Since you plan to make this into a commercial product I will try to adjust my feedback accordingly.
The movement have feels a bit off when you first try it.
It seems that the type of floor you are on affects the movement. I prefer the slower snappier movement from dessert/grass areas than the faster sliding one (that one feels like it needs more work).
The flute is really nice, so far is my favorite concept in the game.
I would strongly recommend adding a indication that your attacks do nothing to the water enemies. Like a line of dialog "oh, I can't seem to do damage to water" or something.
The bombs I would say were my least favorite weapon of choice, mainly because of how small the explosion is.
I do think that it is quite hard to balance this weapon.
Some of the maps felt really confining, unnecessarily so.
The black squares/holes felt a bit unforgiving, Also im not sure how much sense do they make, I think I would prefer something like lava.
I could not open the room for the boss on my second attempt even after getting the key and defeating all the enemies. Not sure if that is a bug or if is something I did not do or mby I needed to reset the game.
So, is this a good base for a game?
Yes, I do believe so. The animations, the art and the mechanics are there.
Some bugfixing must be done ofc but I guess that will be fixed with time.
Here are some other bugs I found:
Attacking through walls,
Not being able to change the sound settings after starting the game.
Spikes traps not working (in some areas? - did not test all of them since some I avoided intuitively)
This game feels a bit like Necesse, so on the more commercial aspect I would ask what makes this game stand out from similar games?
Mby when/if you add the story, the question will answer itself...
The game has some charm to it. I can see the effort that has been put into it while I play it, especially with the monsters attack patterns.
Good job making this and wish you the best of luck! Hope that my feedback is at least of some help.
Viewing post in Dungeon Revolution jam comments
Thanks for playing and the feedback.
I appreciate the feedback looking at it from a commercial viewpoint. It does change how to look at a project. While we are planning it to be commercial, the current project has less than 2 weeks of work in it, so is pretty rough. Still, keeping the goal in mind will help to shape it properly. You have some good points that we need to think on.
I agree with you on the movement. I do not like how it feels right now, and it is high on my list of things to refine, but ran out of time before the jam after fixing bugs.
Glad you like the flute, We wanted to have unique enemies and different ways to defeat them, and are happy with how that turned out.
We will look into better feedback when your weapon in ineffective.
We are trying to balance the bombs more as utility, and less as a main damage dealer. They can get good for groups of enemies, and needed for some, but generally take a bit more timing and effort to use well. We will be refining them further, but don't want them to be too powerful.
We were inspired by classic (S)NES Zelda and similar games, which is where falling in the pits causing damage came from. In the original jam version of this game you lost as soon as you fell in, but we changed it to do damage and respawn at the entry in this version, as the instant loss felt too harsh. I agree that taking damage and respawning does feel a bit unrealistic. We will think on it. Lava will likely be added at some point to give more variety.
We will double check the boss room unlocks. It could be a bug. Which boss was it that you had trouble with?
We are aware that some attacks can go through barriers, especially if you are close. We haven't decided if we want them to be half-height walls that you can attack over or not. Plenty of the classic games we are taking inspiration from do allow attacking through some barriers, so we are debating how it feels and which way to go with it.
I really need to work on an in-game menu for settings in our template. It keeps getting pushed down the road.
We will check the spike traps for any that are not working.
I'm not familiar with Necesse. We will take a look at it.
Right now we are focusing more on making the core game feel good. There isn't any story yet. The jam theme was "Spin to Win", which is where some of the spinning things come from. We are thinking of keeping some of that and adding rooms where the whirlwind is used to spin things as a puzzle mechanic. Beyond that we don't really have anything distinctive to market on. We will need to think on that. This is meant to be a smaller game that we don't want to let ourselves go crazy with scope creep, like we did with our main one, so we need to find a good balance of something fun that will be worth buying, but also not make it too big. If it does well enough we may do a larger game in this style with an overworld and exploring to find different dungeons, and likely other mechanics for outside the dungeons.
Thanks again for the great feedback!