This game is awesome! I can 'grind' this game for hours. Is there an updated link for me to join the discord? I keep trying to join and it's telling me I'm unable to join.
After sending a few runs of this, I wanted to leave my thoughts.
First off, the good. RNG never seems like an issue, which is a really hard one to get right for roguelike devs. Here, the randomness seems really well thought out and balanced. I never once thought that RNG was what screwed me out of a run, only my own approach to battles. This is really hard to get right, and I'm pleasantly surprised this game gets it right! Another good point is the general design of the game, and how everything is changed to fit the idea of a singleplayer toontown. Each gag effect, the way battles work, it all feels genuinely like toontown.
There is a number of bad points though. The first is that, like actual toontown, the platforming feels bad. Secondly is run time: even if you can save and continue, runs being an hour+ or even two hours on average isn't something that I would want out of a roguelike; the best games in the genre are succinct and have an average run time of half an hour. But most importantly is the total, absolute lack of information conveyance. It's not 2011. You're not making TBoI. Tell me what the items do. Tell me what the status effects do. I shouldn't have to look at an out of date google sheet or join a public discord server to get half-wrong information. This one is the worst aspect of the game.
Hey there! I appreciate your thoughts here, but wanted to mention a few points I think are important to mention here. Firstly, the point about game length is probably fair. We've had a lot of internal discussion surrounding the average length of a run, and have made a few changes here and there to make the experience a little quicker. On the whole, though, we're pretty happy where run lengths are at. An average run being somewhere a little over an hour is just about the standard we were looking to reach just with how slow Toontown battles are. In practice, I feel it's allowed the slow, but constant progression of your Toon to feel more natural. To get to an average run time of about half an hour, we'd need to give the player items at potentially double, if not triple the current frequency, which already feels pretty fast in my eyes. It's also worthwhile to mention that making a faithful adaptation of the Toontown Online battle system meant we had to preserve the fact that the battles are incredibly slow. They always take up the vast majority of your run's playtime, and as such, we give you the option to speed them up as a bit of a workaround.
As for the lack of information, I don't entirely disagree here. We've been talking a lot about having a legitimate tutorial in the game, especially for people who may see this game on itch, and not have much experience with Toontown in the past. Right now, the game does a very poor job of giving those players an understanding of the mechanics at play, and that is something we should work to circumvent. For items, though, I don't agree with your stance that the effects should be immediately visible. We have an item, Monocle, that will display item effects before they are picked up. Part of the game design is meant to be some trial and error, where you don't know exactly which items are maybe not the best idea to pick up. Letting the player slowly build their own knowledge on the items is almost like its own invisible progression system. Though, I should mention, for status effects specifically, those aren't hidden and you can hover your mouse over them to read exactly what they do.
Finally, I want to highlight is that as a benefit to being an open source project, we understand we may not always make the best calls on the game design end of things. But we greatly encourage modifying the game in any way to suit your own tastes. And while I understand that may not be a satisfying answer, I do promise to keep an eye on the issues you've brought up here, because we may always end up coming around to your perspective on things later.
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This game is awesome! I can 'grind' this game for hours. Is there an updated link for me to join the discord? I keep trying to join and it's telling me I'm unable to join.
The link works for me.
After sending a few runs of this, I wanted to leave my thoughts.
First off, the good. RNG never seems like an issue, which is a really hard one to get right for roguelike devs. Here, the randomness seems really well thought out and balanced. I never once thought that RNG was what screwed me out of a run, only my own approach to battles. This is really hard to get right, and I'm pleasantly surprised this game gets it right! Another good point is the general design of the game, and how everything is changed to fit the idea of a singleplayer toontown. Each gag effect, the way battles work, it all feels genuinely like toontown.
There is a number of bad points though. The first is that, like actual toontown, the platforming feels bad. Secondly is run time: even if you can save and continue, runs being an hour+ or even two hours on average isn't something that I would want out of a roguelike; the best games in the genre are succinct and have an average run time of half an hour. But most importantly is the total, absolute lack of information conveyance. It's not 2011. You're not making TBoI. Tell me what the items do. Tell me what the status effects do. I shouldn't have to look at an out of date google sheet or join a public discord server to get half-wrong information. This one is the worst aspect of the game.
Hey there! I appreciate your thoughts here, but wanted to mention a few points I think are important to mention here. Firstly, the point about game length is probably fair. We've had a lot of internal discussion surrounding the average length of a run, and have made a few changes here and there to make the experience a little quicker. On the whole, though, we're pretty happy where run lengths are at. An average run being somewhere a little over an hour is just about the standard we were looking to reach just with how slow Toontown battles are. In practice, I feel it's allowed the slow, but constant progression of your Toon to feel more natural. To get to an average run time of about half an hour, we'd need to give the player items at potentially double, if not triple the current frequency, which already feels pretty fast in my eyes. It's also worthwhile to mention that making a faithful adaptation of the Toontown Online battle system meant we had to preserve the fact that the battles are incredibly slow. They always take up the vast majority of your run's playtime, and as such, we give you the option to speed them up as a bit of a workaround.
As for the lack of information, I don't entirely disagree here. We've been talking a lot about having a legitimate tutorial in the game, especially for people who may see this game on itch, and not have much experience with Toontown in the past. Right now, the game does a very poor job of giving those players an understanding of the mechanics at play, and that is something we should work to circumvent. For items, though, I don't agree with your stance that the effects should be immediately visible. We have an item, Monocle, that will display item effects before they are picked up. Part of the game design is meant to be some trial and error, where you don't know exactly which items are maybe not the best idea to pick up. Letting the player slowly build their own knowledge on the items is almost like its own invisible progression system. Though, I should mention, for status effects specifically, those aren't hidden and you can hover your mouse over them to read exactly what they do.
Finally, I want to highlight is that as a benefit to being an open source project, we understand we may not always make the best calls on the game design end of things. But we greatly encourage modifying the game in any way to suit your own tastes. And while I understand that may not be a satisfying answer, I do promise to keep an eye on the issues you've brought up here, because we may always end up coming around to your perspective on things later.
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Reminder that I'm running an item guide for this game! Check it!
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-NzxYwANEXSkbW2J9cFDmOTxnCKEdU8DMkiT82H-0Zo/...
The golden Jellybean pocket prank sells your chest item for jellybeans