Suggestions for This Game and the Next

[Skye]

For this game:

1.) Add the ability to close the game from the main menu. There is no exit button and pressing escape does nothing.

2.) Jumping needs three fixes: (a) the player should be able to control his jump height according to the pressure he applies to a key (or length of time he presses it), not simply by setting a static value; (b) jumping should not repeat endlessly as the jump key is held down; and (c) it should be possible to jump off vines and ladders.

3.) The falling mines of the final boss should be slower. On more than one occasion, I was unable to reach the gap in the line of mines even at max speed. I understand that hiding in these gaps is not the only way to avoid damage, but it appears to be what you intended until he starts to drop the mines with no gaps.

4.) The instructions for the shield command should be clearer about what types of damage it will block.

5.) The proximity mine blocks near the end of the game should show their detonation range.

6.) Take a look at what happens when you jump on the charging enemy after it stuns itself. I got stuck on top of it a couple of times.

7.) If the player clears all bugs before starting the final boss, he can't get more resources for healing, shields, dummies, etc. -- unless there's a source I'm missing.

8.) The first spage stage should be easier. I found the second and third stages to be quite easy as I gained more weapons, weapon types, and modifiers, but my ship's limitations in the first stage led to me being overwhelmed and using up most of my healing resources. As enemies built up, the screen became covered with their attacks and I couldn't even get into a position to attack them without taking damage.

9.) The final space stage, while not difficult, was very tedious because of all of the micromanaging of code. I was constantly swapping out weapons to be able to put up a shield to defend against homing missiles, which really broke up the flow of combat and felt like a chore. Fiddling around with block coordinates and scaling in the rest of the game sometimes felt the same way, but changing that would require more significant redesign.

10.) In my opinion, when editing code, the character that gets deleted should be the highlighted character, not the one before it. This was an occasional source of frustration for me.

11.) I understand the need for a max value on resources, but when I had maxed a trait and had to downgrade it to get past a while loop, this meant that I often lost resources. For example, if I have 99 bits and a downgrade gives me back 15, I still end up with 99; then, when I upgrade again, I'm down to 84 bits. I'm not sure what would fix this, but it would help if healing and shield used a separate resource entirely.

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For the next game:

1.) Focus more on environmental manipulation. It was rather disappointing to find that most commands simply adjusted some of Debugger's traits, which is not really gameplay and doesn't give you much freedom to create puzzles. I liked the ability to create items, but this wasn't explored very much, the freedom to place them where I wished didn't show up until very late in the game, and there was no way to alter them once they were placed.

2.) Explore more programming elements. The "while" loops only showed up near the end of the game and there were no "for" loops.

3.) The classic backtracking-with-new-abilities aspect of Metroidvanias would work well with this sort of game, but there was very little of it in this particular one.

4.) Speed up the pace of the early game, when enemies take a lot of hits to kill and player speed is slow. Pausing to change code already slows a game's pace down; it doesn't need everything else to take a lot of time too.

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Debugger 3.16 wasn't a totally positive experience for me, but it shows promise. I look forward to your next game if you take the time to expand upon this core concept and improve the experience in general.

[Spiderwork]

Thanks for this extensive feedback! ^^ However, at the moment I don't know if there is a chance for updates or a new game with code elements cause it seems that most people are not interested in such stuff... My next game will be someting completly different: A competitive RPG for up to 4 players called RPG PARTY! You can see a small video of the battle mode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8Ez2WwwtkQ

[Skye]

I understand. I didn't feel like writing a review for the game and I wasn't sure what to rate it, so I decided to just give feedback instead.

I don't know if there's a lack of interest in this type of game or if it comes down to marketing, price, or the other aspects of your game in particular. In any case, turn-based RPGs and competitive games are among my least favorite types, so I'm afraid I won't be purchasing RPG PARTY. Good luck, though.

[Spiderwork]

No problem!

[Kaizo]

I'd certainly agree on the lack of environmental manipulation, but a thing that frustrated me was that (in the space fights) you couldn't assign multiple weapons the same thing simultanously (something like "w_morph([1,2,3], beam)" or so)

[Spiderwork]

Originally posted by Skye:

I understand. I didn't feel like writing a review for the game and I wasn't sure what to rate it, so I decided to just give feedback instead.

I don't know if there's a lack of interest in this type of game or if it comes down to marketing, price, or the other aspects of your game in particular. In any case, turn-based RPGs and competitive games are among my least favorite types, so I'm afraid I won't be purchasing RPG PARTY. Good luck, though.

After all, I'm working on a successor of the game, working titlle: "Debugger 3.16: Recoded" ... This time with full gamepad support, improved visuals, local multiplayer and it will also come to the Nintendo Switch. However, it will still takes some time.