I finished play-recording this game a little while ago (you can find the YT playlist
here) and I thought it was pretty fun. Lots of different things to get and do, enemies change enough during a single game and between games to keep you on your toes, and the boss fight is definitely something to prepare for. Combined with the varying length and monster difficulty, it's lot a good amount of replayability and variety for newcomers and veterans alike. (Might I even suggest a 5 and 10-floor choice? In those cases the game would have to be rescaled to accomodate, but I think it'd attract a good number of people looking for a quick game.)
There are, however, a number of overlooked details that could be improved, in some cases quite easily. Here are but a few:
- A very obvious feature that stuck out like a sore thumb was the usage of wands. Their ability to deplete charges rather than your mind/soul reserves has great potential, don't get me wrong: the execution (that is, automatically whenever you use a spell of that element) makes it nearly impossible to use them appropriately.
- A simple fix to this is to allow the player to "use" wands in order to turn them on or off: in this way they can be saved for the right occasion (i.e., tons of enemies all at once or the rare-but-powerful types).
- You may also want to consider changing their name, as a "wand" usually implies that the item itself contains spells rather than reserves. Not really sure of a good name, but something along the lines of "battery" or "focus" is more intuitive.
- Finally, allowing players to move the charge from one wand to another would be convenient: I'd probably still only allow this to be done for wands of the same element (so that it can be automatic), but it would save on inventory space, of which there is surprisingly little once you get going.
- The spells are a lot of fun, especially because there's so much to do with them. At the same time, however, I find there to be a few general problems with them:
- Some spells are very nearly redundant. Take, for instance, Ice Shield and Fortification: both provide defense to the player and, if you calculate the armor gained per mind power used, they are worth exactly the same (save time cost). Usually in these cases, you'll try to differentiate them more, such as giving Ice Shield more defense per mind power (so that there's a trade-off between instant but costly defense and delayed but efficient defense), or making Ice Shield weak to fire enemies and Fortification (which is Earth element) weak to ice enemies. Ideally they will be very different spells, so you still have a use for both of them as you play the game. The same is true of Soul Search (which detects stairs) and Revelation (which detects stairs in addition to a bunch of other information), and likely a couple other pairs that don't immediately come to mind.
- The Slay and Piercing spells are special offenders here, because I doubt they can be changed all that much in relation to each other. In these cases, you should probably just offer the spells as, literally, "Slay" and "Piercing", then give an additional choice of what kind of spell you want it to be. This gives you more room for other spells while maintaining the same original possibilities.
- A lot of "lesser" offensive spells are often made obsolete by "superior" ones. Most of this is redundancy (i.e., you're always ultimately "attacking an enemy" or "attacking an area"), and so they can be fixed in the same ways as mentioned above. You could, however, give the player a few offensive spell slots, so to speak, which they can then customize by investing additional spell levels into them. For instance, at the very first level you could let "Beam" be specialized into Light, Gray, or Dark, and "Mind Sling" into Fire, Ice, or Earth. By leveling one of them again, it would add additional effects (fire = extra damage over time, ice = slow, earth = knockback, light = blind, gray = confusion, dark = fear), etc. If you inevitably have the reduce the number of choosable spells on the initial menu, I think that's perfectly fine.
- The game becomes fairly trivial after collecting certain spells. Mana Feast makes it so that you almost never require food (you can, in fact, gain a very tiny amount of mind power by continually resting and Mana Feasting), Revelation makes exploration nearly meaningless, Rage/Fortification makes physical combat extremely easy...there's other cases but you get the idea. For such spells, it's a good idea to make them come with weaknesses: as a simple example, stat-boosters could drain your other stats, or cause extra hunger, or disable certain actions (raging could make it impossible to cast spells and read, fortification could slow you down or make you unable to move for a time). Balance is a beautiful thing once it's accomplished.
- I think the enemies are done right, although ranged attackers should be more common: that way you have a lot more fighting you at the same time later on. One thing I would like to see, however, are some champison/boss types that drop particularly good gear. It should be an enemy that keeps to its area, so it's entirely up to you in fighting one, but having that "extra challenge" can reduce monotony.
- Potions are usually not very good for the player: the only ones worth keeping around are healing, and a whole lot of the others are plain negative. This led me to prioritize every other item type over potions. Perhaps this is intended (that is, they're really meant to quaff in hopes that you survive a particularly dangerous combat) but I find it fairly boring to constantly come across potions only to find that I rarer ever kept one, especially because there's an early-game heal spell that greatly reduces the need for even the healing potions. Consider removing some of the negative potions and/or adding potions that do what some of the scrolls do (accompanied by removing those scrolls, of course). Throwing potions can be pretty fun, too.
- This is just a bug: since you can't buy anything with a full inventory, you also can't buy food, even though it takes up no inventory space. The same is probably true of arrows, although I never had a need to buy them.
So yeah, there's a lot of room for improvements in the nooks and crannies. The game's plenty fun already, but I think you can make it a TON more enjoyable by tweaking things here and there. I don't believe there needs to be any fundamental mechanic redesigns, save some spell stuff, so it shouldn't be hard to at least try some balancing and pop out a new version for testing. (Also I apologize is this is too wall-of-texty: I'm hoping the list format makes it easier to keep track of ideas.)
EDIT: man, lists are so hard to get right