Consensus: Good idea. Boring implementation.
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I really like the idea behind the game however in it's current state it is no fun to play at all because the process of animating the character feels to tedious and slow.
Maybe an idea to facilitate and speed up that process would be to preanimate some poses and then reuse them with some kind of drag and drop mechanic. I can see this being fun but it would need some damatic changes in its interaction principles.
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This is a really interesting idea, but the inherent tedium of animating is not mitigated enough at this point. This may be one of those ideas that looks good on paper but doesn't work out when you actually prototype it, or there may be ways to improve the pacing, such as the ability to save poses to swap in more quickly or having characters with fewer joints at the beginning.
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REALLY love the idea, but the implementation is just not there. It's not fun to play. It sounds amazing in my head--and I was blown away as soon as I was reading what it was asking me to do--but I didn't enjoy the doing.
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This implies much bigger changes than the HUD things I was talking about. The suggestions they give I had already considered, but i rejected them because of their implications on gameplay.
I think these are the first objective, over the internet, opinions I've gotten, and for that I give them more weight than the ones I've gotten so far face to face (a lot of people won't say to your face that your game is boring).
Now i need to decide if I keep my original direction, thus aiming super-niche, and sink with the ship.
Or... make a drastic change, trying to appeal to a (slightly) broader audience. I really wish I could do this without compromising the original ideas of the game, but right now that doesn't seem possible.
Decisions, decisions, ahead of me... and of course lots of prototyping.
"Art is not a democracy." - GRR Martin.
[size=2]But I'm not an artist, Martin, I'm an artisan.
Having a group of people review and provide feedback is amazing, even if the comments are not overly positive.
Hopefully, you can find a course that allows your vision of the game and lets people have fun.