added in some default mobile controls.
We know the intro needs work. We are planning to break the intro up into a prologue for those who want more depth, which will start earlier in the day, and then the main game will start after you wake up at the inn, with the Leader Leo dialog happening there. We are considering adding mini-games and taking part in the festivities as part of the prologue, along with free roam and being able to play it from the perspective of each of the 4 party Slimes. Some of these are a bit feature creep and would be added later.
One of our earliest tutorials was combat focused. The big area in town with the festivities was actually designed for the combat tutorial originally, and only a recent update filled it with festival stuff. The tutorial, as we tend to do, was too long. It took you turn by turn introducing each ability the Slimes had and the combat mechanics. This was also for our old combat system, where things were pretty different. You had several basic abilities, and then 5 items from your bag that you could use. With the new abilities I would not go through and show each of them. At some point we want to create a new version of this combat tutorial, but with all the feedback that our tutorials are too long, it has been pushed to the side for now. I am considering an option where you have mini-fights started from the Training Hall, where you can do a turn or two at a time for specific things. That will take a lot more code to setup, so is far down the road.
The game does feel fairly intuitive to us, but many were confused in the past. I think a lot of our design changes have made it easier to understand, but we did not do a good job of cutting down the tutorials as we made those changes. We only recently disabled the tutorials by default. They will get a fresh review in the future, after we have got a more solid view of the path ahead.
We added the initial in development popups for Steam due to some of the initial review process, but they probably are not actually needed. We will see about dropping them, as you are right that while some people probably like the changelogs, many don't care, especially on the first play.
I'm assuming you played with the default of Inventory Management off. That was also a recent change. In the original gameplay you are supposed to distribute your loot among the personal Slime bags, rather than keep it all in a single shared bag. Each Slime can only access their bag in combat to pick items to use with their abilities. This is why the inventory screen pops up after each fight. I had meant to disable that by default when we also disabled the Inventory Management by default, and will do so in the next update. The inventory screen layout was also designed for that aspect of the game and normally the center would be split at the middle with the shared bag at the top and Slime bags at the bottom. A lot of the filtering and sorting options were designed around distributing your loot from the shared bag to the personal bags. I hid the personal bags in the last update, but the UI needs a fresh look to see how to clean it up when not playing with Inventory Management.
You mention wanting to sort/filter the food for villagers. The main quest of feeding your clan treats all items as food, since your people can eat anything. When you get the later quests to arm and feed other towns, then the Traders' Depot will automatically apply filters so only items that meet the selected quest will be shown. There is a filter for food items. It is in the last tab of the filters and uses the loaf of bread icon.
We plan to add a subset of the filter to the combat item select. We just haven't worked out how we want to do it yet. It does filter down to the items you can use for the ability, but we want players to be able to a bit more filtering if they are looking for something specific.
Art is an area we are constantly working on. The game started in the jam with a free asset pack. We then created our own art and transitioned to it. Now we are expanding it. The characters have 3 of the 4 directions done for basic animations. Once the 4th is finished we will be adding in attack/ability animations as well. We will start with some general ones, but plan to add more over time.
I don't think the story as we picture it would do well in a roguelike. There is too much to it, and it would slow the game down, especially in repeated plays. Maybe we will evolve things as we go and find a way that feels true to our goals and works in the format. This will still be in the same world, and some of the core story will be present, though we have not decided on the roguelike's story yet. The main game is intended to move beyond the forest, and the end of the demo is leaving it. We are finishing up the tilesets for the plains, which is the next area you move into. There will be plenty of additional terrains to travel through in the main game, and the roguelike.
Thanks again for your great feedback!
All this is great stuff!
Seems you are already on the right track with the game.
Excited to see the roguelike version and what you guys do with it!
Let me know whenever you want a playtest.
Looking forward to this!
Hey Dragon, I like the updates and how the game is shaping up. I still like the combat and the game mechanic of eating the loot and having it be used fuel for the attacks. I like the idea of having the typical bad guys be the hero's in the story and the amount of different story and game systems that you already have in the game.
I feel like pacing out the content or having characters explain some things in tutorial fashion would help with onboarding. There is a lot going on in this game (different type of battle system, different things to do in cities, affinities, ect). Explaining these things during the natural flow of gameplay once could help things go smoother for newbies.
It seems like the game already has several JRPG elements, not sure how it could be more JRPG
The combat seems like a major part of gameplay, maybe an option to choose which encounters you fight in, determining what kind of loot you could get? Like I wanted to use Tanko's shield party ability but didn't have the items to do it, might be nice to choose to go towards attack based enemies or defense.
I like the game a lot and you guys are improving it constantly. Still had a lot of fun and can't wait to see where this goes.
Thanks for playing and the feedback.
