Hello,

Thank you for the thoughtful comment. You caught me while moving from one country to another, so I've got some time only now to respond to the questions:

- Art // Yes the palette was tricky to alight with the desired gameplay goal, it's a very "warm" palette so for something like snow it was tricky to convey the desired mood with those tones. However, I do love a challenge so I think it was alright. 

Agreed on the sprite size, Had I more time, I'would have gone with something like these houses that I've been working on in the past few days:

SO the mechanics were really tricky to figure out while deving all of the other systems. I'd really only manage to figure them out in the end: The player should balance the snow_level (e.g. keeping it as low as possible) to increase town satisfaction. Town Satisfaction was supposed to convey the feeling of "Player Connection" to the townsfolk

Basically, as snow starts building up in the level, there is a bar that starts filling up (Snow_level) and the tiles change etc etc. Based on snow_level, you have events appearing:

- Game pauses, player is given several choices:

-Choice A --> player decides to help neighbor --> town_satisfaction goes up

- Choice C --> player decides to be an asshole --> bad outcome for the player 

Now that I've mentioned events, I'd like to talk about how this is engineered, since you asked: 

I compiled a little parser in Google Sheets (good ol tool, reliable and sturdy :P). I'd show you how it looks in ga

Environmental Storytelling was indeed part of the plan, although on a more narrative sense, with different events. 

When the player had a lot of gold, and snow_level was super high there was an option to take the children bob-sledding and to a nearby ski resort ! I wish that these events could have been implemented in the game on launch. I did learn a lot about developing features in a short time, and this jam was a very useful  experience as a Solo Dev, there's a lot of things I would try to do differently in terms of prioritising. 

I wish you could see a more functional version of this project, and now that I have time to work on sprites and more larger scale 2D assets I think it would be a beautiful project.

Best,

Osvaldo

Hey Kikilo!

Art

- I love the tilemaps you made! They are very simple, but they align super well and there was obviously a lot of thought that went in to using the color palette. 

- I would have suggested going with a slightly larger sprite size so that things look a little more blended together, but seeing as it's a game jam, what you have is more than acceptable.

Mechanics

- I love the idea of the snow building, but I'm not entirely sure what the objective or gameplay looks like? Creating a well defined activity cycle would be very useful in this case. You mention an event creator and helping out the townsfolk with snow-related tasks. What does this look like? Are you searching for objects, completing minigames, answering questions, etc. What does the player interaction actually look like?

Environment

- Obviously this is relating to the game itself, but I would suggest thinking about how you can fill out the environment. Sound effects and animations would greatly add to the game, but you could even focus on environmental storytelling. You have some mountains, maybe there's a ski village near the town! The town roads don't connect to the sides of the map. How do people get in and out of the town? These small additions can help the game feel so much more polished without actually having to create a ton of content.  

Overall, great job on your project! You did a fantastic job for a one-person team, and you worked around the errors you came across.