PyWeek - Chaotic Elven Wizard - feedback

nice game, time pressure is great in this game, I just run out of time in the last level...

Thanks for sharing the game - it was fun!

Despite a number of complaints, the game absorbed me completely, and I went back to play it a second time to complete it (made it just in the nick of time), so well done. I also loved the choice of music.

In many respects I think the gameplay got formulaic fairly quickly. I tend to dislike games that rely on output randomness (ie. getting punished for failing a die roll rather than something the player could have anticipated). Even if I did everything right--checked a door for traps twice, disarmed the traps, then got it open--I could still get punished! I just ended up doing the same thing for every door I encountered: hitting 2 a bunch of times (apparently checking for traps once is not enough) and then hitting 1 a bunch of times, and then just compensating for the loss by taking from my large hoard af health potions.

Ultimately, though, the exploration was the real core mechanic of the game, which was fortunately more engaging than the combat or the trap mechanics due to it relying largely on input randomness (ie. the randomly generated map) and the pressure to find the best route given the limited time. Backtracking was quite irritating, though, due to constantly getting prompts for things I had left behind.

The map generation felt completely erratic at times; like having a bunch of doors in a row that didn't actually lead anywhere. I suppose this could have been improved, and the game could have been more interesting with more world design. But, there is only so much time in a week, and it did feel like a challenge every time to reach the end of the floor.

The fact that it was timed was the only element that added a real challenge to the game. You can retry disarming a locked door as many times as you want, but you pay a price in terms of time, and therefore you have to consider whether it's worth it. This could have been capitalised on further: you could have let the player know that this was a difficult trap, so that the player knows whether it's worth trying many times.

However, because I felt absorbed into the game, the timed game-over completely caught me by surprise the first time. It felt a little underwhelming. Perhaps if the game could have indicated better that my time was ending, it might have added some more pressure to the gameplay. This could have been done by periodically reminding me (day x: 7-x days left!) and by drawing attention to the timer in the last day via sound effects, speeding up the music or otherwise.

Oh, and the character could go diagonally, appearing to slide through walls.

The exploration and combat is pretty engaging. I kept getting rewarded with potions and shoes, kicking down doors and killing monsters. However I completely explored everything and didn't find an exit.

The graphics are pretty but lacking animations. A texture for the floors and doors rather than the flat grey would make a big difference.

Was pretty cool: I’m not a big rouge-like fan, but I appreciated the effort gone in here. The game seemed pretty well all rounded, and I liked that it wasn’t insanely hard or anything like that. Good choice of music, smooth graphics.

I liked it! However, it definitely could have used some attention to detail, like the player always facing one direction while searching the level.

The game is fun, and the graphics are good (aside from the bright blue dialogue boxes). I think the potions are far too common, and a more random door location would make exploring more balanced. The focus on quick movement and fighting doors is and interesting take on the roguelike genre.

Sorry, I haven't been able to get pygame2 installed on Ubuntu yet. pip says it's installed, but the game still crashes with AttributeError: module 'pygame' has no attribute 'GL_CONTEXT_PROFILE_CORE'

I enjoyed the music and scene setting before the actual game! :-)

The game was a really well presented version of this genre.

Some gremlins: Not sure what the sprite for the monster was supposed to be and it took a while to figure out the complete game mechanics (e.g. wear only one type of shoe at a time). Also, while I realise it's a dungeon, the rather random encounters with traps was, to begin with, a bit frustrating -- and then I just powered up my health and "took the pain" to get through them. A rather brute force solution, but it meant the traps didn't appear to add anything. Finally, it took me a while to see that the time was counting down.

Other than that, I really enjoyed playing it. Had me smiling when I got to the end..! :-)

Loved the atmosphere. Music and title screens really set me up for something special.

The actual gameplay felt a bit random to me. I didn't know when to be attacking or defensive so mostly I ran out of health and died.

What would take this to the next level is more variety in classes of enemy so the player can decide the best approach. Clearly that's hard to do when you only have a week.

Inspiring. Hope to have a poke around in the code later on.

Extremely beautiful artwork and production level. I very much like the use of procedural generation, this game definitely has a certain amount of replay value through it.

To be honest, after playing it for 25 minutes I only got to floor 2 and wasn't sure whether the wizards tower actually has an uppermost floor :P

I'll definitely try my hand at it again later though...

I really liked the presentation, though the street-signs for traps stick out like a sore thumb, as if they come from a different universe. I really liked how the character moves diagonally if you press another direction as it's moving. Small things like that can go a long way making these kinds of game more enjoyable. The search mechanic was very annoying though since the maps are so large and dense it's too easy to lose all your time. I had a really good run, had about 20 health potions and 10 keys, but lost because I couldn't find the exit and I had waaaay to many places to search for hidden doors. The only roguelike I've played that did the search mechanic well was POWDER because you could simply eat your enemies for more turns. Very good entry though!