AKONITI'S PROFILE

author=TheRpgmakerAddict
Well done! I'd be caurious to hear other opinions about the game!

Thanks, me too! I always learn much about my games from players, fresh eyes are priceless.

In case you don't get around to revisiting, here's Xinn, the new guy in Sandstone (I named him Xinn instead of Xinos in case you name your wanderer Xinos again someday, there can be only one lol) :

Thank you so much for taking the time to play through (twice), and for leaving such a detailed review.

YOU ROCK! ha ha :)

I'm elated to hear that you loved the setting, idea, music, gameplay, and choices.

I will carefully consider each of your criticisms, and they will surely help make future versions better.

To address a few specific points:

- Mapping:

Absolutely. They are far from amazing. I'll admit that Sandstone was denied based on map quality alone when I first submitted it here last year, so a lot of additional work has gone into them since, and I will continue to improve this in new versions.

Could you clarify which trees you were able to walk through? Just in case it's the one in Sowthin (Act 3 town) just past the Skystone, this is actually a climbable tree that leads to an encounter.

- Getting stuck if you run out of resources:

This is an intentional possibility, though I apologize that it may have proven anti-fun for you. My primary objective is to provide players with a fun adventure. You described it perfectly with, "this is not a classical rpg, but an action adventure game and in a certain sense also a puzzle". Resource management is a huge part of the puzzle element; without it, there would be little challenge. I'm hopeful that being able to save (almost) anywhere will help balance the difficulty as you pointed out. I did add quite a few resources to reward exploration and reduce difficulty in v2.

And yeah, if you missed the island, it becomes very difficult to smash your way to the end! I'll note that the slime near Nortpost does mention there being three islands, but his slime-rhyme could be easily missed or not understood.

EDIT: Thanks to your description, I see that Puzzle is a better third choice than RPG in my genre tags. There are RPG elements, but they're a small part of a giant puzzle.

- Losing HP when you try to smash a stone without enough HP:

You're correct on this one, it does happen. It's intentional- my reasoning is that your hands get battered whether they can break it or not, but avoiding this does take careful observation of how many Handpoints each type of stone takes, and an eye on your remaining points (another part of the puzzle, if you will). I certainly don't want to be mean to players, but this makes logical sense and fits the brutal land aesthetic so will likely remain.

- More characters, stories, and events:

For sure! Sandstone will always be a short game, I'm not shooting for a 20-30 hour play, but I'd like to eventually get it to a solid 2-3 hours of playtime which calls for a richer world.

Another one of my key objectives is ensuring that there are no gamebreaking bugs, so expansion is admittedly slow and methodical to ensure I can test the hell out of each addition before it's released.

- Herbalists crafting all of your shrubs into Balms:

Great point! I actually changed this from a one-at-a-time approach to a bulk processing approach in v2 to make it more convenient for players. Your feedback helped me see the flaw in this (being forced to go all-in on the expensive vendor), so I'll update this in the future so that you have more control over how many are processed, leaving the option to process all if you wish to fly through it.

Big thanks again for your time and notes!