Big long list of feedback

[Stabbey]

Kickstarter backer here, although I haven't gotten around to playing this until just recently. I don't expect all or most of this to be addressed, this is more of a "for your reference" list for future development.

This game is almost fun, and I say that with all the the positive connotations of “Bob almost avoided being hit by the bus”.

• The story mode is far too slow-moving. The opening in-media res thing can only hold one's attention for so long. The advancement seems to be "do 3-4 random missions, then get a main plot mission.” One big problem with that structure is that it gives the impression that Robin does not really seem to care all that much about her missing past and does not pursue it with any real interest. “Oh that lady says I lost my memory and I need to get Ginseng to restore it. Whatever.” Then nothing until 3 missions later when coincidentally the client is a herb merchant. He says Ginseng is found in Spider forest. Whatever. *3-4 missions later* “Hey boss, know where a spider forest is?”. There’s no sense of urgency there, and it’s about the main character’s own memories.
  
• The main story moving so geologically slowly means most of the time is spent on filler missions, which only exposes the games flaws for longer. The combat is very repetitive, it’s just mashing enter a lot and sometimes hitting F to shoot at something.
  
• Because all enemies level with you, it gets tiring and you don’t feel like you’re getting stronger as you gain levels. That makes it boring.
  
• It's all the same and I can't go on any more. Fun has drained away.
  
• Using bombs and guns is pretty rare because there’s so little gunpowder to use. Magic is also ridiculously rare as well and of course it’s random what you get. The first one I got after a while was a very situational Earth Shield, but the second one after another long while was Drain to let me heal. Ice Wall was the third one and it was not good, and I got Slow fourth, and I have a hard time telling the difference between slowed and unslowed (for both me and enemies)
  
• I’d like to be able to mouse over an enemy to see their stats (just as if they were in melee range).
  
• The Inventory tab should be removed and replaced with Equipment. It is useless on its own.
  
• WHY NO SHORTCUT KEYS FOR OTHER INTERFACES BESIDES INVENTORY?
  
• The manual says F2-F8 bring up other menus, but they actually do nothing.
  
• Why no [!] over the heads of quest people when you’re ready to turn in a quest?
  
• Why, why does town music get all echoey and distorted when you go from outside to inside a building. What’s the point of that?aw
  
• Only 3 stash tabs for a game with 89,243,674 different crafting recipes and ingredients is insufficient. There's clearly room for more stash tabs.
  
• When talking to the scientist who sends you out on soil samples, he and robin go through the whole spiel of “I was injured so I am here I like the ambiance of a bar” each and every single time instead of getting to the point “hey go find more samples please” “ok”. There’s no need to repeat the same dialogue over and over again, get to the point. Same with the merchant who keeps being thrown out by his wife. I don’t need to see variations on that theme each time I talk to him, maybe I just don’t care about his personal problems and want to buy stuff.
  
• Why does the scientist only pay you 440 gold each time even though the monsters constantly get harder and harder and harder? The power crystal is nice, but the gold becomes worthless. I bet that the other repetitive quests also don’t scale the reward.
  
• The fishing minigame is good-ish. I’m not fond of the stupid constantly moving depth meter. Why can’t I just set it to what I want manually without having to time it? Fishing sucks, though because without any kind of record about what you found at what depth with what lure, it forces you to memorize that crap. Hint: No one in their right mind will memorize that crap. This renders most of the fishing quests as not worth doing.
  
• Why are fish divided into qualities between A-F? Just for more pointless busywork to pad out the length of the fishing quests? That’s also another thing which doesn’t work without a record.
  
• Random Encounters on the map are thankfully few, but they’re all identical which is boring. The dialogue is repetitive too.
  
• Clever dialogue loses its cleverness when repeated dozens of times.
  
• Why doesn’t the post office recipe reward tell you what recipe you received? They all stack in a huge long list, I have no idea what added or even if it was a duplicate!
  
• What’s the point of the power crystals when you’re basically constantly incrementally improving your gear anyway? None of the gear seems to have special powers that would make you want to hold onto them anyway.
  
• Terrain bonuses and penalties are useless in a game this fast paced. Because they’re randomly assigned to random tiles, there’s no point in using them for strategy. It might be better if they came in larger groups to encourage you to fight on certain tiles, but honestly the whole thing should be junked because it adds nothing to the gameplay.
  
• Why is there no armor or weapon merchant in town?
  
• Why is there no seller of random ingredients in town?
  
• Most of the merchants only sell the identical same components and never change them. That means you’re forced to go elsewhere for pretty much everything.
  
