I never said this wasn't a piracy site, its just that its dickish to do that in front of a developer especially one who worked hard to make the game. Keep in mind I'm the guy who can't buy shit because if I do, third-parties will notice and blackmail the shit out of me. If someone's gonna pirate it, they should at least try to hide it from the developer?
Most game-devs work hard on their games. It just seems a bit telling that posters only seem to care about the devs when they're actually
watching us.
I mean, I'm no different, but it's kinda surprising how meek the piracy-userbase of this piracy-site turn when a game-dev makes his or her own thread.
I guess you could spin it as people wanting to reward a developer for interacting with the playerbase, but I don't think it's that.
It sounds like I needed to do a better job introducing the game to those that needed it.
-Holding F1 will show you what each of your inputs do, there is a notice on the screen for the first floor that tells you this. You get your clothes back by pressing C (heal), unless you need to be cleaned first. The controls are also listed on the game page and the readme. I considered forcing the player to look at the help overlay before being allowed to play but opted for a notice instead.
Ah, the C-heal and the LP-heal not being the same thing could have done with some explaining, but I worked it out fast enough.
then proceded to never use the C-heal because it's limited to three, and LP is easy to come by. Also berries. Why waste the limited heals?
I didn't work out that the C-heal gives your clothes back.
Yeah, having three separate healing methods that all work in different ways could have used some explaining, or some simplification. (for example, you could strip out the berries entirely and just replace them with more common C-heals. Or replace the C-heal with a clothing-repair function.)
-The tutorial lady that you must walk in front of mentions how you should deal with being grabbed, among other tips. She goes as far as to say you won’t make it too far without effective use of your stances (it's actually possible for specific play-styles, but I'll leave that up for people to discover).
She told me about stances, and how to shake enemies off, but nothing about redressing or the C-heal.
Regardless, at this point in the game, the stance-tutorial is kinda pointless. If you started with attack/defence stance to switch between, then it'd be fine, but at this point in the game you effectively only have once stance.
Rather, you have a normal stance, and a stance that debuffs you. I don't know what lewd+ does, but since the issue I'm facing is 'dying in battle' I'm going to say that dropping my defence is probably a bad idea.
Also, all stances become useless when naked anyway.
As for escaping grabs. That's simple enough. the issue is that even if you escape right away, they still take your clothes, which means that you die in this battle because you can no-longer deal damage.
-The first few enemies you encounter on the second/third floor that can grab do big damage output specifically so the player can learn how to deal with it, and how important your stats are. You can make some of them negligible by simply learning vitality 1 (starting enemies scale to be weaker much faster), and it's possible to break out of grabs after the first hit (this was made even easier compared to earlier versions). I really wanted player to understand this before proceeding further into the game because it would have just led to frustration during the later parts.
The problem is that what you refer to as 'the second floor' is actually the second
room.
As in, you can enter it within, what? 20 steps of starting the game?
Edit: Booted the demo back up. 17 steps at shortest route. A single random encounter.
So yeah, you added a beefgate that forces you to grind(not really, but I'll get back to that), right at the start of the game.
Maybe I should have made a step by step tutorial of sorts, that or introduced this stuff in a better way.
Advice for the start of the game:
-You start with 80 XP, choose either offensive stance or vitality 1 as your first upgrade. It's actually effective to out DPS the early enemies in offensive stance because of the extra hit. It’s possible to play in other ways, but this is the easiest most find at the start. Make sure to map at least 90% of every floor since it's a boost to each of your stats by 1 (help overlay tells you this).
I don't think it needs a
tutorial, but some things really should have been explained or plain implemented better.
Right. So
you don't
actually require grinding, because you just hand the player a bunch of exp right at the start.
What?
Why?
You just start the game with enough exp under your belt to get your first level-up?
That's the sort of thing that completely screws with player-expectations.
It never would have occurred to me that i could just level-up right after starting the game, before even fighting anything.
That sort of thing just isn't how games work.
The player isn't going to expect to be able to level up until they've at least killed a bunch of things.
It feel like it would make more sense to expand the first 'floor' to give the player more room to move around before running into something that they're not capable of beating without buying skills.
Push the beefgate back, but strip away the 80 starter-exp to compensate.
That's the grinding option. You force the player to accumulate the xp on their own, but give them the space to do so.
Alternatively, skip the beefgate by just giving the player vit-1 (or enough starter-health to get the same effect) from the beginning of the game.
Alternatively, start the player with the offensive-stance instead of the lewd-stance. Give them the ability to dps-burst the slimes down.
As it is now, you can start the game, fight a bat then open a door and hit instant death within 60-seconds of booting the game up. It feels like the game is demanding that you grind before you can even leave the tiny first room, which feels terrible.
That sorts of thing makes you not want to continue playing. It feels like a sign that the game is going to be an unrelenting grindfest slog.
The fact that you start with exp means that it actually isn't, but I doubt many people noticed that you start with a bunch of xp at the beginning of the game. I didn't even bother to open my menu until I'd gotten to the second room, because I hand't found any items or killed enough things to gain any real amount of xp.
You don't need to grind, many players have completed the game without grinding at all on a medium encounter rate. You get stronger in this game by mapping the floors to 90%, and finding items that increase stats. All enemies give HP up unless you are a lot stronger than them.
Is this explained anywhere? It seems like you'd get stronger by killing enemies and spending exp, not by filling out your map. You really need something big and obvious that tells you that mapping is useful for more than just assuaging your OCD.
The issue here seems to be with differing gameplay philosophies. People aren't always going to play the game in the way you expect them to, and if you NEED to play that way in-order to not face difficulties, you
need to actually explain that.
Mapping every tile is tedious. I'm not the sort of person to ignore side-paths and possible loot, but I saw no reason to walk around the tutorial-lady to get the tiles on the other side of her. I could
see that they were empty.
I mapped the square box that you start in, but only on my first attempt. Second time through, I skipped it because there's nothing there.
Given the random encounter-rate and the fact that you only map the tiles you are standing on... filling out the map feels slow and unfun. If I'd known that you got significant(?) stat upgrades for doing it, then there'd have been some incentive to do so, but that completely passed me by, so I didn't bother.
Actually, on that note. I was recently playing lilitales (dungeon explorer game with similar mapping mechanics) and I noticed that you map tiles
around you. IIRC, in a 2x2 square.
It's a minor thing, but a huge quality-of-life improvement, because you can map a corridor two-blocks wide without having to walk down it three times. (right, left, then returning to your previous position)
More importantly, you can map dangerous tiles like traps or without actually standing on them. Is there a way to map spikes in this game without getting hurt? Standing next to them doesn't seem to work.
What about the tile that a chest is on, or the tile that the tutorial-lady is standing on? Do those need to be mapped?
So yeah, TLDR: A bunch of stuff could have been explained better, especially the C-heal re-clothing you, and the mapping system giving stat-boots.
Secondly: I don't understand why you start the game basically a meter away from an enemy that will kill you if you didn't level-up.
Even if you hand the player the required exp for free at the start of the game, feels like a patch-job for poor game-balance.
Challenge is fine, but either it should be challenging right off the bat (to forewarn the player) or it should ramp up in challenge after giving the player time to get a level or two under their belt.
Here the bats and gazers are utterly trivial, then you open a door and run into something that steals your clothes (debuffing damage and defence, locking your stances) poisons you(I think?) and deals easily three or four times as much damage as the enemies in the previous room.
It's the game-design equivalent of luring someone in with a dollar-bill on a string, then sucker-punching them with brass knuckles when they follow it around a corner.