Benevorlent wrote:This is a really impressive game! It's got a lot going for it you don't usually get in a Quest game of this kind.
I love how interactable the characters are, being able to learn about them and slowly befriend them, resulting in them opening up more with you about themselves.
I love the progression for the bakery and the freelance bounty hunting, the bakery slowly ramping up the difficulty without adding any new stations, only giving you more things to do with them, and the bounty hunting giving you a whole 'nother faction of characters to learn about.
I love the mystery! What is going on in Willowood? What's with the abandoned quarry? What's in the woods? There's a lot to get invested in in this game to want to solve!
I love the music! Every little event has its own theme to it and it really adds a lot to the game! I can't begin to imagine how long it would've taken to make a theme for so many different things
What I will say, however, is I do not love the combat. After the first fight, the opponents hold the advantage, having more damage than you and possibly also having more health, and since they act first every turn there's very few situations where you can pick a "winning" option.
If they go for a counter, all you can do is heal, which is irritating when they start the fight with it, more so when they get a free attack on you which can stun if you decide you don't want to do anything at all.
If they go for an attack, usually trading is not in your favour, as either they do more damage or they have a chance to stun you for much more damage. If you heal, then they'll probably out-damage what you heal. If you parry, you have a chance of failing and taking the attack head-on anyways, along with potentially getting stunned for a lot of damage, and if you block then you don't get anything, and sometimes even that fails, meaning you take the damage anyways.
There's only two situation where you can choose an option which you know will win, which is attacking them when they try to steal from you and healing when they're taunting. Parrying can stun them but can also have you take the hit, meaning you might get stunned instead. Since they'll damage you with the attack that stunned you as well, they'll always deal more damage if they stun you that you'll do if you stun them, making the risk/reward for parrying in their favour, so it's not worth going for. If you attack, again they have more damage, meaning it's also in your favour. That means that in a majority of cases, your best bet is just to block, which has a very low chance of stunning them, meaning usually nobody "wins" in that case, you just didn't lose.
This makes combat far too passive and defensive. For the best chance of winning, you have to block their dangerous attacks and parry their weaker ones hoping for a stun. If that doesn't work, then you have to wait for them to counter so you can heal and repeat the situation.
It's a shame because your combat system reminds me a lot of the combat system from Redscale's Adventure, another text-based game, where you had some options which would beat outright other options, but outright lose to different other options, and your opponent could lie about which option they were going to go for. I feel that with some slight re-adjustment, the combat could be changed to encourage pro-activeness instead of playing passively waiting for the right prompt to come, which I feel would work fantastically with the current timer on combat responses.
Gosh, I'm glad you're enjoying it so much <3 That really means a lot to me! And yeah, I did spend a while on the music. I was actually using some pretty poor software when I made those songs. I have some waaay better software now and I've been honing my skills as a producer and composer, so hopefully future music I do for the game will sound a bit nicer and less stiff.
As for the combat, that's some really helpful criticism! I'm still planning on doing a lot of re-balancing on it, so I can keep this all in mind when I'm adjusting it. I'm a tad surprised parry doesn't feel useful, but I can up the stun chance by about 10-15% and see how that feels. I'm just worried about accidentally flipping it the other direction and making blocking useless.
There is a reasoning behind the combat being defensive though, that much was at least deliberate. I figured that the player character isn't likely to actually have much experience in combat, at least not as much as the thieves do, so they'd naturally be put on the defensive.
There is one other spot in the game I am planning to have combat in as well though, and that one is intended to use an entirely different system (don't worry, there's reasoning behind that too!). I think it would make more sense to use an offense-oriented system there, so I'll definitely see if I can do something more empowering with it. Thanks again very much for the suggestions!
