Blade of the Abyss Prototype

Fun game, I would give the items a clearer way to identify rarity, like a full colored border and a grayed out items for the broken ones.

Some utility for selling items and breaking them like
Ctrl + S - Sell in the city
Ctrl + D - destroy hovered item
some hotkey to use the potion and teleport back to the city would be good too.
Ctrl + Arrows - Would be interesting to navigate the map without using the mouse.
I believe in general the game would be more entertaining if we had a way to play it using the keyboard more often and leaving the mouse for picking items.

I would even go a next level: Instead of all the junk items, when you clear the room, you have a couple items to pick from and you can hotkey them to pick or pick and equip/replace equipment. But I know this deviates from the game style!

Fun game.

I really enjoyed this game!

Here are a few ideas for improvements:

1. Faster item selling: Dragging and dropping each item to the shop feels tedious. It would be great to have a quicker way to sell items—perhaps allowing Ctrl + right-click to select multiple items, or simply right-clicking an item in your inventory to automatically sell it when in town. (You might also consider adding an “Undo” button in case someone accidentally sells something they didn’t mean to.)

2. Compare new equipment: It would be helpful if, when hovering over an item in your inventory, the stats of your currently equipped item are also displayed. This would make it easier for players to quickly compare items.

dragging to trash doesn't sell...? it just destroys?

that house button on the right never incremented from 0 to 1.

i played and managed loot and cleared rooms until i died.

final verdict: what an absolute stupid piece of shit game.

Hey, great prototype. The core loop is fun and solid, the progression is good and getting a stronger item is exciting.

I have some suggestions:

• Maybe start with 1 town portal or have the player start from town, so they can understand how selling items works and what the possibilities are. It took me a few minutes to get my first portal, until then i didn't understand how i was supposed to sell my loot.

• Show items stats and selling price on hover. When you inventory is full, it would be useful to know if some item are stronger or more valuable than the ones you're already carrying.

• Consider adding more consumable items to add more variety and even more decisions. Example: a potion, rune or other type of consumable that return all damage taken in the last 2 seconds (that way players would have to decide the best time to use it by watching for when a large number of enemies are about to attack).

Great idea and fun game, keep up the good work.

I'll register just for this.

1. It's fun. Fundamentals are solid.

2. Do not explain anything! It's not punitive, discovery is natural and part of the fun.

3. Training turns the dungeon shop into a noob trap.

4. No need for spells and abilities (hello Loop Hero), I would advise focusing on exploration instead: more room / monster variety. Focus less on how to kill monsters and more on wanting to know what's in the next room - while caring for survival.

5. Restarting from scratch is eh, so if you could add a boost in luck / xp up to the highest level reached in previous runs, that would be appreciated.

And as a preference, make town portals as scarce as possible. Right now it's just a pitstop; I enjoyed when it first seemed like an oasis.

There's what I assume is a sell price near items, but I don't see how you can sell them. Shouldn't the trash icon turn into a sell icon in shops?

Great prototype!

It was fun, and I felt like I was making some important decisions. The stats and equipment system is satisfying, the UI is clean and well designed. 
You've managed to capture the difficulty curve (or stairs) of vampire survivors where you bounce between feeling powerful and feeling like you're on the cusp of death. It feels like a really key element of the game, so I hope it stays in future versions!

The gameplay loop definitely works, but I think there's a few elements that could be improved on:

Town Scrolls
I was about 15 minutes into the game before my first town scroll dropped,  which answered the question "how do I sell my gear?". At that stage I was starting to get a bit frustrated at having to clear space in my inventory with no incentive to keep objectively worse gear.
I think starting the player off with 1 scroll and having them start dropping again where they do now would give the player a better understanding of the overall context.
Also, being able to buy town scrolls for what quickly becomes a trivial amount of gold generates some problems that I'll talk about later.


Combat Feedback
Currently the combat feels hard to visualize as enemies don't display damage numbers. Since the main form of interaction stems from how you build your character, not being able to clearly see the results of your build makes it hard to tell if your build is working as intended. Another commenter said that having a player sprite would improve the experience, and I agree, but considering the extra work it would take converting the equipment sprites I think the damage numbers would be sufficient.


Room Decisions
Deciding what room to go to currently boils down to a fairly simple matrix. Are you full on health? Always take torch rooms, otherwise take the easiest fight. Are you below max health? Take a potion room, otherwise as above. Are you low on health? Keep taking non-fight rooms until you see a potion room. Once you have infinite access to town scrolls, this decision is just replaced with "Go to town and heal".

The pattern could definitely be more interesting, and part of the problem stems from the fact that there is no benefit (or at least none that I discovered) to taking harder fights. Since the format is always 1 combatant vs. x combatants, greater numbers of combatants become exponentially harder, so the player needs some incentive to take those combats if they are ever expected to willingly take them. Adding more chests to harder rooms, giving guaranteed rare items, or restricting town scroll drops to skull rooms all stand out as potential fixes.


Late-game Combat
At the later stages of the game, I found that rather than pay attention to what stats my new items would give, I would just take them all to the shop and sell them for gold. Then, I'd invest that gold into permanent training points that would never be lost by swapping out gear. I think this is an issue you should consider before moving on to new levels.
The strategy is possible because of a couple of factors, so you could solve it with a change to either one:
- Town scrolls are abundant as they can be purchased in town. This means you can get an inventory full of gear, go to town to sell it, buy another scroll and spend the rest on levels.
- Level training has no cap, and stays at a fixed price. A system where there is a hard or soft cap would fix this issue (i.e. scale the price with how many levels you have purchased, or make it so that you can only purchase a certain number of levels).


All in all, I think you have a solid base for a game here.  I hope my feedback was helpful, and I wish you good luck on finishing the game.

The biggest issue with the current loop is that you end up being completely controlled by potion RNG. Since you can't pick up and keep potions in your inventory.

A lot of the time you get 3-4 potions in a single room. Then not a single potion for 4+ combat rooms. This just forces you to pick any given non-combat room over and over until you roll either potions from urns, or a healing room.

Currently there is no sense of urgency, since nothing punishes you for "wasting time". Which means you end up spending a lot of time just "rerolling rooms" and wasting your time to get potion spawns. Which isn't exactly fun and engaging gameplay.

The fact that potion healing is % health also just makes stamina not only overpowered, but basically 100% mandatory to stack. To avoid having to just spend almost all your time just rerolling for potions instead of fighting.

Personally I'd also feel a lot more engaged in the combat, if we actually had a player sprite. Ideally one that updates with visuals for our gear. Currently it just feels a bit too detached.

Hello, enjoying the game. I found a minor spelling error in one of the shops; Magical Stronger Helmer. Also; pushing the mute button only turns off the music. A volume slider would be great(if possible). Going to follow the progress of this game, thank you for your time and effort in creating it.

This is fun! I liked the gameplay loop. Some clearer information to start out would be helpful - I didn't know how to sell anything until I found a town portal scroll, so I was just trashing gear. Maybe start the player in town so they can see the options before entering the dungeon? It would also be nice to be able to just drag the cursor over the gold to pick it up, or click and drag if you still want some friction. 

Some proofreading would help! There are some typos here and there in the items and stats ("Strenght", "Helmer", etc)

Loved the game, It's fun and addictive
I think you should add more stats and maybe 1 or 2 bosses (idk if theres any, haven't seen one so I'm assuming)
Good stuff and keep up the good work!