So now that my niece and nephew have quieted down after a day of babysitting that has carried on far longer than anyone anticipated, I have the time to sit down and ask for some feedback at definitely not the last minute! While any feedback is appreciated, be warned that I’m pretty exhausted right now so I may be a bit scattered and hard to understand until I get some rest and can go through this all again tomorrow.
There are a few changes in the recent 0.40 release that I’m sure people have already noticed, the first of which being the one dialogue box at the end of every battle. That little feature has certainly come with a few more bugs than it probably should have, but it’s in a relatively stable state, which now brings up a few issues that I’d much appreciate some feedback on. See, originally I had intended to work in something into the options menu so that you could have it display a message after every battle, as it currently does, after no battles, or go through a sort of algorithm where it checks how often you’ve ‘seen’ a quote from x character then randomly checks whether or not to skip that character, effectively making characters who you’ve seen multiple quotes from have a lesser chance of coming up, to help you experience quotes that you haven’t seen before. This ended up not making it into the 0.40 release for a few reasons, largely to help save on time with the intention of, well, getting people’s thoughts about which of these options they prefer now that they’ve had a chance to see the the victory barks feature at it’s theoretically most obnoxious.If the general consensus is that the system is fine, or just needs to be turned off when it gets annoying, it’d probably be best if I took the development time that I’d put into that third option and instead invest it into working on bugs or something else.
There is something else that I’d appreciate some feedback on with the victory barks. All canon party members (aside from Alina) have a level-up quote associated with them that will take priority over the standard barks if at least one person levels up. The original intention is that the one quote you see would come from your active party, though due to a bug, instead the quote is selected from anyone who levels up, which does stretch immersion some. I’ve elected to leave the bug as-is for now, as we’ve gotten some people requesting that the game plays all level up barks one after another when they happen. To me, that seems like it’d get rather tedious after awhile since each character only has one, after 30-40 level ups there’s going to be several that you’re tired of. To this end, any feedback that can be given on how important it is that level-up barks apply only to your active party or that you can only get one at a time would be much appreciated.
Finally, one last thing that I’d appreciate some feedback on! It’s come to my attention that the addition to tanking that I had mentioned awhile back has been causing some problems, in that it’s making player tanks take too many hits, to the point that keeping them alive has gotten very difficult. Some discussion with a few players has helped me figure out that what I plan to at some point in the game development process is make it so that anytime that any character ‘blocks’ an attack they get a damage reduction bonus, both on the player and enemy side, to help radically reduce the amount of damage that tanks accumulate by blocking AoEs for your side as well as helping to encourage more strategical play on the players end of things by having ‘cover’ and other similar skills reduce your damage if you don’t properly respond, but the problem with adding this in now is that it might result in making enemy tanks harder to kill and just drag out the game a lot more as the existing fights haven’t been balanced with this in mind but would be impacted by it, so it might be better to roll out with re-balancing as a whole. My other options to deal with this core issue is either turn off the AoE blocking that’s currently in the game or at least adjust the formulas so that it’ll be noticeably less likely to activate, this might make it harder to keep characters like Yeon alive as more AoEs would hit them, but trading deaths on squishy characters with deaths on your tank typically isn’t the best philosophy.
So yeah… Any thoughts would be appreciated!