Demo impressions and feedback

[MoaCube]

This is the first public release of Bonfire in years, so we're super interested in your feedback after playing the demo! If possible, please post a screenshot of the end stats screen (you'll know it when you get it).

Thanks!

[glenn3e]

So I played and got to the end of the demo, but didn't unlock any character yet(I was trying to do Pyra's quest but it ended before I could). I really want to play more lol.

Anyway, got a few questions. If we run out of food, it says that party members may leave; is there a possibility to lose the game? I always seem to be running out of food.

[MoaCube]

There's no way to "lose" the game or miss any content permanently, but there are consequences.

I don't want to delve into it too much as it could be considered spoilers. Being in that low point where resources run out and someone leaves is a part of the game after all.

Btw, could you post a screenshot of your post-demo stats?

[glenn3e]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1982799422

There you go

[MoaCube]

Thanks!

[korul]

I had to do it in a roundabout way: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1983210679

I'd have rather posted it on discord, sadly the "invite was invalid" :(

[MoaCube]

Thanks! Will check that about Discord too.

[glenn3e]

Originally posted by korul:

I had to do it in a roundabout way: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1983210679

I'd have rather posted it on discord, sadly the "invite was invalid" :(

Lol you managed to get a new character at least. I only managed to play for about 1.6 hours.

[MoaCube]

I've got a few more of these from other sources and I too was surprised by how much play times differ between different people. Probably boils down to play style. Doing everything in an area vs rushing to the next one ASAP.

[Patr!ck]

It is a decent game just that there are three things need to consider :
1) Reset the data , players may want to reset the data and start from scratch
2) No stun locking the characters , resulting the player not to play anymore
3) As hero group increases , the food consumption increase which is not really an ideal scenario to keep in mind for the longer perspective of the game

[glenn3e]

Originally posted by MoaCube:

I've got a few more of these from other sources and I too was surprised by how much play times differ between different people. Probably boils down to play style. Doing everything in an area vs rushing to the next one ASAP.

I blame the Monk guy. I was running out of food, in a game I thought was a rogue-like, and he told me to move to different areas to look for food and that’s what I did. I wanted to experience more areas lol. Can I have a reset lol

[MoaCube]

Haha, looks like I really should consider adding a reset button for the demo. :D

If you really want to do it, just find Bonfire in your application data folder (type %appdata% in File Explorer's address bar to get there) and delete the profile.sav file.

[Grolleter]

Here's my end screen:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1982575274

I enjoyed the demo, but there were certain situations where I wish that information was more readily available. For example:
* I'd rather have my quantity of gold/food/glimmers be always visible on the bonfire screen, rather than having to move the mouse to the upper left corner to see that
* It doesn't seem to be possible to see the "effectiveness formulas" during combat. (For example, if you click on Zhu in the bonfire screen and mouse over her enemy-targeted power, you can see that it deals damage based on 75% of her Attack stat. But it doesn't seem to be possible to see those numbers except when you're at a bonfire.)
* I didn't find any way to view my item inventory directly from the bonfire screen; I was only able to see it by choosing something on the world map and then clicking on "select loadout", which was a minor inconvenience two or three times when I wanted to check what I had and then do other stuff on the bonfire screen.

Despite that, and despite (or possibly to some extent because of) getting frustrated sometimes, I'm definitely planning to play the full version when it's available!

[OPTIKLOPS]

Feedback? I have a lot of it. I will write it from the most important to the least important.

The game is very simple to be entertaining, so even further from being entertaining and not getting boring after a little while. It requires little strategy because you don't actually do a lot of things. But you can easily make it not only having strategy, but having a lot of strategy with something which is simultaneously very easy to implement. Make it so you can change characters in battle so you can use the ability you think is the best to use in this situation. So you must have a lot of characters with different abilities each (of course some will be the same) to cover all the possible abilities. You can also create a mode where there is a maximum amount of times you can change characters in a battle. That simple change, changes the whole strategy because you must also think how that character will affect the whole battle instead of this turn only. Of course this mode makes the game more complex (without actually making more difficult) so you can make the player choose what mode he wants and even the difficulty. When you change character, he will have the same health as the previous one (%health, not flat health) so that the players don't change characters just to have full hp (actually you can balance this in the max character changes mode, but it will make the player choices less impactful because the player basically changes the order the characters fight and not which characters abilities will be used). To explain in the story sense why the new character takes the hp of the previous one, you can say that the enemies attack all your characters and what it shows you only the active ones or something like that or you can simply not explain it at all. Changing characters is the most important one.

You can make the game more replayable. The most easy and simultaneously the most effective method is to give the player sliders to change enemy damage,hp,gold, chances for something to happen and so on. This simultaneously will make the game exactly as difficult as every player needs so everyone will be happy i guess.

Different modes. Like how Slay the Spire has done it.

Make buffs last the average rounds a battle takes but be weaker. So in the first half of the battle is beneficial to do buffs but in the second half it's not, so there is a balance. Same for debuffs. For example make them last 12 turns and make you 16.66% stronger. -15% for debuffs.

Can speed make you attack more times per turn? If not then speed is way less powerful than the other stats so give very very little value to it.

I didn't do the math but my first impression with Zhu is that her AOE attack is weak. It should be 20-25% stronger.

As others have said, make gold,food and inventory being shown on the bonfire screen or at least let us change it in the options. That's not that important though.

[casquecrayoncolle]

Sup, played the demo, loved it.

Here what I think of it

Liked :
- Three-ability characters
- Little stories, random (?) event
- Interaction between character (although maybe heavy after the 200th replay)
- The setting reminds me of Has-been Heroes.
- Feeling of discovery
- Quest
- Figuring out a combo out of three simple characters.
- The items were cool and strong and the fact you need to "waste" a turn to use them is interesting.
- Different enemies need different strategy.
- They aoe spell effect is sick.


My problems :

- Not enough interesting combination / strategy. Now I know this is a demo, but it did not take long before I realised that I mostly used one combo with small modification :
guard + charge + hidden + heal + big charged attack (aoe or not)
or
guard + charge + hidden + buff + piercing dmg.

- Maybe it's just me, but I felt like the pyro character was sub par then the other characters. Her booby trap and DOT seemed interesting at first but were not as much as reliable as the other character.

- The region map. Beside the danger of travel I really did not know where I should go. Quest gave me goals but I had no idea of how to achieve said goal which is cool sometimes, but I only felt like a was wondering.

- I was killed a couple of times by the rock-eye-laser thing and it never felt fair. I did not feel like I could have won the fight, or that I made some kind of mistake. When I finally killed some I did not know what I did differently to be able to kill them so it did not feel that great.

- Some enemies are not really interesting I think. Like the armored white hair zombie do not add a lot of things that the shield skeleton already adds. As far as I understand the only thing changed is the stats and the self heal. I feel like it could be just a skeleton shield variant.


What I would like to see.
- Some information about what I could find in the next map.
- A more interesting Pyro
- More diverse enemies or enemies combination that need different strategies
- Maybe tell people what the will likely encounter on a quest so they can choose their set-up right ( a little bit like Into the breach)
- Random events while traveling, sleeping, etc.
- Some map with environnemetal effects (?)... Thunder / marsh / trees...


That's about what comes to my head it the moment. The game as a big potential that's for sure. I hope you the best !

[MoaCube]

Thanks, guys! This is all massively helpful!

Improving the travel/map system to make it more strategically involving is our main focus right now.