Hi, I talked to TheAncientGoat about your little game project and I had some comments about the website which he already fixed, or so I heard. He also told me to post any comments I might have. After that I though, what the heck, I have a spare hour, lets give that game a whirl.
Let me first say that the first impression was not good. I read in the sidebar "Witness blood and gore, crude humor, nudity and sexual content." (Ps: mentioning nudity makes sexual content a bit redundant). Then I see in the scrolling pictures a picture of a underage anime girl. (And actually, all the pictures where of little anime girls). That made the game feel creepy. (And people already think that gamers and games are way to misogynistic).
I understand if that is the way you want to take your project. But atm the game contains little, gore, humor, nudity etc. So it is kinda off-putting for anybody looking at your page.
Also mixing girls that look very underage and sexual content is usually a very bad idea. Will cause a lot of people to dismiss your game right away.
So apart from the main point that I'm not a big fan of the aesthetic direction your game takes, I still have some feedback from when I played the game.
Minor GUI stuff:
- No %nr of steps on the server loading screen. Just list step 2 of 13 map generator: saving the map step 12 of 12. Makes it easier to see how long I still must wait.
- The menu bars and pop up menus look pretty good
.
Character creation:
- Stat assignment. It was totally not clear for me how the bars worked at first. The tooltips mentioned something that made me assume that left click added points and right removed it. Instead I had to click on a location on the bar. Might want to consider adding a plus and minus button tot he sliders.
- Please make the model stand still on default and walk on command. This is a bit to much movement. (Esp if you want to adjust the face, you cannot see the changes).
- Loved that drag and drop on the model worked. Might not be obvious to all players.
- The bust slider and the Aer breast animations are just creepy (Tip, breasts do not move like there is a small monster inside trying to go the other way. Dead or alive beach volleyball also did this rather creepy breast animation). And it did not do anything on male models. Might want to change that into something like upper body wideness (I cannot think of the correct name to give this). So that you can adjust the upper body chest size on male models.
- I understand if you want to keep the breast stuff in. As personal sexual expression or whatnot. You might also want to consider that not everybody likes big breasts but some do like wide hips, or big behinds. No slider for that. Nor waists, head size and all other stuff you could change.
- 3 face sliders, function unknown. Might want to name them.
- Skin and Eyes only had default options. Might want to hide those as long as you do not have options for them.
Ingame.
- Could not find the how to remap controls in the option screen. This is important to a lot of players, esp if you want them to spend a lot of time in your games. (Mapping jump to C is pretty irritating for me personally).
- Each action requires a mouse press, even if you want to remain mining. Couldn't you just repeat the action if the mouse button is hold down?
- Items mentioning the stuff that was used in crafting them is always good. I assume there is some way to get the ingredients used in the crafting back. (else the information is kinda useless).
- Spells page might need some sort of tutorial. (Perhaps the first time ever you open up the page offer a tutorial or a link to the help page). And am I right that all spells require some sort of mushroom based stuff as reagents? That makes spellcasting very time consuming (as you need to gather the resources, which only showed up very sporadic).
- House walls are minable but small fences are not? That confused me abit
.
- I found something that I assume was water, it was a multicoloured barrier which I fell through. Might be a problem of my setup, might be some sort of texture problem.
- Apparently there is no gravity for blocks. That was funny. Mining out something to see if it would drop down and it did not.
- Might want to add some sort of information button. That changes the mouse cursor in something that gives information. Say for example if a block is a piece of wood or a granite block. Just going by visuals isn't always easy. And creates a bigger hurdle for entry.
- When I used the inventory to put stuff in the workbench it was a bit responsive. I clicked, the mouse cursor changed, some time passed, and the inventory item was moved. That was a bit visually unpleasant.
- Body locations do not have descriptions of what kinds of items go there. (I wanted my shield next to the torch damnit!).
- You need to hit the branches of the trees and not the trunk which I found odd.
- Please make some sort of always run option, or at least make the run button a "enable running" option. Even running is a bit to slow imho. Esp when jumping, god jumping uphill is a chore (And the characters can be a bit frustrating to move at times, dunno why, bit to slow to move and unresponsive , but that might have been my setup). But the jump animation takes way to much time, you do not jump you glide.
- Personal gripe, but I tend to dislike overly restrictive inventory systems. You start with already having 1/3 of your inventory weight filled with gear. Does not leave much place to go actually. And because the mining stuff also adds a lot of weight your inventory fills up pretty quickly. And jumping takes that much time that I never want to go back to the home base.
- Another chore, Combat. You need to keep the cursor on the enemy as you do not have a separate attack button, and your cursors location is half of the times obscured by your own character model. (I know scrolling changes the camera angle and helps, but it was still frustrating at times).
- Monsters do not attack you if you stand on them (I dug a pit with a monster in it, a rock something). It looks like they cannot attack if they are in the same square.
- I assumed that my body would be persistent on death. But apparently it is not?
- I had a chest drop some sort of book thingy. I assume it was some sort of backstory device. But it dropped the same book twice. Which I thought was a bit of a bummer. I would have rather seen a different book.
Well that concludes my comments. Hope they are useful for you.