• No equipment vendors means you need to craft (LOL) or use what you find randomly in dungeons. The fact that you can survive on what you find randomly means that crafting is pretty pointless.

That’s all for the non-crafting complaints. The list of complaints and issues with crafting needs its own section. It’s clear that absolutely no one at all who worked on the crafting system knows what the word “fun” means and wouldn’t even if they were smashed in the head with a sledgehammer embossed with the word “fun”.

CRAFTING IS CANCER section

• The lack of even BASIC recipes provided for free sours the entire crafting experience. It’s stupid and unacceptable that I have to go to a website just to learn the most basic crafting recipes. No one at all would think that the first step to making a health potion is to combine 5 wood chips with a potion bottle. Because the website had typos, I didn't realize that "Sphalerite" meant "Sulphur".
  
• Recipes are listed like Ore x1, Ore x1, Ore x1, instead of Ore x3 like any sensible human being from the planet earth would.
  
• It’s compeletely braindead that in a game with 500+ recipes they are all in one gigantic long list with no filters. Brain. Dead.
  
• The crafting menu needs tabs and categories. One category should be “CAN CREATE”, if you have all the ingredients on hand to make those items.
  
• If I have a stack of items and I drag them to the crafting menu, I should get a pop-up with a slider which lets me select how many to move there. I should not have to individually drag the stack over EACH AND EVERY ****ING TIME.
  
• WHY IS THERE A LEVELING SYSTEM FOR CRAFTING
  
• WHY
  
• WHY DO I HAVE TO GRIND CRAFTING
  
• There's no sorting for crafting materials. Apparently everything is just considered "crafting". The sort button makes no attempt to sort ores, rods, plates, rings, ingots, minerals, organic parts, food components, clothing components together.
  
• The level shown is only the level of crafting you require. It does not tell you what level the item you’ll get is. It needs to do that for equipment so you can decide if it’s worth making in the first place!
  
• Tin, Zinc, Potatos and Onions are far too common. Iron and minerals/crystals are too rare.
  
• I am finding way way, WAAAAY too many duplicate recipies for a game which has 500 recipes. In fact duplicate recipes shouldn’t be allowed to appear at all!
  
• Digging tens of thousands of holes to try to find the needed ore is the antithesis of fun. A better idea would have been to put ore objects in the levels that would provide more chunks per dig, then crumble once done. Same overall amount of items, far fewer pointless clicks.
  
• When in the same room as your storage chest and crafting, the crafting interface should automatically see your storage chest's contents so you know if you can make the recipe. If you select one recipe, it should move ingredients to the crafting window as needed.

[Adam Kärpänen]

Here's another player's take on the above suggestions, point by point. I'm not commenting on the crafting section, as I'm not much of a crafter and haven't done any that the game hasn't suggested so far:

- Disagree. I like it that the story moves slowly and has filler missions to it. I don't see the need for "urgency" and personally I would hate if I could just breeze through the whole thing in a day.
- Mostly disagree. While I'm sure there could be more variation to the battle mechanics I'm pretty okay with it as it is.
- Strongly disagree. The game's pretty easy as it is, I sure wouldn't want to see weaker monsters no matter how far I advance. That would surely kill the game if you took away all the challenge. Maybe you could make more different kinds of monsters for more advanced levels if people feel that leveling means nothing.
- Okay.
- Somewhat disagree. I use more bombs and guns than anything else in this game, and it's not that rare to find more ammo for your guns. My favorite trick is kick the bomb to your opponent and shoot it. Always a pleasure. Magic is too rare though, and I'm not sure if the spells I've used even do anything, not that I've found many spells though.
- Agree.
- Agreed. Inventory in itself feels pretty useless.
- Agree.
- Haven't tried it but if it's so it should be improved.
- Agree.
- That's supposed to be bar music I guess. I'm pretty okay with it. Matter of taste. The funniest thing I've encountered in this game is the exceptionally bad rockabilly band rehearsing in the backroom of the bar. Lol. +1 to the band.
- I suppose so. Wouldn't hurt to have some more.
- Okay. I'm fine with the dialogue myself.
- Scaling the reward to the challenge is a good idea. +1
- Haven't tried fishing yet, so no comments.
- There's a point in the fish grades but I can't remember it now. It was explained in the tutorial video, maybe I need to watch it again.
- I don't mind the random encounters. Wouldn't mind if there was more variability to them though.
- Okay.
- Not there yet.
- The power crystal will upgrade your current weapon a little bit, but overall their worth is not much more than finding a box of decent ammo.
- Disagree. It's hard to to use the terrain bonuses for tactical edge, but sometimes they are useful. Not absolutely needed but in my opinion a good bonus in some situations.
- Might be nice.
- Might be nice.
- M-hm.
- I guess it is pretty pointless as I do just fine without. I guess some people like crafting, and I might look into it myself at some point. But really, I find it an easy-going game with a little challenge if I only think what I'm doing. I only ever die from my own damn bomb traps.

