Okay, so this is just awesome. Everything is adorable and stylish as hell, the dialogue is fantastic. Given the length of the competition this is an incredible effort.
I have some little comments and one big one:
- First time I ran this (OS X 10.6) it crashed. Then I ran it again and it worked fine.
- Full screen mode and/or the ability to resize the window would be really cool.
- It's a little annoying that the dialogue features a "skip this line of text" button but no "hurry up" button. What most RPGs do is something where like when you start pressing the "hurry up" button it fills out the rest of the comment before moving on to the next one.
- The wobbling is cute but the little guys wobble SO much it's almost like they're flickering.
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You can freely walk through walls, and so can the enemies (EDIT: I mean the big checkerboard walls. It's also possible for either the player or enemies to be knocked backward when hit into a normal type wall, but the game seems to behave basically sensibly when this happens, when this happens you can't do anything afterward except walk back out of the wall.)
- It's a bit frustrating you don't know when your archer cloaking has recharged
- Jumping doesn't seem to serve any purpose at all? At first I thought it was for jumping over enemy archers' arrows, but seemingly not
And the larger comment:
- In general: Combat in this game seems to be an activity with incredible risk and basically no reward. The knight for example can tear through basically any enemies you encounter until the enemy archers start showing up en masse, at which point all of a sudden your game will be over very quickly. Any one archer is likely to take away at least one of your hearts-- it's not even really possible to follow a strategy of smart dodging or blocking because they can fire arrows from 0 distance away and still hurt you. Because the enemies are so frequent, if each archer you approach is able to take one heart before you take it down then that's going to be a quick game over. (The other classes change this situation only slightly in that they're at least
capable of beating an archer without getting hurt, but they have a relatively huge chance of getting hurt when any other enemy appears.)
In fact after taking a few goes at this, it doesn't seem like there's any incentive to approach this game in any way except by playing as the archer, avoiding ALL combat, and just cloaking constantly. (
This is actually sort of fun-- woo I'm Medieval Snake!-- and since you have to conserve your cloaking carefully it actually involves a fair amount of strategy, but I don't think it was how you intended the game to be played.) There's basically no incentive to engage in combat rather than avoiding it-- since the gold serves no obvious purpose (atm not even the superficial purpose of a high score board) the only incentive to engage in battle is to get hearts, which themselves only serve the purpose of recovering from your previous battles. Since regardless of which class you play you are much more likely to lose a heart from any one enemy encounter than you are to gain one, avoiding combat is the only strategy with a positive expected value or any hope of surviving down to the next level (which is the only reward structure the game has in place).
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