I’m reaching out to seek your feedback on my first game project. This has been a significant learning journey for me, as I had to acquire skills in scripting, modeling, and animation from scratch. I dedicated hours to watching tutorial videos and devouring any available resources on game development. While I’ve conducted some playtests with substantial improvements, I’m here today to gather additional insights because player feedback is invaluable.
Before testing the game, please consider the following:
My game is designed as a retro-style old-school RPG with faction-based PvP and capture points. Gold is abundant, and when you meet your demise, you’ll lose your items, except for your starting kit. Every five levels, players receive an upgraded starting kit that’s immune to loss.
Areas I’m aware need improvement:
I acknowledge the need for a more comprehensive tutorial or help menu.
I’m actively working on implementing permanent items, once I resolve some data storage challenges.
The caves and dungeons are currently at their most basic form and are relatively short.
Your feedback on these aspects and your overall gameplay experience would be greatly appreciated.
First time I’ve seen a game that uses cloth physics in roblox. I played for around 30 minutes. It was a decent experience. But i did get a few lag spikes. Maybe work on optimization.
Great game overall!
I start by congratulating you on your commitment and perseverance (I saw that the game has been up for 2 years).
The thing that impressed me most is the dungeon design and the medieval fantasy setting.
Having said that, although the game works in its basic features, it has several points in my opinion that need to be improved.
You mentioned a menu or a tutorial, but I would avoid that as it is quite understandable what you can do in an RPG, unless there are really peculiar features you would like to introduce.
In testing, I marked a number of points, I will list them in my order of priority:
Unknown goals.
Any RPG, whether old style or more modern, has a base of quests or objectives (I am not talking about narrative ones).
In this case I didn’t see any (if there were any, they weren’t at all obvious), which left me free to explore, but without any particular motivation. Remember that not all players only like to explore, so the game should be more inclusive.
Fighting.
It is essential in an RPG that the fights are entertaining, in this case I found them frustrating.
I’ll explain why: if I attack a mob I expect to receive feedback, these are signals that confirm my expectations and allow me to understand that the actions I take have a result in the game.
In this case you can add particles of blood when the sword penetrates the opponent, a small recoil if the opponent hits the player, and so on.
GUI bars.
A small marginal note on the aesthetic side: add some padding to the lettering so that it does not stick to the edge of the panel and make the style uniform (either all caps or just the first letter).
On a functional level, however, I noticed that I don’t notice them, because of where they are positioned my eye doesn’t mind them so much, at least for life, stamina and experience, I would put them central at the bottom, also to refer to the old RPGs.
NPCs.
Every NPC (or almost every) has a yellow exclamation mark on it, this is a feedback to the user of the presence of an activity to be performed, it is a cultural mapping due to having played other RPGs.
The expectation is to talk to the NPC and see the yellow indicator disappear, instead it remains. And if the purpose is to highlight the presence of an NPC they are completely useless, use instead a shader or a white circle at the base of the NPC.
I consider exclamation marks extremely useful as feedback, but you have to use them correctly.
Look for some references if you don’t already have them.
Yellow = ‘I have something to tell you’ Red = ‘I have something urgent to tell you’, Blue = ‘you have a mission to deliver’.
And of course they should disappear once you talk to the NPC.
The content of the npc text box is verbose, anyone will skipper it without hesitation. Try to be more concise and informative.
The animation of running.
It is clearly missing, but there is very little perceptible difference between walking and running.
You can double the speed of the walk and maybe add a faint white trail with fade out to give the feeling.
Then put in an animation as soon as you can.
There are some soldiers without a question mark.
I can kill them but they don’t give me experience. Why do they exist? They confuse me.
In the GUI where it is written to press F to speak, there is an inscription. It should be consistent with the target. If it is an NPC “Talk” is fine, if it is a rune “Read” is better.
The background of the portals in the lobby could be more consistent, it clashes a bit with the monochrome with that medieval setting.
The water in the stream outside the castle is fake, it seems like a deep ditch but then you walk in it. If you want to introduce the swimming mechanics in the future that’s fine, but if you have to leave it like that make sure it doesn’t seem so deep. Also add some easily climbable hills to get out of it.
My feet penetrate the carpet at the entrance, if you don’t want to put a collider on it, make it penetrate a little into the ground, so that you can always see your feet.
I hope it can help you.
I want to point out that I wouldn’t have been so specific if I wasn’t interested in what you were doing. They are critical but constructive.
Thank you for that in depth feedback. I agreed with a lot of your suggestions. I liked them all and plan on implementing as much as possible. A lot of the time I leave stuff out because I cant figure out how to code it. And sometimes I have to do a lot of research and testing to get it working correctly.
But thanks again for the tests, I will re post again when I add some changes.
Thanks Mongoose, that tutorial was very very helpful. I have been making optimization changes to the game and not much else. I have to fix all my rookie mistakes and it will take some time. I did make a new UI menu to clean it up a bit.