[Stabbey]

Originally posted by Adam Kärpänen:

Here's another player's take on the above suggestions, point by point. I'm not commenting on the crafting section, as I'm not much of a crafter and haven't done any that the game hasn't suggested so far:

- Disagree. I like it that the story moves slowly and has filler missions to it. I don't see the need for "urgency" and personally I would hate if I could just breeze through the whole thing in a day.

"Urgency" is not about the player speeding through the game. It's about how much interest the MAIN CHARACTER takes in THEIR OWN LIFE. Robin does not seem to care all that much about her missing memories, so why in the world should I?

Stories are supposed to be about hooking the player/reader and making them care about what happens to the characters/the world. If the characters inside the story don't seem to give a s***, then I'm certainly not going to.


The premise and setting of the game seemed fairly interesting when I read about it on Kickstarter. Unfortunately, 16 hours into the actual game, and they still have not done anything interesting with the setting or premise.

Instead I’ve been alternating between doing main quest jobs from the bartender and dirt collection jobs from a scientist.

- Mostly disagree. While I'm sure there could be more variation to the battle mechanics I'm pretty okay with it as it is.

I thought it was okay at first, but after so many hours it has become just far too repetitive and mind-numbing. Skills are far too rare to add any variety to spice combat up.

- Strongly disagree. The game's pretty easy as it is, I sure wouldn't want to see weaker monsters no matter how far I advance. That would surely kill the game if you took away all the challenge. Maybe you could make more different kinds of monsters for more advanced levels if people feel that leveling means nothing.

It's not about difficulty, it's about tedium and no feeling of progression. I level up and get a few +1's in categories, big whoop. I find a new weapon or new piece of armor, who cares? It doesn't matter at all because none of it actually means anything.

Enemies are all scaled to your level, they're always going to be about the same level of threat. There are no satisfying moments when you can clean up a group of weak enemies and feel powerful. There are no moments when you face off against a super-tough enemy and pull off a win you really shouldn't have been able to do.

Each fight, each dungeon is just as difficult as the last one. After a while, it's no longer satisfying, and it stops being fun.

- Somewhat disagree. I use more bombs and guns than anything else in this game, and it's not that rare to find more ammo for your guns. My favorite trick is kick the bomb to your opponent and shoot it. Always a pleasure. Magic is too rare though, and I'm not sure if the spells I've used even do anything, not that I've found many spells though.

You can't craft any special ammo, as far as I know, not even the big list of 500 recipes has anything but the basic standard ammo listed.

More importantly at level 33+ and 17 hours into the game, picking up every component I found and I still was not able to make more than 10 batches of gunpowder, because you need 16 animal droppings to make one batch of gunpowder. It takes too many components.

1 batch of gunpowder can produce 12 bullets/shells/cartriges, and that doesn't last very long because bullets don't seem to do that much damage because my guns are all outdated.

That's largely because bullet weapons don't drop or appear on the Random Merchants often and you need luck to get recipes for decent guns.

You need 3 batches of gunpowder to make a total of 4 bombs.


Considering how long it takes to gather the components, 4 bombs or 12 shots is poor value for your time.

- Okay. I'm fine with the dialogue myself.

My problem is now with the DIALOGUE, it's with the REPETITION. I do not need to hear:

"hey can you help me I hurt my leg"
"LOL a bar sure is a good place to recuperate"
"I like the ambiance here"
"okay what do you need"

each and every time I talk to the engineer to take on a soil-sample collecting trip. It's repetitive, after the first quest, just skip to the point.

- I don't mind the random encounters. Wouldn't mind if there was more variability to them though.

Is there any variability? I've only seen the one with possibly two variations of the dialogue.

- Disagree. It's hard to to use the terrain bonuses for tactical edge, but sometimes they are useful. Not absolutely needed but in my opinion a good bonus in some situations.

lol, really? They're random, randomly placed, and the only way you can make use of them is by remembering what your weapon's damage type is/are and what the enemy attack type is (is there even any way to tell that?).


***

When neither the story/setting nor the gameplay can hold my interest, there's just no reason to go on.

