REVIEW
Before beginning the review itself, I'd like to say that I am uncertain that this game meets the limitation requirement of the Game Jam. It is meant to take place within a town/city/village. However, your Tower appears to have no organic connection with the town at all beyond vague references to it being "in our town". It is more like the dungeon shown bottom left corner of the diagram in
this post. We don’t see the tower from within the town, just a break in the town wall to indicate that’s where we have to go. Then when we do see the tower, the surrounding terrain looks very different from that of the town, different sky, and lighting. Even the entrance road is a different width from that of the road at the top of the town map so cannot be a continuation of that road. It feels like the town is tacked on to justify the tower. (See my comments about the town mapping below).
Proofreading
This appears to have been overlooked. The very first sentence the player sees has a typo in it: “diffiucltly” instead of "difficulty". The first dialogue box has another with “a head of us” instead of “ahead of us”. The next dialogue box has a missing word and “hand full” instead of “handful” And so on throughout the game for what dialogue there is. Proofreading is essential. It should never be neglected. As you still have around 2 weeks before the deadline, I would like to recommend that you go through your text and correct it. That will immediately give a better impression to the player.
Story
Coherence is important, not just in the sense of avoiding obvious plot holes, or contradictions, but also in the way that the characters embody the story you have to tell. These characters are meant to be the best of their type – would they really go into a known mega-hazard with virtually no equipment, and what they have is pretty pathetic? Also with only a few items, and those low grade as well? The king is sending them off to rescue his brother with no money for supplies? Oh, and they're all Level One. It just doesn’t hang together as a narrative. All the details of gear, items etc should reflect what the story is trying to tell me about these people. With their inventory and gear they come across as newbies trying to act big. Obviously you don't want to rebalance everything, but there are cosmetic ways round this. You could easily start them off with the same stats but set at e.g. Level 6 so that the player has the impression that they've been round the block at least a couple of times. Change the name of the gear so that it sounds a bit more advanced without changing the stats there either.
A story also needs characters. It needs something to flesh out the snippet given at the beginning. These characters say nothing to each other. They make no comment on what is happening to them. They do not develop, they do not show any facets of their personality. They do not interact with each other. They just trundle along. In essence, there is no story, just a single plot device.
This might be something you have a look at in the remaining time. There are a number of fairly obvious places where you could easily insert some dialogue, either between the characters or as a discussion of what they are seeing/finding, e.g. the fact that some enemies sneak up on them totally unseen (random encounters) while others just stand around (the pigs in the Greed floor). They could easily be asking themselves why anyone would construct a place like this. From the little info we have at the beginning it seems that no one knows anything about the Tower. How likely is that?
If the Tower were in the town, surely people would have found out something about it, even if it were just rumours spread by the workers who actually built the thing?
Mapping
Maps are one of the biggest tools you have to tell your story. Everything happens on them. They convey the tone, the atmosphere, as well as the environment where the characters act. They should be supporting the narrative in both subtle and obvious ways. These maps do not. There is no atmosphere, e.g. differences in screen tinting to suggest that the Tower is not the same as the outside world. They are featureless.
Many maps (e.g. the tavern and some of the rooms on each level) are too big, empty and therefore uninteresting. The town map has well over 50% space with nothing on it. No town is built like that. It needs to be much more compact. Town mapping styles vary, but many would say that it needs to have at least some feel that people live there. Here we have a town with not a single house for anyone to live in, other than the shop or whatever. This is passed off with a wave of the hand and a comment at the southern exit to suggest that of course there are houses etc. but someplace else. No NPCs around, absolutely nothing to suggest that anyone is there. Not a dog, cat or bird to give it a bit of life. Just endless grey patches which are not interesting to walk around.
You are suggesting that this is the main/only shopping and social area. One exit is to the Castle. One, theoretically, is to the Tower and the third is to the residential area. There is, again theoretically, no exit to the outside world from here. Yet particularly where there is an Inn, this would be the map that does have a road leading out of the town. No town is going to be built so that visitors to it have to traipse through the houses to reach lodging for the night. I strongly recommend that you study town maps in other peoples’ games to see what works and what doesn’t.
The mapping of the tower does not convey the idea of a tower. There are no indications of going up or down because there are no stairs. I might have expected to perhaps go round, but I go forward again and again in a way which doesn’t give the sense of it being within a building with restrictions. The floors are just arbitrary (that word is going to come up again) shapes connected by long narrow corridors with nothing on either side, just a room at the beginning and end of each branch. There are no windows until floor 3, nothing. This could be anywhere or any type of building, as long as that building was shaped something like an aircraft hanger - vast spaces going forward.
