SYNBI'S PROFILE

I could also gladly help playtesting this.

That was a swell short demo, so here's some feedback.

- First thing is everything feels very very laggy. Cut back on those more busy scripts if you can.
- I liked the thief battle, even if I died there first time too. You have enough MP to cover heals and also kill him with Lunge so it's just the question of whether the player has realized you have those 2 skills, something which the game probably should have reminded you. So in the end maybe the only thing ridiculous about him is his absurd running speed...
- There's a different text box look within the screenshots that I like more than what's in the demo. The bright yellowish "flying" outlines are too prominent and distract from everything else. And that text noise is annoying/too bright and loud.
- NPC interactions have some weird stuff going on which gets me thinking all kinds of things. Talking to everyone was fun and made me more invested in the game world, even if this demo hasn't had many chances to detail the backstory yet.
- That zooming effect in battle becomes dizzy very quickly.

- Mapping is very pleasing throughout with a good use of different resources!

- Yep, pacing feels uneven and some of the events seem to take place too quickly after one another. But I liked that grandpa's scene, it was well executed and worked fine even if we didn't have any backstory on the poor guy at this point.

Overall I found the demo a good experience! You have a heavy reliance on interface scripts and at this point it's understandable you're still finding out which works and which doesn't. You could have done "more with less" by scrapping some of the bloat but this'll probably happen sooner or later along the course of the Gam Mak process.

Good news about the somewhat cluttered HUD going away, I think. I've played Infinity 3 for a good amount of time and I never liked it (the HUD). Will you also be thinking of applying a custom font this time? I dare say the bland fixed-width default has already served its purpose for the series at this point.

Sound is so important but often taken for granted when it's there. You start to notice things like opening/closing doors making no sounds all the way to more subtle things like footsteps being silent, when playing games that are not paying so much attention to sound design. It's not so easy to find sounds that fit, though, or to find something frustratingly specific for your game when it isn't easily found on the net. It's even more difficult to settle for lower quality sound effects in a horror game where you really want to hit that ambience just right.

So keep focusing on sound and even if no one praises you for it in the end, you know they'd enjoy the game far, far far less if you didn't put as much effort into sound/music as you should have :)

Actually getting the game to work was a pleasant suprise as I'd been looking forward to seeing how MOM has been shaping up for a while now.

From a glance it's a very pretty game, monster and creature sprites are very well drawn - character animations too, suberb work so far, - I couldn't find a "attack" command to fight passive creatures, not implemented yet? Movement feels a bit jerky or laggy atm. I'd rename Medicine Man/Woman to Shaman perhaps and those text strings for looking & picking up items could use better word order/syntax. Walking further into the forest also gave me an ingame blue screen, you probably haven't mapped too many areas yet? The impression I get is an awesome game in the making, the game starts strong for a roguelike with the intro and everything - menus and font could use fleshing up of course.

I was actually on a short creative spree myself, I put together a few music tracks for Bifrost (that rainbow bridge) and Asgard + a few other places, if you want I can send them to you later. So why make music for the last areas of the game you ask? Hopefully to motivate you someday finishing the game up to that point :)