We really need to work on the tutorials. Our current ones are disabled by default due to feedback that they were too much (too long, too many details all at once). There used to be a training fight in the large area in the first town that walked you through combat with your opponent being a Slime teaching you. Each turn it would unlock you next possible action and have you use it. This was with the old combat system, and was not updated for the new one. Then we added the popup based system that points to each section and explains it. As new systems were added those got a bit too wordy, and too many pop ups in a row for some people, so they were turned off by default in a recent updae. We also have the Training Hall. That used to be in the Town UI with the Inns and Taverns. We had some comments that some people felt like they had to read through all of it before leaving town, which made the intro too slow. They were in every town, but if you missed that part you may want to do everything, and that could make it feel too much, especially for a jam game. We moved it to the menu so you can access it from anywhere hoping to give players more freedom to visit it at any time to read up as they were ready. We clearly need to find a better balance. I think the popup tutorials are probably still good, but we need to cut them down. Part of the issue is that we support so many inputs and talk about them and the different ways to do things. I'm looking at changing it so that the player picks what input they are mainly using and want as the basis for their tutorials.
The main change we are talking about for making it a JRPG is the movement/how you interact with the game world. Right now we have it on rails with your characters mostly moving to the right, and interactions done through menus. Switching to be more JRPG style would involve allowing free roaming to explore the world. You'd wander around town to interact with NPCs. You'd walk outside and explore the world, fighting random encounters. Things like that. We feel we will be better able to present the story in a way that works for a larger audience, and make the world feel more alive. It will both offer a gameplay style people are more familiar with, and help to breakup the text with more player control.
We have discussed updating the travel system to allow picking what fork in the road to take, with options for more risk/reward. With our recent changes adding the AP system we still need to balance the drop rate of items, especially early game.
Thanks again for playing!
Tutorials are hard, I think the good news is that you already so much content that the need for a tutorial is there. That means a lot is going on which is good, I would rather a complicated, deep game than one that is too simple or boring. I'm sure you will figure something out.
Free movement could possibly solve a bunch of the issues you currently have all at once. Could allow people to experience things at their own pace (less need for a tutorial) plus choose how many people they fight between towns, allowing them to get more gear and level differently based on how they feel about it. Could also be a fun animation for the slime movement, just bouncing up and down as you move. Might be a really fun addition.
Its been a while since I played this.
Lets take the questions one by one:
The art got a massive improvement since my last played and it was surprisingly nice.
The storyline got some more depth now witch is nice, managed to finish my breakfast while watching the intro.
There seems to be a lot more powers and upgrades.
The boss came just in time to change the vibe of the game. I can see myself get lost in this game.
The intro/chat does not continue automatically and its a bit long. (i didn't check the settings to see if that is an option). I wonder if a longer narration style story instead of a long dialog would be better...
The inventory is still a bit overwhelming. I got the hang of it pretty fast tho. Mby the weapons / food should be split. It doesn't seem like I really need too see the weapons when I look in the inventory.
Its hard to see when a item filter is on.
The gaining of a new skill is easy to miss as it is only a short lived popup.
You tend to get a bunch of abilities in a relatively short time.
I haven't played many games like this so my feedback may not be the best.
"Your path is blocked by a big rock" -> you train to gain the ability "rock breaker" or something along those lines.
Great work! Good luck expanding this even further!
Thanks for playing and the feedback.
There are several options for dialog speed, including showing all the text immediately. We do not currently have anything for auto-advancing, though will think about it. The game is story rich, so we are working on trying to find the right way to present those story sequences. Part of the thoughts on going with a more standard JRPG style is to allow separating out the story a bit with more player control in between and player choice of who to talk to.
We are needing to do some rethinking on the inventory with the change to remove the inventory management on the default mode. Normally you would see the Bags for each Slime and be transferring items around in there. It also lets you see details, if you want. It does feel a bit excessive when the inventory management is off, but it seemed like the best way to do things for now until we really get a feel for what this change means and how to best update the UI for it.
We will look into the Filter UI to see about making them more clear.
The popups were longer, but then things changed so that you were getting a bunch at one time and they felt like they took too long to get through all of them. The main purpose of the popups is just to let the player know their is something new, and they can go into the Character Details to see more. We may need to rework it a bit more to find the right balance. We have already discussed adding a setting so players can adjust how longer the notifications remain, and possibly the size.
This demo was designed to give players a fast intro to the game, so it was accelerated from what the planned normal game would be. That Demo Dragon boost was especially meant to be a major jump so we could show off tougher fights and later abilities.
The main thing we are thinking about for changing to a JRPG would be the movement changing from an on rails side-scroller to the normal freedom of movement of a JRPG. This would impact not just moving around, but how the player explores, how they interact with NPCs, and how the story would unfold in scripted events.
We are looking at options for making leveling up feel better. Being able to distribute skill or stat pints are among the things being looked at.
