Hello everyone,
I'm the game developer of Salubrious Scales. We are currently working on an expansion to the game that we intend to have done in a few months. I have also been diligently squashing bugs that have slipped past my notice. This is the 7/10/2020 version. There is already a updated version available on steam. I knew my game would get pirated but I didn't think it would be so fast. If there is anything I can do to gain your support please let me know and I will do my best to do that.
Mate, i don't know if this is your first attempt at making games or what, but i truly cannot comprehend the differences between one section of this game and another. The disparity is absolutely mind-boggling. Was this a team effort and everyone had a job assigned to them with no one actually directing the development? Honestly, at this level of quality I wouldn't have even started to think about spending money on this.
Now, with the rant out of the way, my criticisms.
First, let's address the elephant in the room:
THE ART: Outside of the (beautifully crafted, might i add) pixel art map selection screen and the overall higher quality paintings you collect in the game, I wouldn't call the in-game assets good by any means. Even from the menu screen it was apparent to me that i wouldn't spend money on this. I don't know if it was necessary for the art to be this simple looking in order to make the actual game development a bit easier, but it already looks like not much effort was put into the art and animation in the first place. Either have a single dedicated artist who makes all the art for the game, so it could at least look consistent (and with any luck, better), or hire another artist to make your assets.
THE GAMEPLAY: Dude, there's barely any gameplay. This might as well have been a point and click adventure game where you find stuff in a cluttered background and it would've been more engaging than this. I appreciate the valiant attempt at making a sidescroller, beat-em-up, exploration game, because god knows there aren't enough of those with a furry theme, but everything that's there feels like an afterthought that was put into the game for the sake of arbitrarily passing it off as a "game"! The actual platforming feels clunky, floaty and unsatisfying. The combat is all but redundant; I played through the whole game not even touching the attack buttons, and on the topic of attacks, why is there a seduction attack, without any effects other than it deals more damage than the normal attack? What even is its point if you can't fuck the enemies you seduce? The enemies themselves (all
3 of them in the entire game!) are mostly inconsequential, they do so little damage with so few attacks, and item pickups are so abundant everywhere that you can just jump and run through them without much of a penalty. As a result, they render the combat completely useless. The actual item searching aspect itself is unfun to do, and unrewarding when you actually do them. I didn't even know what the pink diamonds were for until I visited this page and realized "Oh yeah, there were painting I had to collect or something". Up until that point i thought it was just another arbitrary item to collect and progress through the game, not once does the game tell you that those are the paintings we could collect for a little bonus art, and the appearance certainly does not help with identifying what they are. The objective items itself look too similar to each other to differentiate, but at least they appear in order so you know when you're missing one, which leads to the next problem. Sometimes in a level you miss a key and you go back to collect it, but as it turns out, you can't, because the ledge you just jumped down has no way to go back up. which makes you have to go all the way to the exit portal and then through the level AGAIN just to get one item that has no hint to where it might be and most of the time hidden off-screen. The level itself has soooo many nooks and crannies and ledges and stairs filled with enemies that serve absolutely no purpose than to mislead the player into checking every corner of the level for a tiny little key. And
oh my god, help me the "boss fights". They are such mind-numbingly boring and absolutely pathetic excuses of a "rhythm game" that i actually fell asleep during the majority of them! The sections take too long, the measly 3 frames of animation loop for the entire duration of the section with no variation to speak of other than the few frames of start animation and the pathetic payoff at the end when you fill the meter up to max is unfathomable to me how someone could EVER find this fun in any degree. Even the loading screens are more of a reward than the climaxes. The characters themselves are as barebones and nonsensical as it gets. By the end i don't even know why the main character only appears in one of the boss sequences, not that there is any story to speak of. All of these problems i've been typing out, all these chores you have to do to progress the game, repeat that for 3 entire maps, and you've got Salubrious Scales, my friend.
The only praises i can give are for the decent looking pixel art, the maps have more character in them than any aspect of this game, and the voice acting, which was few, but decently done enough that it doesn't bother me to hell and back.
I sincerely hope you take a look back at this game with an objective eye and see it for what it is, a tech demo that should not have costed money from the start, let alone released on the Steam store, and continue to work on it some more if you ever want to continue developing games for a living. Maybe switch to a donation based business model, like SubscribeStar or Patreon so people can pay what they feel is worth it to help development and want to see it thrive.
