Stray Travels

I liked this as a chill background game that I could just leave running and tweak periodically to change skills grinding. I had fun fulfilling all the requirements to upgrade each class. Now I've gotten at least one class to level 1000 and made it home, but nothing else has happened. Is that the end of content?

Unfortunately I feel like you've missed a lot of the magic of Tour of Heroes. In that game, the classes felt different... mind you, they weren't actually that different... but they *felt* different. Each had a unique unlock method. A lot of them were reliant on just going to a place and doing a thing, but there were also unique ones like completing a very slow action. They all also had a unique perk that affected their gameplay outside of just aptitude rates.

Add to that each class having a unique sprite, and they at least "felt" different even if they were mostly identical.

Here... well, you've got an array of classes but they're all unlocked by doing a zone. They don't have unique perks, nor pieces of art to help me feel a connection to them. The multipliers are also similar enough that no class really feels different -- if I weren't actively looking for it I probably wouldn't even notice whether I were a rogue or archer of the same level.

I also think the decision to replace slowdown with success percent is a poor one. There's no action log, and the bar moves so quickly I can barely read what I'm actually doing and what the chances are. The actions don't especially make sense, either. Why is picking a fruit "fishing"? Why is throwing darts "cooking"? The constant quickly shifting blue behind the words makes it difficult to read, as well. In ToH, I was intensely aware of each action and how bad I was with it by how slow that dang bar would move. Here I feel like every action is identical, and can barely parse any actually useful or entertaining information as to what I'm "doing".

Edit: Also having your skills rearrange themselves based on what is highest is needlessly confusing. Just keep each in one spot.

Hi there, found the game via Reddit.  It certainly looks like there's a fun gameplay loop here, but it would be great to have a lot more information to base my gameplay decisions on - most of the fun in idle games is in optimizing, and the limited feedback that I get from the game is making that difficult.

For instance, I'm not certain why I would choose to adventure in later zones instead of staying in the first one.  To pull an example from my current character, if I go to the Enchanted Woods and explore Lost Garden, at a high enough level that my Success is 100% for both actions, then every time Adventuring procs I get somewhere between 10-15 XP.  If I instead go back to Meadowshire and explore the Library, then Adventuring gives me at least 22 XP.  I understand that new zones will have a penalty until you level up sufficiently to get Success to 100%, but if the malus persists beyond that, what incentive is there to ever explore instead of farm the first zone?  Usually in games of this type, the base rate for later zones is so much higher that your incentive is to grind just enough to transfer to the zone and then push forward as hard as you can.

The UI also makes a number of implications that don't seem to be true.  For instance, in that same Library, Adventuring is listed first -- that means it's the zone's primary skill, right?  But it only procs super rarely, like, about once per minute in the time I was watching it for this comment.  Woodcutting and scavenging are lapping it by miles.  Is there some way to indicate the frequency of actions within a zone (and also the base XP that's modified by all your other proficiencies)?  It's nearly impossible to make informed decisions without that.

There's a number of UI elements which just aren't clear in their effect.  I managed to figure out that your Ancestry bonus reflects the highest and lowest multipliers from your previous class, but there's no information about it otherwise. Is it applied as a bonus to your current XP?  Do you also get bonuses for the previous class' other skills, or only those two?  Is the "proficiency bonus from class" a multiplier to general XP, or to general Success rate, or to something more specific, or what?  Is there any benefit to leveling up specific skills other than increasing your character level?  What's the difference between a proficiency bonus and a skill bonus?  Do they apply to different things?

A few other suggestions.  Maybe it would help to rename "Success" to "Efficiency", since it looks like you always succeed when the skill procs, you just get more or less XP based on that percentage.  It might also help to rename the 10 skills into something more abstract like attributes (strength, dexterity, etc).  And labeling the hourglass to indicate that it's how you reincarnate would be grand.

You've mentioned you're working on a new version -- excited to see how this develops.  Thanks for making it and good luck!