Hello there. 
I am trying your game (bought it), and I'm having a nice little time with it. Here is a couple of the thing I find really nice and the thing I find... meh.
Warning, I'm an "old" snort who grew with the SNES for years, so I tend to compare a lot actual RPGs and old ones. I'm giving my point of view in a harsh way, but note that at any moment it means I hate your game as it is now. It is the opposite. Else I even wouldn't bother making such a long post.
(Yeah, I didn't played long, in fact I'm still in the haunted forest.)
The good things :
- The arts, colorfull, really well made. The displacement effect is the forest blew my mind.
- The animations, really dynamic and well made.
- The variety of monsters, items and weapons.
- For later, the variety of stuff to do? Hoping you will add more than fishing, puzzles and bashing monster.
- The freedom of choice the player can make for its fighting style. Wizard, Knight, a mix of both, archer, etc.
- The arcade mode. The trend is to the RNG and generated dungeons and you are damn right to exploit it!
- The details. The sheed number of details. It is related to art work but even the house of the witch is populated with so much different stuff, it feels really great.
The meh things :
- The character animation. Yup, I said I liked the overall animations are good, but I find the character attack animations a bit too slow/smooth and the character lack of dynamics. Maybe raise a bit the overall framerate of the character during attacks and makes him do more ample movements when attacking? It feels Zelda-ish, for sure, but it makes the character lacks personality.
- The fights tend to be a spam of sword attacks. Wait for the enemy to do its big attack then spam it of sword hit. Most of the old action RPGs tend to make each strike count. SoM and SoE had a % counter to fill at 100% before striking a good hit, Zelda ALTTP had the enemies (or the character) knocked back quite far at each hit, avoiding spamming the attacks like crazy.
- The bow firing speed... MACHINEGUNS§ I mean, even with 20 arrows, if I encounter a monster a bit tough, I fire it 20 arrows in 3 seconds. Really too fast, is that really a bow we have? :/
- The management of the game screen, its resolution, its ratio. Hell I can't have the game in fullscreen because it don't adapt to my display ratio. You show so much of the land the game feels quite slow. I like my pixels huge and the character big and showing up on the screen. Maybe you could give more freedom on the resolution, and instead of having the Zoom x2 x3 making the window bigger, having it showing a smaller portion of the world, so we have a bigger character on screen? It is all about player's taste.
- The progression feels too fast at first. Well the story isn't complete but after just equiping a new sword and gaining 2 levels, it doubles my damages on the first area's enemis. It took me like 20 minutes. Let me enjoy a bit more the local land before feel too strong for it.
- The grind. All the modern games tend to make the player feeling more powerfull by giving monster to kill in industrial quantity. It is even more true when the quests ask for dozens of monster loots. The more monster we have to kill, the less they feels threatening. Older RPGs were limited by the hardware, only displaying 3 or 4 monster at a time, but having few monsters to fight at a time gives them more presence and make the game a bit more easier to play. Once have less of a hard time to deal with 2 or 3 tough monster than 12 of them running everywhere and attacking from all sides.
The things that could be better :
- The UI. Yeah, a huge and complete UI is needed to manage the sheer number of skills, items and weapons we collect, but sometimes a hotbar or a quick radial menu to select just what we need would be nice. The good point of much of the first action RPGs was its simplicity. All the stuff you would have in Zelda ALTTP was visible in the inventory menu. No need to scroll or navigate. In SoM, you had only 4 menus to visit to have all the stuff you need : Weapons, Items, Magic and System. Maybe give a quick access to the character weapons and skills so we can change them on the fly instead of navigating the overloaded menu we have now? And give the possibility to show the inventory as a compact list on two columns with the item icon, its name and its number, instead of having huge icons on 4 columns.
- Controller support. Well I think you have them planned somewhere in your TO-DO list, but right know the control scheme don't feel you prepared it for controller and would be a bit complicated for player. Mapping 10 shortcuts for the different skills, plus the sword and shield actions. Most of the controller have only 8 buttons for rapid actions, 10 if we include the joystick buttons. Of course not everyone will have 10 skills to use at a time, but it would appeal more peoples not to have to bind so much shortcut at once.
- The walking speed. I had a hard time on the first puzzles to have the character right in front of the block to push due to its speed. A bit too fast to walk. But in other hand, the land is so vast, the character feels too slow. Maybe reduce the walking speed and add a sprint in straight line by double-tapping the direction buttons?
- The music. The game musics are nice, but I find them quite generic. Having a clear theme to ear on much of the area, or even a good main theme, would be far better. In short, a good video game music can be hummed anytime. We all remember Fear of the Heaven, main theme of Secret of Mana, or the Dark World theme of Zelda ALTTP. Make a theme we can remember too!
___________
Few, that was quite a post, but I wanted to say all this. Now I hope you will find success and make your dreams come true.
