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I really hope you have the will to see this through, there just aren't enough excellent games out there featuring non-human characters, but this is shaping up to be one of them.

I have to give special credit to the sense of flow the animation has, the lovely palette used for the aesthetic which is reminiscent of some of the best platformers I've seen (not too over-saturated), the sprites and tiles themselves, and the general feel of the game. That last one is so incredibly important and you've nailed it.

As someone who's had a little experience with this? The best advice I could offer is to be wary of feature creep. It doesn't matter if you have the best systems and mechanics in the world if your level design and aesthetics don't hold it up. I think it's important to be able to diversify your content with fun mazes, puzzles, traps, and so on; And with enough diversity of tiles that it doesn't get repetitive. I've fallen into the pitfall of concentrating too much on mechanics before, so... I just wanted to share that.

Mind you, I'm not saying you're doing that! It's just... If there's a piece of advice I wish someone had offered me? That'd be it.

It really is an excellent demo though!

What else did I want to say?

Oh! For a project that sort of started off as yours did, and grew in a similar way, it might be worth checking out Frogatto for inspiration. I suspect you've likely played it already, but just in case... It's always fun to see how these things come together.

I think that's about everything. I can definitely see greatness here. I think this is going to be an incredible project, so do keep at it! I see you had a setback with your approach to weapons and I know that can be disheartening but, like I said, you've got something very good going on here. And kobolds to boot!

I do think you've got the chops to pull this off, though. Controls really are so important and I've rarely seen them nailed this early on in a project's development.

Very, very good.

If I may air my thoughts?

First of all? I don't like doing this. As a creative myself, with a partner who also is, I know how crushing even light criticism can be. It's awkward, as I'm really fond of all of your games (and Atomic Robo!) so I don't want any of my thoughts to come over as mean, ever. Then again, this could just be me being an empathetic baby.

The thing is? I love Relic, I want to adopt it, I can't. Why? I suck at balancing and there's one thing about it that really disagrees with me and plucks at my mind. I'm sure it has its place, and people like it, it's just that it isn't especially compatible with me which is why I've stuck with Glaive. It's really the only thing, and it's lead to me trying to house rules a patchwork monstrocity hybrid of Glaive and Relic.

How can I put this?

As a roleplayer, my brain is incompatible with hierarchy and grouping. This is why the rules I use have to accommodate for that. As a roleplayer, if I ever feel forced to do something that I feel my character wouldn't do? That takes me out of the game and immediately puts me off the system. Where Relic fails me here are the hierarchical talents which are grouped.

What made Glaive singularly and uniquely awesome was that it seemed to go for the realisation that I'd always had: talent trees suck. That's just my opinion though, and one many might not agree with. I mean, one of my favourite mods for Torchlight was one that removed the tree, rebalancing it so that each option was worth picking, and with only a scant handful of instances of requirements (you need this to get this).

I have a dragonkin character, for example. He's a lovely old eccentric, kind, and gentle. In a pinch, to save a life, he might use his elemental breath. However, the concept of him having the cold, dead stare of a cold-blooded predator is incompatible with my view of him (and chromatic dragons in general, but that's neither her nor there). I grumbled over that and muckled on, but then I found that more and more I disliked having to take talents that didn't fit with my character in because they're grouped in a template.

This is just my opinion alone, solely, nothing else, but I feel that in this regard Relic has become more of a video game and less of a roleplaying game. In a video game, you play the character that's laid out before you, you're not really playing a character of your own, with your agency having any impact on how things turn out. I mean, sure, you have rare gems like New Vegas (sans the very linear DLCs), but most video games aren't especially taken with player agency.

I love that in Glaive, I can pick the elements that I feel are relevant to my character. I can multiclass then by picking other traits. That's really cool, as I can build up something I want to roleplay and be supported by the system's mechanics. That's actually kinda unique. The reason I play rules-lite is that often I struggle against these video game-y elements in crunchier systems. I want to roleplay my character, not someone else's vision of it.

So in Glaive, I can mix and match a whole boatload of traits to really give my character the kind of bulk I'd want. I've even been trying to hack Glaive a bit to add new traits which I feel fit the classes, and that's actually a lot of fun! In Glaive, you have something that's incredibly diverse and something that can be built upon. I feel that Relic really begun to build upon that... and then lost the diversity in favour of video game-y elements.

Here's another thing: I actually really like that you've got lineages as classes, I get why you did that and it's fun. The whole reason is so you can have race traits. I dig it. However, the other side of this is that there's now the loss of a bunch of the cool lineages (like ursinkin and turtlefolk, two of my partner's favourites).

In my opinion, there's something truly awesome to be found in the weird space between Glaive and Relic—where lineages have traits, and there's none of the hierarchy or grouping (you just pick a trait or two every level).

One thing I have to acknowledge though is that I have a faulty dopamine circuit, which is not like a lot of people. I'm neurodiverse. As such, I've found that progression in games doesn't really do a lot for me. I've always preferred upwards rather than sideways. Seeing numbers get bigger is... Well, it's nothing. At least, not to me. It's a means to an end, but it doesn't excite me. However, Glaive did. Its sideways progression meant that my character became more interesting, not bigger number'd.

