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Asking for feedback on my game CrawlBound

A topic by veih created 59 days ago Views: 321 Replies: 14
Viewing posts 1 to 5
(+1)

Hi everyone!

I just released a new build of my game Crawlbound on itch.io, and I’m looking for playtesters!

If you have a few minutes, I’d love for you to give it a try and share some constructive feedback. It’s playable directly in your browser, so there’s nothing to download or install.

About the game

Crawlbound is a grid based roguelite where you’ll need to exploit game altering bugs to survive.

Fight enemies, collect loot and XP, level up, and see how far you can make it through the dungeon. Each time you level up, you’ll get a random upgrade with varying rarities, so every run can play out differently.

Play it here: https://veih.itch.io/crawlbound

Any feedback is greatly appreciated, especially your thoughts on gameplay, balance, bugs, difficulty, and overall fun factor.

Thanks for checking it out!

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Really fun and polish game!

Every level I beat, I don't recover stamina,  Sometimes I spend it all in one level just to lost imediatlly in another level them have to restart and win easily or just run for the exit.

I saw later that we can upgrade the samina, I think that's nice and could fix my complain, but would like a little reward (like + 5 stamina) whem completing a level and entering another. And I couldn't get past it because the game crashed every time when upgrading it, here's the print:




Sorry that I can't get you more info on the error right now.

Nice game!

Thank you for the feedback! :3

I’ll look into the bug. I think I should also add a way for players to recover stamina during a run. Maybe it could be an upgrade node, or perhaps enemies could occasionally drop stamina potions.

Thank you for pointing this out! I’ll definitely make a note of it.

Hello! I’ve updated the game. If you have some time, could you test it again and let me know what you think? :'3

I’m still working on the stamina recovery issue too, so I’ll keep working on that.

(2 edits) (+1)

Hi!

the core loop looks nice and the good thing is I actually kept playing a lot longer than I thought I would, so the game has something going for it. The stamina is a bit odd concept to understand on first run, since it was just enough to get through the first level if you don't waste any moves. Maybe some food spawned in the levels to recover it, warning on first time I start game on how it works...

Level ups were quite frequent, maybe a bit too many decisions.

The error choice in between levels well for example fully dark room seems too frustrating, also opting in to 0 to 3 modifiers is like making a choice between easy, normal, hard, very hard before each level, I am not sure if that's a decision I like in a sense that it adds something missing to the game if the base challenge is good, or it could be a perma opt-in, also if they give more exp then does it actually pay of down the road to always take full difficulty? in a way it could be set once for the entire run

I don't know how to recover stamina (if that's even possible) and there is also a bug that if I mouse click the hp/stamina bars it seems to be setting their values, but not really doing that.

The end game stamina upgrade is giving +10, not +5, so the stamina numbers shown are often bugged, like I upgrade first to 100 and then see 50 going to 60 with another +5, and I also got the error reported above when upgrading attack to Lv2

Thanks for the detailed feedback!

I guess I should make the error choice limited to one per level, otherwise, people will just pick all three for optimal play, which could make the game more frustrating. I’ll also make the dark room section less annoying.

The upgrade tree bug seems pretty critical. I haven’t encountered it myself yet, so I’m still investigating it. I’ll upload an additional desktop build then :'3

Hey! I’ve updated the game based on your feedback. If you have a chance, could you please test it again and let me know how it feels? :3

(1 edit)

I’ve been working through the feedback from here and other places, and made quite a few changes to Crawlbound:

• Reworked progression with less frequent level ups, only 1 challenge choice at a time, and a new upgrade tree UI
• Improved game feel with better hit and death feedback, plus rebalanced enemy stats and numbers
• Added new stamina recovery upgrades and fixed some stamina display issues
• Added settings both in and out of the game, along with a new stat upgrade popup
• Fixed the upgrade crash, hopefully for good, and added better error logging
• Added a UI showing your blessings and how many turns until they activate
• A bunch of other small fixes, like draggable health bar bug

Any feedback is welcome. If you have time, a rating would also really help. Just rate it whatever you think is fair.

(+1)

Hi, I don't think the core loop is particularly fun. It revolves around basic resources and a lot of repeated enemies, and there doesn't seem to be much in the way of skills or explorable elements within the maps.

(+2)

Hey, thanks for being straightforward with me! I can definitely add more elements to the maps. I’m actually planning to work on that right now.

As for the skills, since it’s a turn based game, I guess the problem is that there isn’t much strategy involved right now. Maybe there isn’t a clear enough challenge to overcome, and the upgrades aren’t helping much with that either.

Would you mind telling me a bit more about your experience when you played the game? Like how many rounds you played, whether you made it to the boss, and what you were expecting when you started playing. That would really help me understand what feels off.

(3 edits) (+1)

I didn't make it to the boss. Most of the time I either ran out of stamina or got taken down by clusters of enemies I couldn't handle. I played around 7 runs or so, and I think I was three upgrades away from maxing everything out. I don't recall seeing any sign that I was about to reach the boss. With the current build, those enemy clusters seem impossible to handle. In my latest run, I had to face 4 enemies on the first floor, and there wasn't even much open space for me to move around in.

Thanks! :3
There shouldn’t be 4 enemies at the start, so I’ll look into it.

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Hard to see what you have to do with the text overlap at the bottom and the character can still act in the background

Alright, thank you for feedback, I am working on fixing it right now :3

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Right now it’s more of a demo with just one map. I’m planning to add more maps in the future, but I’m starting to think that might not be the main problem. Maybe it’s more about how repetitive each run feels.

What do you think I should add to make the runs more interesting?