Re: Arena of Audacia (AoA) - Top-down ARPG [updated 30-11-2015]
Gave this a try, so here's some thoughts.
First up, this is a very addictive little game. Nice work so far. Decent difficulty curve, reasonable variety of enemies and tactics required and some okay little h-animations. Sound design feels solid too, I kind of like a lack of BGM in games like this because it leaves me free to play things like
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in the background (or anything else that feels right, but I must say this went really well with godzilla music). The little rounds of applause in particular felt nicely understated.
I'd almost be interested in hearing some ambient crowd noise during the rounds too. Cheers when something dies and boos when something lands a good hit perhaps? A sudden intake of breath from the crowd as something plummets to it's doom? I don't know, feels like you could do something with the idea of spectators. Keep it subtle like the end of round noise and you're on to something, I think.
I do think that by about level 41, things are getting a little...swingy. The axe warriors in particular seem to have all too easy a time at knocking you clear out of the arena. I don't know, I kinda get why but it makes the gameplay significantly more frustrating. Perhaps if they knocked you over instead? Worth a thought.
Speaking of being knocked over, I have some thoughts about stamina. Namely, outside of rare occasions involving holding a charge for too long, it rarely seems to come into play. Enemies knock you down sometimes, but only after the kind of barrage that usually leaves you mostly dead anyway. Generally speaking, it only came up organically once or twice, usually in boss battles. (For the record, the bosses are pretty good and surprisingly well balanced between difficulty and fairness).
Thing is, you can run around the arena to your hearts content and swing your sword like it's a rolled up newspaper but you'll never see a hit on your stamina. I wonder if it might be worth seeing how it changed things if you lost a tiny bit of stamina every time you swing your blade, or take a hit on your shield. Not a huge amount and the stamina regen seems pretty strong anyway, but just enough to keep the bar from being so stable and forgettable most of the time? You could even try adding a small amount of constant drain when running. Not enough to overwhelm the regen, but enough to slow it down. That should combine so that the more frantically you are rushing around fighting things, the more energy you are expending and the higher the risk of a lucky blow taking you off your feet.
I don't know if that might shift the current difficulty balance a little, but it should allow the h-content to come into play more easily and honestly and add a little more tension as things get steadily more out of control.
But yeah, otherwise I'm impressed and will be keeping an eye on this. Lost a good few hours to this game tonight, very playable.
