Hi, game looks super cool! Inventory seems to be sorted and fleshed out enough to function as one would want, movement is fluid, map fits well with the game’s thematics, everything I listed is awesome!
That said, I do have a few criticisms and ideas that you could take to the drawing board and take into consideration when further developing this.
- Firstly, where are the enemies? It could be my terrible eye-sight, but I don’t recall seeing any enemies in the video that was shown.
- Are there any visual indicators regarding the items you have equiped? That could be really useful, especially if the game ever includes any PvP action or encounters. It doesn’t have to be a different sprite for how damaged or how used your item is, you could take the Minecraft route and put a bar under.
- Main menu (as shown when registering or finding a room for multiplayer play) is bland. Simpler games can make use of bland menus like this, so long as they don’t have any visible or significant style to them. Whereas this game, on the other hand, looks to be going for a more dark and gloomier style of visuals, and a main menu that shows itself off as being a gray box with white text really doesn’t work. If you really want to improve this, I strongly advise taking a look at POSTAL 2’s menus, which uses the same font, colored text and no boxes, which not only eliminates the blandness, but also all the empty space that could be present in a few of the menus.
- The Bank UI looks kind of goofy, in my opinion. Since the Bank is its own thing, you could remove the loud and slighty obnoxious ‘DARK FRONTIER 2D’ in bold, red text and the dark forest-ish background and instead replace it with art of a bank or maybe even something of your own. Likewise, the Merchant tab suffers from the empty space issue mentioned previously and it could use art or even an animated merchant character to cover up all the empty space and instead give something cool or pretty to look at.
- AI. This is your game and I’m not one to dictate what other people do, but consider removing any instance of AI (Dialogue, art, etc.) that the game may use and is very much exposed. AI is typically frowned upon when it’s heavily used in the making of art, dialogue, map design, etc., and your game is really cool. Would be a real shame if all of the game’s positives were to be overshadowed by the use of AI.
I really appreciate you taking time to read all of this, and I truly hope all of this was constructive. Nonetheless, awesome game, and best of luck to you!