We've had the suggestion of starting out with a single Slime and adding more over time before. The problem is that it does not fit into the story. That is one of the reasons we are looking at roguelike aspects. In that style of game with less focus on story we could have the player start with just one character and unlock more, and a larger party size, as they play.
Thanks again for the feedback!
I am sure you already took into consideration many more options than I can even begin to think about.
"changing to a JRPG would be the movement changing from an on rails side-scroller to the normal freedom of movement of a JRPG"
I have trouble imagining how the game would feel in such a scenario. I guess it would have at least two big problems one is the technical aspect, a lot of things will have to change to accommodate this new play style and the art aspect that will need to change as well.
I think the art aspect can get more complex depending on how the final art vision for the game is. The side-scroller offers a bit of simplicity witch would allow for a more complex art style.
I tilt towards keeping the side-scroll movement. I am a bit tired of the old JRPG movement style, the side-scroller offers a bit of a fresh take on it.
I guess one thing I do not know is if you have the story locked and now you are building the game upon the story, or building both at the same time and also if you only want to change the movement or to do a more massive change on how the game works? The "roguelike" mention makes me think that there is more taken into consideration than simply changing the movement.
The core issue it money. We switched to full time game dev about a year ago, and this is our first real game that we need to release to try to sustain us as we continue. It has grown much bigger than intended, and as it is, it is not working. We are caught in between several areas and not good enough at promoting to draw enough interest in what may be too niche of a project.
Based on the feedback we have gotten, the story is too heavy and long for many who like the combat and want faster gameplay more fitting with the side-scroller style. Those who like the deep story and want to explore more of the world feel limited by the movement and ways to interact with the world and want to be more immersed in it . Switching to a full JRPG is a big undertaking, and would require a lot more time to do, but does feel like what we need to do to create the game we have in our minds with the full story. We don't have the time for that, so are looking at alternatives. Rather than picking one style, the reason for our questions is that we are thinking of forking the code and making 2 games in this world setting. We will take the side-scroller movement and combat and create an endless or roguelike. It will have much less story, but will be based somewhere in the same world, to allow some shared world building between the 2 games. This will allow us to reuse some of the art and character designs to help get both to completion without starting fresh on a new game. The main game will then advance more slowly as we build out new systems to make it feel bigger and allow more exploration and depth to the experience for the player. The current story would stay with that version. We do have a larger story planned, and that story is what drove the design to become more RPG-like and story heavy.
On the art, we are doing our own art for the game. The characters are already being designed for 4 directional movement, so it won't take much to finish them up for the free roam movement. We were already considering enabling it in the towns anyway. The big thing with art will be needing a lot more of it for the world. We will need interiors, which we don't currently have. The rest of the overworld art will need some work as well, but won't be too bad. We've done games with roaming around so have an idea of some of the issues we will need to deal with.
Thanks for taking the time to continue discussing this!
I am in somewhat of a similar boat. I do not feel qualified to give advice. All I can do is give you my opinion and warn you that I have no successful games of my own =).
Usually games from this genre are focusing on the story and art style and less on combat (GameMaker type of games.)
Your game fighting style and feel reminds me more of Pokemon. The twist being that instead of catching pokemons you get different weapons. Your niche may be here. Give weapons more focus and story and make them collectible, the compendium adds little value atm. Using it for weapons instead of enemies may be one way to go.
I tend to prefer action like games more than story focused games. I played a lot of games and very few got my interest in the story even some games that had a really good and polished story. My point is that these 2 categories are really hard to reconcile.
Making the character free movement in cities feels right to me.
It could allow you to add minigames in cities later on. Similar to what a lot of GameMaker games have.
This may allow the story to be told at a slower pace as it would give the player something to do before hearing the rest of the story.
Finding your audience is a hard one... and I do not think there is easy solution for this.
My approach to this is to make games that I like to play, the audience being people "like" me. Is that a good approach? probably not...
If the project has grown much bigger than intended I would push trough to release it sooner than later.
Most of indie game dev quit after 1st game. I do not know what to do with this information.
My interpretation of this is that I need to push trough and launch more than 1 game =).
Witch is what I am trying to hint at here.
You project has a lot of features already, and if you can't figure out what niche is this for, you could try to find it by releasing it.
The alternative looks more like endless development...
I can not express enough that this is just an opinion from someone who has not released any games. So please that that into account.
Thank you for taking the time to delve into these talks!
Wish you a successful game release with lots of buyers ;)
Thanks. These are good points. We do try to design games we enjoy, as it is easier to get a feel for if it is fun, and more enjoyable to test. Sometimes in jams we will explore new styles, but sticking with what you know helps. This started one way and grew in others, so we kind of got lost along the way. We will experiment this month with some of the changes we are thinking of and see what people think.
I know indie dev is hard, and most don't make it. We still have a bit of time left to try to make this work, so we are going to do what we can. And even if it needs to be cut back to nights and weekends, we do plan to keep working on trying to make it succeed.