Saligia - Prototyp

Hi,

I streamed your game (and a part of queenfaith's video 😂) last night. Overall...*drum roll*...You're the first non-RPG Maker game that has been produced for free and by a small dev team that I really enjoyed! Though I am aware programming in Unity is much more difficult than RPG Maker, Unity fortunately offers far more diverse game experiences. However, often the results I have found on my streams is that many Unity developers probably would have been better off with a simplified, more focused game engine as the games I played were buggy, filled with jank, and sometimes unplayable. So this is a momentous moment: the day I finally found a small Unity project that isn't filled with bugs and jank.

Onto the review proper:

The art direction, customization, and small (but focused) level design really brings a lot of charm to the game that I enjoyed the most. The dynamic between the tome and the scythe is also quite fun. I found it strange, but somewhat quirky that the player character doesn't seem to have a voice at all, and all of the talking is done by your weapons.

Where I would say the game lacks is in the sound design, feedback, and accessibility. Sound design sounds fairly generic and basic with mediocre mixing and sounds that seem to cut off a bit too early.

When you health is low, there is little indication given to the player that their health is low other than the health bar, but in the heat of combat sometimes it is difficult to focus on HUD elements. Giving either sound cues, visual cues, or both would go a long way in making sure players don't accidentally die because they weren't watching their health bar enough. Always have redundancies in your design.

Likewise, the dodge mechanic is satisfying to pull off, but the only time I really felt confident and cheeky about my dodges was when the attacks were predictable and foreseeable with slow moving projectiles. Melee enemies don't telegraph their attacks enough to make dodging a well thought out strategy for the player, instead mostly boiling down to dodging "when it feels right". One thing I didn't bring up in the stream but I should have is that it does seem like the dodge cancels animation, which is what makes it feel so satisfying to execute and really makes it feel like the player has a lot of control. This is likely why I started thinking of Bayonetta/DmC while I was playing, and I think it would make the game way more thrilling to pivot the combat is a more fast-paced direction by taking some notes from those games.

This is long enough, so let's just end on accessibility: It sucks there is no option to (at the very least) invert the X-axis camera controls on the camera. On controller I always use inverted X, so during my play through of your game, it was a real struggle for me to control the camera without inverted X.

If you'd like to watch my experience with your game, I've linked the archive below. You can click the timestamps to jump to when I start playing your game.

nice prototype rpg