[Adam Kärpänen]

So you don't like the game, I get it. I've played about 9-10 hours so far, and I like it. Some of your suggestions make a lot of sense, some of them don't in my opinion. I guess they could make the game a lot more complex and intricate, but that would require a lot more money too. Money and coding. For a small production game it answers to my expectations well (if I don't encounter many more crashes) but surely there is room for improvement. I guess the crafting part needs more work than anything else from what I've heard, but I've not experimented much with it yet, so it's also somewhat optional as it is. Maybe best that way as crafting is not something that I fiddle too much with in any game.

[Adam Kärpänen]

Oh, and there IS a weapon merchant in town. Enter the Academy of Arms and talk to the guard there.

[Stabbey]

Originally posted by Adam Kärpänen:

Oh, and there IS a weapon merchant in town. Enter the Academy of Arms and talk to the guard there.

No such place in my world's seed.

[Adam Kärpänen]

Maybe you have an earlier version of the game then. There's one in my village.

[Stabbey]

Originally posted by Adam Kärpänen:

Maybe you have an earlier version of the game then. There's one in my village.

That's not it, my game is only a few weeks old. But thanks for letting me know, because wow, it turns out that the Academy of Arms only shows up in certain randomly generated seeds. It's not guaranteed to spawn.

No wonder why you didn't have problems with ammo, your game has one and mine did not, so I got screwed over from the start. That's amazing - and by that I mean that it's amazing what a poor design idea it was to randomly screw over the player by giving them a chance to not have a critical building in the starting town.

[Stabbey]

I actually abandoned my previous game to start over, just because of the lack of an ammo shop in my first save. The difference in ammo between having a shop and not having one is night and day.

PLAYERS SHOULD NEVER, EVER, ****ING EVER HAVE TO DO START OVER BECAUSE THE RNG ALLOWS FOR A VITAL SHOP TO BE MISSING. That is a terrible design decision. It greatly hurt my experience of the game and I didn't even know that I was missing something.

***

Adam, a small team is an excuse for some things, but not everything.

It's terrible that the main town does not have a merchant which sells random things. You can find random merchants in dungeons, which sell random items. That means it's completely possible for a random merchant which sells random things to be a permanant fixture in town. It would change its inventory each time you leave/re-enter town.

It's annoying that the things the merchants DO permanantly stock do not include ores or finished metals or logs or planks. You can do quests Wilson and Alison to get them metals and ingots and wood things, but the store inside DOESN'T SELL ANYTHING GOOD. You can get worthless zinc, copper, and tin ore you find like candy elsewhere, and just pine logs and boards in terms of wood. Why don't they sell ingots of all the different metals so you could at least pay gold to skip the terrible digging you're forced to do? That's not because the dev's had a small team.

The Academy of Arms does not count as a weapon merchant because its weapons stay the same. It's great for ammo and bombs, but nothing else.

In my new playthrough, I have a ton of shotgun ammo, but it's pretty useless because my shotgun is badly out of date. I want to make a new one, but WHOOPS because of the developers demonstrate incredibly poor understanding of their own recipes, they've made Iron, a substance required 60% of the time in metal-using recipes one of the rarest things in the game. I have 44 useless pieces of Zinc and 31 worthless pieces of Tin, but only 8 pieces of Iron. A small team is not an excuse for there to still be such badly skewed drop rates 9 months or so after launch. I spotted the problem in a few minutes by doing a "Find" on the recipe list and looking at the actual quantities of ores which appear in my inventory.

[Adam Kärpänen]

My guess is that the lack of Academy was a rare bug. Like in my first attempt of the game it randomly crashed and corrupted the game so badly I had to manually delete all save files from Steam to be able to play at all. My second attempt was even shorter, as the leather ball in the village had randomly spawned in front of Robin's front door. When I tried to exit the house, it threw me into a teleport square and when I tried to return it crashed the whole game.

I've read that when the game first got out it was so buggy it was virtually unplayable. Their patch solved most of the issues but obviously some bugs still persist.

[-]

I have already pointed out this games main issues when it was first announced on kickstarter.
I'm going to assume the game was mostly finished when they launched the kickstarter and didn't need our money to begin with.

It's freaking BS, I pointed out the problems to this game and not a single one was fixed. After all, why fix them when game has already been made?

Crafting is stupid.
Linear progression is stupid.

They seemed to fail at understanding the main reason people like roguelikes. But linear progression? No control over leveling up? this game could've been my favorite, but those 2 alone are gamebreaking enough for me to uninstall.

I did not have fun playing this game. You die once and everything is the same.

