Hey
Bruce I played it last night for a bit. My feedback isn't gameplay related, I'd need more time, but I did play long enough to give constructive criticism regarding UI, controls and feedback.
First, what I liked: the art, the comic book section, and the story's premise. And I don't like anime or jRPGs.
Now, criticism:
When fighting, we can cycle attacks with left/right arrows, or A/D, and enter selects an attack. Enter doesn't let us confirm the attack on the enemy, and that's a problem. Enter should consistently confirm actions. Making us use the mouse to click the center of the red circle is annoying when full keyboard support seems logical and mostly supported.
That extends to the Backpack/Special Attacks (fire symbol) during combat. Again, we scroll to them with the keyboard, enter selects it, but we can't use the keyboard to navigate the resulting list, enter to select a list item, or escape to move back a level to select a different combat option.
As far as a demo goes, you don't want the player to feel like they're fighting the control scheme. If you can't support logical keyboard implementation like I suggested, I think you should remove keyboard navigation of those elements entirely. Make it entirely mouse driven. I don't prefer this
at all, but it's better than setting expectations, only partially fulfilling them, and frustrating the player.
My other feedback is aesthetic. The conversation 'bubble' at the bottom of the screen needs to be a fixed width. At 1920 pixels wide, it isn't pleasant to read. My head feels like a typewriter, rastering left to right to left. You'll notice games with dialogue boxes that support 1920+ widescreen will fix the width of the dialogue box to avoid this phenomenon. I think the common convention is fixed width of 720 px, which is 'fullscreen' for small 1280x720 screens, and maintains a pleasant reading space at higher resolutions. Also, it would be a nice touch if it looked more like a text bubble (like in the comic book interludes), with the text bubble 'horn' or wtf you call that coming from the direction of the character speaking.
Also, when fighting enemies, I think their health and (maybe?) timer should appear in the bottom text bubble, in-line under your character's. If we're not supposed to know the health, have a bar that doesn't move and is ??/??. I realize the first enemy we're not supposed to know it's health, but in the jail break sequence, the low contrast floating white numbers left of the enemies was inelegant. We're already looking at the bottom of the screen to see our timer/health/MP, might as well put the enemy's info there. Also, it would be consistent implementation, which is important.
Good luck, looking forward to seeing this develop. By the way, do you have a copy editor to go over the text? I noticed one instance of 'here' instead of 'hear', and the intro dialogue with the bad guy read like it hadn't been edited.