Just finished this up in about 2 hours and yeah it was alright I'd say. For a first quest, you definitely have cool ideas and I can certainly see some promise already. I also see a ton of IoR inspiration from this, especially with all the SFX and some design choices. Overall, the dungeon itself was the main highlight for me, that was very fun to play through and explore and got me stumped a few times. There are a few of the typical block puzzles, but they are still pretty fun to solve and none drove to absolute insanity like I've seen other quests do lol. The difficulty in itself is pretty fine I'd say, nothing was too easy or too hard and I didn't have nearly as much of a hard time as I had thought (though that boss did spike up on difficulty like mad, so that was very steep for me, but that's about it there). There also were no bugs or any weird oversights, so that was pretty good on that part.

Pretty much what James predicted people would say, the graphics and design are not all that great for me which is unfortunate. The dungeon looked a bit better at least, but for your next quest this is something you can certainly focus on since looks alone can go pretty long ways, while also balancing out everything else. I'd certainly experiment around a bit more with screen design in general. I felt submitting stuff to Screenshot of the Week or Map of the Month occasionally (or even just posting on the Discord server) can provide some pretty good feedback to help out, but you are off to a good start I'd say. Personally, I didn't really enjoy the starting segments before the dungeon. It generally just felt like a straight line with nothing really interesting going on besides a way to collect a whole bunch of items. Branching out with optional content can go quite a long way. I understand this is meant to be quite a small quest just to get into things, so I suppose this is something to consider for future quests.

Overall though, the dungeon itself was good fun and I can definitely see potential for a full-fledged quest. I'd give this one about a 2.5/5, which rounds up to a 3. Best of luck on your future projects!

I really appreciate how you want to try ambitious things already despite this being your first quest. I love the dungeon layout.
This was quite the difficult miniquest. But it's still simple because of the length. I feel like the length works very well with the difficulty balance.
Overworld could use some more depth, but other than that, great attempt at a first.
I'm ready to help whenever you feel like you want to start making another quest!

Just finished your mini-quest in 2 hours 16 minutes with 20 deaths on my first run. I must say, this reminds me a lot of IoR Hero mode. I wonder if you were inspired by it. You certainly have captured the difficulty of IoR hero mode. It feels so natural and wonderful to play against - I loved it. It was especially difficult to figure out those skeleton enemies when I first encountered them in the fight for the hammer and I got a bit lucky that I stunned all three of them with the boomerang. Thing I hated most was waiting for my health to refill before a tough fight. I think that if you're going to have a health ring, if you don't get hit for, say, 30 seconds then Link should restore to full health instead of the player having to sit there and wait. The block puzzle in the dungeon was very nice. And you also know that the spikes in the dungeon are walkable right? If a player uses the flame from their candle to hurt themselves before stepping on them then they will not take any damage. Ask Evan about bomb-jumping in his IoR


I'm 99% sure that you're going to cop it sweet for this kind of difficulty. And sooner or later you're going to have to decide what you're going to do about it (if anything). Evan simply halved all damage done and if you read the comments and the forum threads you'll see that it didn't go down well. Most people are also going to have complaints about the overworld graphics because they are pretty bland. Once again, how much time you're going to devote to fixing this is going to be an issue.

If you need any help making this into a full quest I'm prepared to help you - I can script, test and advise. Just ask me via PM.

Nice. Sorry if I haven't been playtesting your newer versions. But I will be playing this one and giving you feedback.