Post by AutisticDevs in Cleaner of Dungeon comments

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Cleaner of Dungeon has an interesting title concept. “Clean the dungeon” immediately made me think of games where you mop up after a mess, and the Craftpix pixel look plus wave/stat HUD give it the shape of a tiny top-down action RPG. The music is genuinely good and was the strongest part of the current build for me.

In this version, though, I struggled to understand the gameplay. I could move with arrow keys, see Wave / Level / PV / ATT / DEF, get French prompts like sacrifice/quest choices, and eventually change sprite after upgrading — but enemies/objectives weren’t clear, and leaving the game open mostly just leveled me up over time. It felt closer to a work-in-progress systems test than a finished short jam game.

Suggestions:

- Explain the goal in the first 10 seconds (what am I cleaning, and how do I win/fail a room?).

- Make combat/cleaning feedback obvious: targets, hit reactions, clear rewards.

- Add English text (or bilingual UI); I don’t speak French and couldn’t reliably parse the prompts.

- Fix performance/feel — the web build felt laggy or low-clarity at default size.

- Package the desktop download as a full runnable export, not only engine data files.

- Customize the itch page with screenshots, genre tags, and a short pitch so players know what the game is before pressing play.

I like that you’re iterating with Craftpix assets across projects. If you tighten the cleaner fantasy into a clear room-by-room loop, this could become a fun little dungeon tidy-up game. Keep going, M_A_E005!

M_A_E0051 day ago

Thank you so much for the detailed feedback — this is genuinely the most useful critique I've received, and you caught a real problem I missed.

The web build bug: the reviewer experience you described (no enemies, infinite level up) comes from a loading issue. My DataManager was scanning res://data/bestiary/ with DirAccess, which works in the editor but returns nothing in the web export — so no creature templates loaded, no enemies spawned, and the room timer just looped through levels. I've fixed it by listing the templates explicitly and I'm adding the proper export filters. Sorry you had to play that broken version.

What I'm fixing based on your notes:

English UI (and bilingual where it makes sense) — you're right, the French prompts were unreadable for most of the audience.
A short intro tip in the first few seconds: "Clear the room to advance. Survive the waves."
Clearer combat feedback (hit reactions, sound cues already in but were silent because of the same loading bug).
The web build perf issue — I'll reduce the number of simultaneous enemies and check the viewport size at default.

On the desktop zip: you're right, I shipped the editor build folder instead of a proper export. Fixing that too.

I'm glad the music landed — that's the part I spent the most time on. And thank you for the kind words about iterating with Craftpix assets; the goal really is a small, clean room-by-room loop. Your note about "the cleaner fantasy" made me realize I should lean harder into that in the pitch and the first room.

Thanks again for taking the time — this kind of feedback is exactly why I joined the jam. 🙏

itch.io

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