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[Oddball]

Liked: Great lo-fi aesthetic coupled with simple gameplay. Easy to get into.

Disliked: Apart from the visuals the enemies seemed very similar.

Conclusion: Great for casual play and a bit of procrastination.

[dood77]

Hey, I found your game through this 1up article here: http://www.1up.com/do/feature?pager.offset=0&cId=3177782 and I LOVED it!!
I really look forward to future updates and refinements. A question about the name though, was it at all inspired by this: http://www.squidi.net/three/entry.php?id=22
? (Note, the game described in the link is not an actual game, merely a description of the mechanic.) The gameplay described doesn't really have much in common with your game, but the reason I actually clicked on the link to your game was the name I had read before...

If you aren't familiar with squidi's Three Hundred Game Mechanics project I highly recommend you take a look at it. It's absolutely brimming with game ideas and every one of them has the potential to be an amazing game.

[Anthony Flack]

This is a fantastically elegant design. So simple, but it works really well. I like it a lot.

[Hangedman]

If you aren't familiar with squidi's Three Hundred Game Mechanics project I highly recommend you take a look at it. It's absolutely brimming with game ideas and every one of them has the potential to be an amazing game.

There are a lot of interesting ideas, yeah... but almost every one has been done. They are original, but I'd be more worried about the author attempting to claim credit for every single possible game mechanic they could think up...

[Superjuden]

Summon Suggestions

You could make summons limited to a certain number of uses, after that you need to capture a new creature. This would fix the problem if you capture a low-level creature that eventually become useless.

You could the creatures powers up with the player character, so if you find a sword, your minions get +1 attack, if you find a shield they get +2 hp, that should make them more durable in the long run.

Spell suggestions

I've also noticed that if you have two tabs with the same spell, the game tends to get pretty easy so I'd suggest instead of having two individual spell tabs which can be used separately, you could perhaps use them as one spell with is more powerful. To if you have to heals you can't use them as 8+8, but rather when you use heal you get +14 hp, powerful enough for it to be useful but not enough to essentially give you infinite life in many battles. Or you could remove one spell tab and upgrade each spell every time you find a new copy of that spell. For example the magic missile which does 12x1 damage is quickly overpowered by your normal attack, and it becomes worthless, however if every time you found a new magic missle spell, it did a little bit extra damage it would probably always be more powerful than the normal attack.

Power-up + multi-missle is pretty broken also, right now it does enough damage to kills pretty much any foe in the game other than bosses and some at level 5. I'd suggest reducing the damage by just a few points to that you don't one-shot everything all the time or limit it to 3 target at the most.

If the heal had an party effect for your creatures too it would be awesome.

Enemy Suggestions

It probably wouldn't hurt if you gave some enemies a mutli-target attack. Right now there are creatures with sticks and versions of those without sticks, those with sticks deal +1 damage, you could however do a double stick version which does two strikes and each strike doing the same as if they had one stick but divided over two targets. So if the stickless does 1x3 damage, the single stick does 1x4 and the double stick could do 2x2. These double stick version would first strike your pets of course. This could also be an extra power-up found in the dungeon.

It would be bit fun if there were kamikaze enemies which blows up and deals party damage at turn three of combat, such an enemy would make target prioritizing a bit more complex and interesting in some battles since you'd sometimes have to choose between killing the bomb or taking the blast and kill the other creatures.

Giving bosses minions and powerful heal spells at higher levels would make them a bit more challenging, right now they just trade punches with you.

If you want the game to go on for longer you could take the diablo approch which is to simply take an enemy and put a different color on him to indicate his power level. So there could be three different kinds of rats, a blue, green and red, each being successively stronger in some way.

Lastly, I'd recommend changing the battle system so that there is an enemy front line which is the only line which can use melee attacks while those behind can use weaker ranged attacks. This would eliminate the problem where you sometimes get bombared with three lines of enemies which get first strike. Once the front line is killed, you then leave the back-up open to your attacks and you're open to their melee attacks. Of course not all foes should have this range attack, perhaps only those which also have a stick option should be able to use ranged attacks. THis change would of course change a great deal in the balance of the game if you just add this system.

Hope you'll find something useful from this. Your game is awesome btw.

[ejfarraro]

This was a lot of fun; just beat the 5 level dungeon.  Even when I considered myself overpowered (AoE spell + 2 heal spells), I still managed to cut it close a few times.

Looking forward to see how this develops.  It feels like a Rogue, but is more accessible.

[Banov.]

Holy cow, this game is so cool!  

I love the streamlined RPG gameplay, the presentation and sounds are just perfect.  Watching your dungeon map fill up is very satisfying!  Can't wait to see where this goes next~

[plums]

Hi, another random visitor who came to say that I really like your game.

One idea I had that I think would solve some of your design issues is to make all the spells limited use. Healing abuse etc. would not be such a problem, plus it gives more purpose to finding more spells further down the dungeon, instead of just getting a good set of 3 and sticking with those the whole game.

Interface wise, having spell bubbles start full, with a level that gradually depletes as they are used, seems like a good idea.. A picture explains much better:



Here, the first spell has been used quite a lot, the second spell is nearly full, and the third hasn't been used at all. An "empty" bubble (such as the way spells are currently shown) should mean exactly one use left.

In any case, I hope you expand this into a full game, because it's lots of fun.

[Jotaf]

Dude, just wanted to congratulatate you on the awesome game! The way you streamlined movement and pretty much every mechanic is awesome. I only now realized how much time I usually spend in a RL just traveling from room to room and getting to objects. Also you kept the graphics and sound style of Star Guard which I love

[sylverone]

This game is really neat, and I've had some fun playing. I love the sounds and the way the enemies disintegrate when defeated.

Concerning summoning; I think a way to empty the spell is needed, maybe with a bit of restriction so that the player doesn't just get upgrade to new monsters whenever. How about this; while a monster is summoned, cast the summon spell again to banish you ally and reset the spell tab. The penalty is that you have to wait a period of time (maybe between 5 to 10 turns on the map?), and then you can capture a new monster again.

Also, plums' idea sounds promising.

I checked out all the online games on your site while I was there, and the "image tree" thing gave me an idea. The images that that thing produces are much like the ones in Tiny Crawl, so what if you made another game by tweaking Tiny Crawl so that different types of monsters are generated using that image generator. You could have the game automatically animate the creatures using the evolution feature of image tree, since many of the mutated pictures are quite similar to their parent. Maybe the monster population itself could evolve over time as well, with some influence by the player, so that neat sprites can be rewarded and kept in one's game.

Thanks for the game!