I’ll just state that I like what you’ve done here with skills and modifiers. Simple to understand systems that don’t have a lot of fluff or complex for complexities sake. It’s genius. I love it.
With that out of the way, playing this game is kind of difficult to get into because I’m constantly reminded that this is a work in progress. The core functions of this game feel very much broken. As a game that was slated for this year at some point and for basic things to feel so… janky… just doesn’t sit well.
When trading with an NPC, I should be able to just right-click to sell an item. More importantly, when trading with an NPC my character shouldn’t start walking sometimes when I’m trying to drag an item over. And even more important than that, I shouldn’t somehow start dragging the item next to it and accidentally sell it. I’ve never had this happen in any other ARPG, even with ones in BETA. It’s such a basic thing that you never expect something like that to be so broken.
Picking up items work… That’s about it. It works. It doesn’t work well. It feels very ridged. I have to carefully click each one. And this game has an unusually high amount of drops (I’ll leave that complaint for another post). Picking up items should be smooth. It should be fun. It shouldn’t feel like work. It feels like a chore to pick up any item in this game.
Which leads to my last point: Teleports. They feel like very powerful vacuums because you only need to be walking next to one to be pulled in. On the other hand, sometimes clicking them does nothing at all. I’m guessing teleports would work like walking through a door in any video game. Again, it’s a basic thing I think we all take for granted because this game made me realize that game development is not as easy as one would think.
TL;DR
I have to be super careful and gentle with this game like a delicate flower.
Listen, I get it. It’s fun adding new stuff to the game. New features, items, modes. It’s exciting to tell fans “Hey! We added this new thing! It’s awesome!” But every now and then you have to reel it back and start polishing up some of the basic stuff. ARPG’s are really repetitive games that people sink hundreds of hours into. Little things like this slowly become a infuriating problem down the line. I’ve said it so many times “Spend enough time with a game and you’ll slowly find all the cracks.”
So please, take some time to at least polish these basic things. They’re part of the foundation of your game.