[Stabbey]

Feedback on the manual:

An in-game manual is nice, but, it can only be accessed from the start menu, not in-game, which is when you most need to look at it. It would also be nice to be able to use arrow keys/WASD you could hold down to quickly scroll through the pages instead of having to click dozens of times.


Feedback on the Power Crystals:

For a moment, I thought that I might have found a purpose for the power crystals. Guns don't drop often, and they come in three types with three different ammo.

So since I was level 28, I thought I might try to use crystals to upgrade my Boom Boom Stick (Craft level 7/Player level 12) since the next craftable shotgun is either the Double Barrel Revolver (CL 35/PL 41) or the Thunderous Blunderbuss (CL 46 / PL 52).

The first power crystal increased the STR on the gun by 1 from 39 to 40. That was it.

I learned that you can only upgrade something three times. In total, I increase STR by 3 to 42, Crush damage from 10 to 11, Pierce damage from 6 to 7 and Fire, Earth, Water, and Air damage from 0 to 1.

That's what you get for three uncommon Power Crystals, and you can only upgrade something three times. For the amount of work you need to put in to get one, color me underwhelmed. Another half-baked idea.

It's bad enough that the benefits for using a single Power Crystal are negligible, but limiting how many times you can upgrade to just three is ridiculous.

If Power Crystals are supposed to be useful, they've failed utterly. To make them useful items, the increase in power for an upgrade has to be significantly increased. That's not good enough to fix them alone, though. The number of upgrades you can apply must also be greatly increased.

[-]

Originally posted by Adam Kärpänen:

So you don't like the game, I get it. I've played about 9-10 hours so far, and I like it. Some of your suggestions make a lot of sense, some of them don't in my opinion. I guess they could make the game a lot more complex and intricate, but that would require a lot more money too. Money and coding. For a small production game it answers to my expectations well (if I don't encounter many more crashes) but surely there is room for improvement. I guess the crafting part needs more work than anything else from what I've heard, but I've not experimented much with it yet, so it's also somewhat optional as it is. Maybe best that way as crafting is not something that I fiddle too much with in any game.

>money
You don't even know how game development works. Money doesn't magically make things work.
They already had a working version of the game before the kickstarter, and they used it to enter contest. The engine has been made in less than 10 months.. 10 months!!! (They had a working version of the game running within half a year.) Fixing all these things would take a month at most, don't kid yourself with the meme "urrgh programming takes years, all of this needs money"

They made a damn engine, and switching a value mere minutes, taking under consideration all the suggestions will take at most a month.

They're not coding from scratch, they're just readjusting values, disabling features and making modifications. No money required, just 2 hours a day when you get home from your Job. But they're too busy marketing.

You say they need money? Well talk about how they're remaking the game to get the ports to work...

They rewrite the entire game for many consoles, it has a playstation vita..console version for everything.

Money is the least of their problems (even though this game failed miserably) they are doing all of this without any money at all, they spend all this time making posters, and plushies for the game, showing up to conventions and multi-platform and more.

Yet you think they need buttloads of money to open up their text editor and change some numbers. Give me a break.

You are blindly defending them without knowing anything about game development. This is a roguelike with RNG's, tiles.. you can pick up a random library on the internet and get a world generated for you within 10 hours (even if you never coded before.)

Follow some random tutorial then spend a month learning how to replace those 2D tiles with 3D graphics. The rest is modification and adding content to the game, making adjustments and adding skills. but the libraries their self will handle most of the complexities for you.

Everything people are asking for them to improve on, isn't even complex. If they could make the entire gameplay (excluding assets/dialogue/story/etc) within 6 months, and then finetweak it for presentation within 10 months, then they can EASILY fix all these problems within 1 month.

It's just a roguelike, it's not some AAA parkour space shooter game.
I don't care too much anymore, I'm just disappointed at how blinded they are and how they disregard feedback.

Go look up roguelike libraries and you can make this game too in a year.
This same company entered a 7 day roguelike contest using their roguelike libraries. It's that easy when the assets & code already exists. If they can do that in 7 days, then don't talk about how they need money, for one guy to sit at their computer and type for 2 hours a day for a month.

They made less progress in the 2 years since the kickstarter funding, than they did before kickstarter and developed the engine within 10 months by a SINGLE developer. If anything money made ♥♥♥♥ worse, because they already got their moneys worth. They already "won".

[-]

Also at the OP, all your complaints can be fixed with ease.
If they are capable of making this entire game (ready for a trailer on kickstarter) by a single developer within 10 months, then they can fix all these problems, but they are not going to do that.

I have made these same complaints 2 years ago on kickstarter, and not a single one has been fixed. Give up & open visual basic.