Rampant Gaming!

[Agent]

Greetings,
for the past half-year I've been working on an RPG of mine, currently called Eternal Bickering. It's a single party hack'n'slash-more-or-less-dungeon-crawler, taking place in a world supposedly swallowed by the Mother Snake - therefore everything is underground. While I am still miles away from where I want the full game to be at release, I've just released what I call Prototype 1 which is the earliest part of the game as it is right now.
I was hoping someone here might want to try it out and give me some feedback.

You can download it here:
https://sites.google.com/site/brainswitchmachina/Eternal-Bickering/downloads

If you want to see some screenshots, they can be found here:
https://sites.google.com/site/brainswitchmachina/Eternal-Bickering/screenshots

Kind regards
_________________
Brainswitch Machina

[McTeddy]

It was fairly entertaining, though not something I'd rush out to play.

While the core of the game was fairly enjoyable... there were certain irritations that hurt the experience.


Audio Feedback:
This is fairly obvious and probably not even worth mentioning it... but would be very beneficial even at this stage of the game.
The issue is that the silence is boring. The lack of sword slashing and cries of pain (Or even beeping and blipping) made it difficult to feel that anything was actually happening. I needed to rely on the tiny "1" popping up next to me to realize that I was dying .
The other major advantage to implementing the sound at this point, is that you have an extremely limited tileset. This leads to many maps feeling the same. A couple musical tracks could easily help me feel like I've progressed from "Happy village" to the "Cave of Hellish Horrors".

More Weapons
The game seemed to be extremely stingy with the weapons. I continued to use the dagger that I received in the first room until minutes before beat Thanatos.
The biggest problem with this is that without a weapon... a skill level is useless. Before I picked up my first (And only) Sword.. I had already maxed out both my Dagger Levels and my Dual Wielding. There was no way I'd give up 25 bonus accuracy to use a sword at this point.
My advice would probably be to add other "Training" weapons to the chest with the dagger. The weapons would be equally weak, but it would turn "Swords" into a valid option for spending skill points.

Combat Controls
Because you need to click on the tile where an enemy is located, rather than the enemy itself... It becomes EXTREMELY easy to mis-click. Once I've clicked on the square behind him, my character will start to run around the target and getting attacked multiple times... which in the case of this game... is deadly.
Even worse is when I don't see an enemy and I click FAAAR away... My character will keep chugging along getting the crap kicked out of him every step of the way.
The easiest and most effective way I can think of fixing this, is just to stop the player from running if he is attacked. This will allow me to make tactical decisions based on the specific combat situation.

Resting
I'd probably recommend implementing a "Rest" feature. This would simply skip turns until the player is either fully healed, or attacked by any enemy.
Healing is already as easy as running in a circle, but the ability to rest would cut out a lot of wasted time. Less wasted time == More time enjoying the game.

Keep up the Good Work
I figured that since I've given you a wall of "THIS ANNOYED ME!" I should probably point out that I really did enjoy the game.
While the first few battles were extremely difficult (Probably due to putting all my skill points in "Lockpicking" )... the game did reach a fairly standard balance. I never felt that the enemies were suddenly too powerful, or that my skill points were wasted.

This game actually reminds me alot of the game "Dark Disciples" an old rogue-ish RPG that I really used to play all the time. I used to love that game and Eternal Bickering makes me feel that same satisfied pride.

[Agent]