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A jam submission

forest, keep, mirrorView game page

browser townbuilding puzzle game
Submitted by sevencrane (@sevencrane) — 2 days, 12 hours before the deadline
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forest, keep, mirror's itch.io page

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Comments

Submitted (1 edit)

Awesome concept. Really unique and interesting. Love the art, sound, and the spooky elements you're incorporating. I'm just gonna dump a bunch of miscellaneous thoughts and feedback.

-Figuring out what 'networked' meant was pretty confusing. It would probably be clear enough if you just said "on the same landmass" or something like that

-It would be a lot more elegant to have a commit button that cycles through each day and reports on how your town did, instead of hammering sleep over and over again. If you've played any factory puzzle games they usually have something like this.

-It's really easy to screw yourself in a click so an undo button would be a nice feature if it's not there already.

-The dark forest sprite can block view of you own buildings making it hard to tell how I lost on some levels. Could be fixed by making them shorter or maybe by making stuff transparent when you're hovering over something behind them.

-It's hard to micromanage how many days everything has left until destruction, having a little number pop up over every building at the end of each day would be nice.

-I had a hard time figuring out how various purple tiles worked, wished there was a little more handholding there.

-I don't get the point of having to put down timber and then put down a house. Seems to make the game needlessly fiddly. I get that it extends the amount of time it takes to place a house but this was never an issue.

Had lots of fun plaything though it. Looking forward to seeing how it turns out!

Submitted

I beat 5 levels, got a bit stuck on the 6th but I'll tell you what I thought about the levels I played. I think the concept is really interesting and unique. The art looks fantastic and well done. I like the different buildings and mechanics and I felt like the pacing of the stages was good and integrating tutorials into the main game is fantastic, however I felt that there was still a little bit of information missing that was hard to figure out even with tooltips. Like you can build cemeteries on water, how exactly the repairing mechanic works, and I had no problems with my gardens in the first few stages but on stage 6 they died without the house keeping them alive. I also think the stages would greatly benefit from a button that says skip X days where X is the required days to go without taking actions. I didnt encounter any bugs and enjoyed the experience even if I got a little stuck. Overall I think its a good game and I'll come back and beat it fully soon. 

Submitted

This is very pretty and has huge potential. I would work on streamlining the learning process of how the game works.

The game's current problem is that it gives the player a little too much freedom and expects you to read a large amount of tooltips to understand how to build things and how they actually function. 

The first level starts with the simple instruction of "build a house", but you then have to read the house's tooltip and realise that you first need to build several other things next to it, which also have their own resource and tile requirements before they can be built. Clearing the first level takes too much effort. It's not difficult, but it's tedious and feels like trial and error if you didn't carefully read all of the requirements. The visuals for why something can't be built should be clearer.

The first couple of levels should have 90% of the prep work done for you (and maybe even do some hand-holding). Afterwards, you can slowly complicate things by adding extra steps that you need to consider to get that same result again.

I'm not very good at these types of games, but I got a buddy who i showed and was saying that he'd likely buy a release build assuming it was a bit less opaque in directions and tips. Maybe he just got filtered idk

Very good visuals too man 

Submitted

Great graphics, nice grass texture. I like the concept of building networked self-sustaining villages.

I think the game could communicate more information visually. The mechanics are centrally about the connections between buildings (and how those connections bounce off of mirrors), but these connections are not visible. It felt like playing laser redirection puzzles with invisible lasers.

Networking was tough to understand, and the house implies you need to know it in the first level. I was unsure if any structure counted or just paths. Some indication of which tiles were networked (like an outline) would help.

I wish I could see decay status of different buildings more easily. Or just highlight the ones on zero turns left. 

The graphic for the mirror pool doesn't look like it reaches all the way to the shore. The wall graphic implies it can be built on meadow.

I couldn't work out how to deselect my tool so I could inspect tiles. Usually this would be done by clicking on the selected tool again.

Having to clear land before building is tedious. Its fast regrowth is annoying, but not difficult enough to bother planning around. The timber pile and stone foundation similarly feel unnecessary. Makes me wonder if houses could just cost 3 actions instead of 1. This wasn't as bad once I got used to using the keyboard shortcuts.

Took me a while to realise you could have multiple houses with 1 garden, or that this was necessary for building a mason.

I think I encountered a bug here, with the house not registering stone as being networked.



Good luck and I'm curious to see how it develops.

Submitted

This game is very pretty. I like the concept of a puzzle game focused on survival.  I also like that you take the time to tutorialize things.