So, I guess what I'm saying is that a lot of this might just be people like me, and we might be a minority. You might change the hierarchy and grouping of Relic, and it might upset a lot of people. There are people for whom the sense of progression is more important than playing a uniquely interesting character that isn't bound to the rules, the character that you want to play. I'm writing this and I worry that it sounds like an insult, but it isn't. It's just... What it is? I mean, in an MMO, people love progression. The character is a means to an end. For me, the opposite is true. I love the character, and the progression is just a means to an end.

I'm sorry that this was an essay of waffle, but I'm not good at being succinct or explaining my feelings, and I always worry I'll convey myself wrong and cause hurt where that isn't my intent. I just wanted to share to see if you had any input.

Frankly, if you put up an optional module for Relic that was Glaive-ish with its traits (no grouping or hierarchy, you just pick on level)? I'd buy that in an instant. Like I said, I really like Relic but, for me, being bound that way and having limitations on how I can express my character is a bad time, it doesn't feel great. But that aside, I absolutely love Relic. I mean, if I wasn't really fond of it, I wouldn't be writing an essay long comment about it, so I hope that's obvious?

I just hope this doesn't come across as kind of a gut-punch anyway because, hey, like I said, I dig Relic and I dig Glaive. Relic just has that one part that just... doesn't work for me. I don't know what your thoughts on this will be, but I wanted to share mine.

Thank you for reading!

Okeydoke Boomer. Though I feel like something like this judges you as much as you're judging it. Not all works are completely accessible to everyone, and no one is entitled to all works being completely accessible to them. With some works, you either have to adapt or simply admit they aren't for you. If you can't do that and you blame the creator? That makes you look silly.

You remind me a little bit of Terry Pratchett and I mean that in a good way. If there's a type of *mancy that plays around with expectations, this is something that Pratchett excelled at. His works would often play around with high-concept yet very meaningful jokes which sort of had a life of their own and lived beyond their humour value. I feel like Extreme Meatpunks Forever is a bit like that.

It throws you into a bizarre, somewhat post-apocalyptic(?) Biopunk world of strangeness without any explanation. It treats you as though you're a resident of this world and you already understand most of what's going on. It challenges you to adapt to the craziness around you. The characters talk in something reminiscent of Millennial/Gen Z text-speak and while that might seem strange to someone today, it's not at all a stretch to think that the vocabulary of tomorrow could be formed from that culture. If nothing else, it's meant to appeal to it.

It's not meant to "make sense" in a contemporary sense because it isn't contemporary—it's an extrapolation. Good Sci-Fi does this. It's like windows on spaceships, yeah? If, for whatever reason, a Sci-Fi lacks them then people complain as they expect the setting to be familiar. Even though there are many reasons to skip having windows in spaceships. I certainly could go over all of the reasons but a cursory googlin' into a show like The Expanse would cover most of the bases.

I mean, when people think of Sci-Fi they think of anime robots or jet fighters in space. They don't really think of myrid digital life forms existing within a network of dyson spheres designed to house virtual realities as that's a much more resource efficient way of living than most others and it'd extend the life of the Universe by not having most life living in very resource inefficient ways.

A lot of people don't do well with this sort of thing though, if even one strange concept is implicitly included without a duly exasperating explanation to make it all simple and objective? They bounce off of it.

I find the questions fun and I welcomed the chance to adapt to this gay disaster world.

I think it might come from being neurodiverse, downtrodden, traumatised, dysphoric, abused, and having the introspection to recoil in existential terror at the things I've been through but I'm not shaken by something like Extreme Meatpunks Forever. To the contrary, I'm excited by it.

I'm hoping in one upcoming episode we have an Otherkin-adjacent character who identifies more as their meatmech than they do as themself, and doesn't enjoy getting out of it to interact with people as a human. I'd love that. I mean, that's how I am myself—Otherkin—and it's always wonderful to see any kind of representation for those like myself. A Universe such as this one is as good a place as any.

Just a passing hope, anyway. Thank you for a great time! I had been watching someone play this but I've now bought it myself to have a bash at it and because I want to support you.

I remember this game from forever ago. I recall everything about it as it left its mark, in a good way. Dragons are dear creatures to me, as wonderful as underappreciated they are. What struck me though was that this dragon was allowed to be a kindly healer. I've an inner-fiction where dragons are indeed so but it isn't something I'd seen in media prior to this. A dragon can be a noble warrior, a scholar and magician, or even a war machine (sadly) but never really a healer.

I'll say this was a... memorably cathartic experience.

This is as cute as heck. It reminds me a lot of early home computer games, and as an unrepentant, unashamed dragon grognard I couldn't resist this adventure of a hapless, precious little scaly baby in a onesie.

Sorry you're not furry, friend. Harsh. Got hugs if yuo want them, it's a cold world out there.