Spidyy
I am trying your game (bought it), and I'm having a nice little time with it. Here is a couple of the thing I find really nice and the thing I find... meh.
Warning, I'm an "old" snort who grew with the SNES for years, so I tend to compare a lot actual RPGs and old ones. I'm giving my point of view in a harsh way, but note that at any moment it means I hate your game as it is now. It is the opposite.
Else I even wouldn't bother making such a long post.(Yeah, I didn't played long, in fact I'm still in the haunted forest.)
The good things :
- The arts, colorfull, really well made. The displacement effect is the forest blew my mind.
- The animations, really dynamic and well made.
- The variety of monsters, items and weapons.
- For later, the variety of stuff to do? Hoping you will add more than fishing, puzzles and bashing monster.
- The freedom of choice the player can make for its fighting style. Wizard, Knight, a mix of both, archer, etc.
- The arcade mode. The trend is to the RNG and generated dungeons and you are damn right to exploit it!
- The details. The sheed number of details. It is related to art work but even the house of the witch is populated with so much different stuff, it feels really great.
The meh things :
- The character animation. Yup, I said I liked the overall animations are good, but I find the character attack animations a bit too slow/smooth and the character lack of dynamics. Maybe raise a bit the overall framerate of the character during attacks and makes him do more ample movements when attacking? It feels Zelda-ish, for sure, but it makes the character lacks personality.
- The fights tend to be a spam of sword attacks. Wait for the enemy to do its big attack then spam it of sword hit. Most of the old action RPGs tend to make each strike count. SoM and SoE had a % counter to fill at 100% before striking a good hit, Zelda ALTTP had the enemies (or the character) knocked back quite far at each hit, avoiding spamming the attacks like crazy.
- The bow firing speed... MACHINEGUNS§ I mean, even with 20 arrows, if I encounter a monster a bit tough, I fire it 20 arrows in 3 seconds. Really too fast, is that really a bow we have? :/
- The management of the game screen, its resolution, its ratio. Hell I can't have the game in fullscreen because it don't adapt to my display ratio. You show so much of the land the game feels quite slow. I like my pixels huge and the character big and showing up on the screen. Maybe you could give more freedom on the resolution, and instead of having the Zoom x2 x3 making the window bigger, having it showing a smaller portion of the world, so we have a bigger character on screen? It is all about player's taste.
- The progression feels too fast at first. Well the story isn't complete but after just equiping a new sword and gaining 2 levels, it doubles my damages on the first area's enemis. It took me like 20 minutes. Let me enjoy a bit more the local land before feel too strong for it.
- The grind. All the modern games tend to make the player feeling more powerfull by giving monster to kill in industrial quantity. It is even more true when the quests ask for dozens of monster loots. The more monster we have to kill, the less they feels threatening. Older RPGs were limited by the hardware, only displaying 3 or 4 monster at a time, but having few monsters to fight at a time gives them more presence and make the game a bit more easier to play. Once have less of a hard time to deal with 2 or 3 tough monster than 12 of them running everywhere and attacking from all sides.
The things that could be better :
- The UI. Yeah, a huge and complete UI is needed to manage the sheer number of skills, items and weapons we collect, but sometimes a hotbar or a quick radial menu to select just what we need would be nice. The good point of much of the first action RPGs was its simplicity. All the stuff you would have in Zelda ALTTP was visible in the inventory menu. No need to scroll or navigate. In SoM, you had only 4 menus to visit to have all the stuff you need : Weapons, Items, Magic and System. Maybe give a quick access to the character weapons and skills so we can change them on the fly instead of navigating the overloaded menu we have now? And give the possibility to show the inventory as a compact list on two columns with the item icon, its name and its number, instead of having huge icons on 4 columns.
- Controller support. Well I think you have them planned somewhere in your TO-DO list, but right know the control scheme don't feel you prepared it for controller and would be a bit complicated for player. Mapping 10 shortcuts for the different skills, plus the sword and shield actions. Most of the controller have only 8 buttons for rapid actions, 10 if we include the joystick buttons. Of course not everyone will have 10 skills to use at a time, but it would appeal more peoples not to have to bind so much shortcut at once.
- The walking speed. I had a hard time on the first puzzles to have the character right in front of the block to push due to its speed. A bit too fast to walk. But in other hand, the land is so vast, the character feels too slow. Maybe reduce the walking speed and add a sprint in straight line by double-tapping the direction buttons?
- The music. The game musics are nice, but I find them quite generic. Having a clear theme to ear on much of the area, or even a good main theme, would be far better. In short, a good video game music can be hummed anytime. We all remember Fear of the Heaven, main theme of Secret of Mana, or the Dark World theme of Zelda ALTTP.
Make a theme we can remember too!___________
Few, that was quite a post, but I wanted to say all this. Now I hope you will find success and make your dreams come true.
Spidyy
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