I've played Cat Quest for 15 hours or so and I must say I immensely enjoyed it. Did not expect the game to be as fun as it actually is, I foresaw a shallow indie RPG and got something really fun with a lot of charm! Combat is engaging, progression is quite complex and the story/atomosphere/art style are all amazing.

Some design input:

At the very beginning when I started playing and was about 1 hour into the game, I was utterly immersed and then... I started doing all the side quests. What I found vaguely irritating (less so at the later stages of the game due to certain gameplay mechanics) was that each hub had a questline with progressively higher level requirements. This meant that you could not complete storyline A and then move onto the next hub with a different questline.

From my point of view, this has two major disadvantages: first of all, I'd much rather experience one story as a whole and complete it without initiating another narratives at the same time. It just feels disruptive when you're doing multiple questlines concurrently and sometimes one might actually forget what the quest he/she was on is about. Secondly, you have to constantly move between different hubs which can get quite tedious and boring and also it juts artificially lengthens the game which is not a good thing in my opinion.

I just think that the player experience would be much better if the hubs were designed in a somewhat different manner:

instead of having Hub A with quests for levels 1, 4, 9 > Hub B with 2, 5, 10 > Hub C with 3, 6, 13 the dispersion should look something more like the following: Hub A with 1, 2, 3 > Hub B with 4, 6, 7 > Hub C with 5, 8, 9.

Anomalies in level requirement curve should be much rarer.
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Of course this is purely subjective and someone might not prefer the latter, just my two cents.

The game is deceptively simple and has a lot of depth behind it which I really love. With that being said, while I really appreciate any types of 'secrets' if you will in all kinds of games (huge fan of zelda and the souls series) and a design philosophy which doesn't give everything to the player on a silver platter, some of the 'secrets' that were put in Cat Quest might be game breaking to a certain degree.

To give you some examples, dungeons such as the founder cave or the hidden level 99 cave can be exploited to easily farm gold and experience with A MUCH HIGHER efficiency than any other method in the game. When you introduce such areas, monsters there should probably not be able to respawn after being killed.

That way discovering these areas will still feel rewarding but consequently players won't be able to exploit them and at the same time will avoid ruining the game for themselves (other content becomes trivial after completing the said dungeons multiple times and farming the same spot repeatedly is really not fun).

The spell/ability system is somewhat luckluster imo or rather the foundation for it is good but the spells themselves need some tweaking/balancing. The very first one you get (the AoE circle) along with +% DMG that you get later on are clearly the best choices and shun other potential fun builds.

Also, Willpower and Faith both need a major nerf since they render all the other much cooler looking equipment useless. ^^ Lets us assume that you can only get Faith and Willpower at the very end of the game without making other content trivial. These items still outshine all the others though. Even then, that should not be the case in my opinion. I think it's much more interesting if you have a lot of varied gear and every single set is somewhat better in a different area.

The game is quite short which is fine given its pricing but more importantly since I think it could get monotonous if it were a lengthy title. As I have already said, the combat is engaging and fun BUT you're basically doing the same thing over and over again. What this game could use is some additional minor twists in gameplay from time to time, perhaps logical puzzles of some sort that require you to interact with environment in a certain pattern?

Cat Quest has a lot of potential I think and while it is already an amazing game, in my humble opinion it could benefit a lot from replayable 'end game' content. I wonder if the developers thought about future systems to implement? How about something along the lines of greater rifts as seen in Diablo.

I'd suggest adding procedurally generated dungeons with randomized monsters that get progressively harder and scale endlessly. You could call them 'dragonblood challenges', an ancient arena of sorts that the past dragonblood used to test their might. :)

You could even add an in-game leaderboard of some kind that would allow the players to compare their dragonblood challenge scores though I suppose that might be slightly trickier to implement.

I've played Cat Quest for 15 hours or so and I must say I immensely enjoyed it. Did not expect the game to be as fun as it actually is, I foresaw a shallow indie RPG and got something really fun with a lot of charm! Combat is engaging, progression is quite complex and the story/atomosphere/art style are all amazing. Some design input: At the very beginning when I started playing and was about 1 hour into the game, I was utterly immersed and then... I started doing all the side quests. What I found vaguely irritating (less so at the later stages of the game due to certain gameplay mechanics) was that each hub had a questline with progressively higher level requirements. This meant that you could not complete storyline A and then move onto the next hub with a different questline. From my point of view, this has two major disadvantages: first of all, I'd much rather experience one story as a whole and complete it without initiating another narratives at the same time. It just feels disruptive when you're doing multiple questlines concurrently and sometimes one might actually forget what the quest he/she was on is about. Secondly, you have to constantly move between different hubs which can get quite tedious and boring and also it juts artificially lengthens the game which is not a good thing in my opinion. I just think that the player experience would be much better if the hubs were designed in a somewhat different manner: instead of having Hub A with quests for levels 1, 4, 9 > Hub B with 2, 5, 10 > Hub C with 3, 6, 13 the dispersion should look something more like the following: Hub A with 1, 2, 3 > Hub B with 4, 6, 7 > Hub C with 5, 8, 9. Anomalies in level requirement curve should be much rarer. ​ Of course this is purely subjective and someone might not prefer the latter, just my two cents. The game is deceptively simple and has a lot of depth behind it which I really love. With that being said, while I really appreciate any types of 'secrets' if you will in all kinds of games (huge fan of zelda and the souls series) and a design philosophy which doesn't give everything to the player on a silver platter, some of the 'secrets' that were put in Cat Quest might be game breaking to a certain degree. To give you some examples, dungeons such as the founder cave or the hidden level 99 cave can be exploited to easily farm gold and experience with A MUCH HIGHER efficiency than any other method in the game. When you introduce such areas, monsters there should probably not be able to respawn after being killed. That way discovering these areas will still feel rewarding but consequently players won't be able to exploit them and at the same time will avoid ruining the game for themselves (other content becomes trivial after completing the said dungeons multiple times and farming the same spot repeatedly is really not fun). The spell/ability system is somewhat luckluster imo or rather the foundation for it is good but the spells themselves need some tweaking/balancing. The very first one you get (the AoE circle) along with +% DMG that you get later on are clearly the best choices and shun other potential fun builds. Also, Willpower and Faith both need a major nerf since they render all the other much cooler looking equipment useless. ^^ Lets us assume that you can only get Faith and Willpower at the very end of the game without making other content trivial. These items still outshine all the others though. Even then, that should not be the case in my opinion. I think it's much more interesting if you have a lot of varied gear and every single set is somewhat better in a different area. The game is quite short which is fine given its pricing but more importantly since I think it could get monotonous if it were a lengthy title. As I have already said, the combat is engaging and fun BUT you're basically doing the same thing over and over again. What this game could use is some additional minor twists in gameplay from time to time, perhaps logical puzzles of some sort that require you to interact with environment in a certain pattern? Cat Quest has a lot of potential I think and while it is already an amazing game, in my humble opinion it could benefit a lot from replayable 'end game' content. I wonder if the developers thought about future systems to implement? How about something along the lines of greater rifts as seen in Diablo. I'd suggest adding procedurally generated dungeons with randomized monsters that get progressively harder and scale endlessly. You could call them 'dragonblood challenges', an ancient arena of sorts that the past dragonblood used to test their might. :) You could even add an in-game leaderboard of some kind that would allow the players to compare their dragonblood challenge scores though I suppose that might be slightly trickier to implement.