It's difficult to be sure, but I got the impression that floors 2 & 3 (I got no further) do not map over floor one in terms of size and shape. Upper floors can be smaller, and often are, but they aren't usually a different shape with some bits wider and some bits narrower.
You appear to have neglected to set some of your passabilities. I can walk all over the plants, the blue stone jar, the cupboard with the open door etc. On floor 3 you have taken one half of a double bookcase and tried to use it as a single bookcase. That doesn't work, as you have a wooden frame on the left side and open shelves on the right. You need to go back and check all your passabilities and choice of tile.
Gameplay
I needed to earn some money to buy items, so at the entrance to the first level I have a few fights by touching the gold bars. In none of them do I need to do anything except mash attack. That’s it. Nothing more. But it gets weird as soon as I fight anything else. The gold bar fight gives 80 EXP and 175 gold. The random encounter, with enemies of pretty much the same difficulty, gives 20 EXP and 30 gold. This makes no sense. It just feels arbitrary. This sense of arbitrariness continues when I reach the next set of gold bars. Out of the blue they give me stat changes. No indication that this is going to happen, no way I can get back the debuffs. Are these changes permanent or only until the next battle? I have no way of knowing, as the numbers on the status pages don’t change. No way I can make interesting, strategic decisions about game play. No, it’s going to be at the mercy of the RNG. And it clearly doesn’t like me as in several of the random encounters I had 2 misses out of 3 attacks in every round. You might like to look at how you’re balancing out either your HIT stat or your enemy EVA stat.
At another set of gold bars it asks me if I want to take some. I say yes (and get the stat changes) but I do not get any extra gold. This contradicts what the question seemed to imply i.e. that I was balancing out the risk of stat changes with the benefit of more gold.
I only started using skills against random encounters on floor 3 and that was mainly to finish off quickly the one enemy (usually the one on the right of the 3) who did all-party attacks.
One character has elemental attacks. What does one element do that differs from any other element other than having a different animation? Elements are frequently given side effects e.g. Fire can inflict Burn (DoT), Ice can either slow the target down by making them cold or, because freezing causes things to become brittle, can give a DEF debuff. Water can increase the damage if it is followed up with Lightning, and so on. The only difference I can see, other than the animations, is that some cost more than others. Why does Flame cost 5MP and Thunder cost 8MP? Or Ice cost 15MP and Wind 20MP? There must be something to justify the difference, or else this is just another arbitrary decision. One skill she has does blind the enemy (not an elemental skill, so it doesn't contradict what I've just said), but Blind is only useful in a longish battle in order to justify giving up an action which causes damage. However, none of my battles before floor 3 lasted more than 2 rounds, and the second (if it happened) was just to mop up the remain enemy of the 3. It was, therefore, never necessary for me to use it, and would, in fact, have been disadvantageous to do so, as more enemies would have survived to give damage to me.
Of the other skills that characters have, a disproportionate number are buffing/debuffing. The same comment applies to them as for Blind. In Boss battles for the first round I used Attack down on the enemy, defense up on the party and tried using Mute - which, btw, never took, with Alena dealing damage. Greed went down in 2 rounds, the other 2 took 3. At no time was using their TP Overdrive skill an option as I never got anywhere near enough TP charged to be able to use it.
There is the suggestion that puzzles/traps are intended. On one floor I threw a switch. I have no idea what that did. There was no indication. On another floor I get the instruction to "Disarm the trap in order to proceed." What trap? I went round that floor carefully, alert to something nasty happening, but nothing ever did. I got to the end of the level and saw a blindingly obvious floor switch which I activated. Was that it? If you are going to do switches for things, they need to be set up in some way so that their connection with the puzzle/trap/whatever can be understood. Otherwise it is yet another arbitrary thing I have to do which makes no obvious sense.
You posted this game very early. I would like to suggest that if you have spare time before a deadline you use it to polish everything, check everything, playtest multiple times, maybe find someone else to play it and give you some feedback. No one is going to play the game the way you do, and players will find things you never even thought of. I don't see anything in the Rules for this Jam which would prevent you having a look at some of the things I've mentioned, so that a more polished version can be made available.
I'm sorry if this Review comes across as mainly negative. This is almost inevitably the consequence when a game is rushed through in just a few days. If that had been all that was available, then due allowance could be made. But it is not the case here. It has to be evaluated against the standard one would expect of a game that has one month in which to be made.
.
