Here are some notes from my first two sessions. I haven't made it super far in the game yet, as I'm still getting used to the control scheme, so if any of my suggestions/criticisms/bugs are misguided, let me know. Everything is marked with game versions because I played yesterday with 0.45 and today with 0.5. I'll be up front and say that I didn't read though all of the bugs in the thread, so if there are repeats, sorry about that!

General Notes

• This game is a lot of fun so far. Of course there's that initial "arg, this is pretty difficult and has a non-traditional control scheme", but once you get over that it's very rewarding to feel yourself get better at controlling your movement, understanding how to navigate the stages, and interact with different seeds.
• Music is top notch.
• "Crystal Room" sounds like a room where you'd spend crystals, the fact that the crystal rooms are free seeds and the "Shop" is the room where you spend crystals seems a little confusing, I might just be missing something though.
• How in the world does a seed roll over water?

Interface

• (0.45) The color of the speech bubble for the folks in the post-forest camp (maybe all camps?) blends in with the color of the background (both white), could use some contrast. In a similar vein, the "I can talk to this guy" indicator tends to blend in at the bank as well.
• (0.45) (1920x1080) Icons in the menu seem like they need to be higher resolution or vectorized.
• (0.45) Quitting the game from the main menu: For some reason my instincts always tell me to look for a "quit" option in the menu available from the bottom screen (the one that has the "resolution" and "fullscreen" options at the moment. I realize you can just hit circle/escape in the initial screen to exit, but having it also available in the options menu might make sense as well, just a personal preference/QoL addition really.
• (0.45) I picked up a seed from a crate that showed up after hitting three purple buttons. When I picked up this seed (homing seed, doubt that matters), it was automatically equipped but I had to open up the seed menu to find out what kind of seed it was. It would be nice if there were an alert on the screen that said "Homing Seed" or something like that so I knew what I picked up without having to go check.
• (0.5) After hitting A or X to access the seed selection menu, it would be nice to be able to naturally exit it without selecting a new seed (B or Circle).

Gameplay

• (0.5) I found myself wanting the "back to checkpoint" animation to be faster, I feel like it takes me out of the flow of the game by creating downtime.
• (0.5) Similarly, the time it takes to begin a new run after losing feels a little long also.
• (0.5) I don't know quite how I feel about newly obtained seeds being equipped automatically. I feel like generally if you've got a strategy going, a new seed isn't usually going to be used immediately most of the time.
• (0.5) The default seed seems like it should be the crystal seed rather than the checkpoint seed, seeing as it's the only one (that I've seen) that doesn't cost any crystals to plant and using the checkpoint on the first few plots is pretty much worthless, even for a super beginner player. In fact, any of the seeds other than the checkpoint seed seem to be more useful at the very beginning.

Audio

• (0.45) Maybe fade/cut the audio when you open the menu during the game; it gives more of a feeling of things being paused. Again this is definitely personal preference but I think audio continuity (or in this case, discontinuity) helps with the flow of the game.
• (0.5) I had a bug in the second biome where as soon as one of those horizontal full screen lasers was off the screen, to the bottom, the audio for the laser charging kept repeating itself until I went back down.

Seed Specific

• (0.45) Slow seed: The animation after planting, when the slow effect is activated, is too abrasive in my opinion. It completely obscures your view of the entire screen for the duration of the animation. Perhaps this is for balancing, but I find it annoying more than anything.
• (0.45) (screenshot 1, screenshot 2) Crystal seed: I used the crystal seed on a plot near the side of the side of the map; I watch it spawn 3 total crystals (I picked up one before I took the screenshot), but one of them is inaccessible beyond the right side of the map, this seems unfair if it's intentional.
• (0.5) Teleseed: The terminology "telefragging" has the potential to confuse and/or go over the head of someone who doesn't know what it is. More precise language might be helpful.

Had a couple people over playing last night and they liked it a lot.

Not sure if this was mentioned somewhere, but we found if you quit on purpose to restart a run, you keep thorns and other items like that from the last run. We also had the seed spawn at the location of the quit rather than the beginning although that didn't happen when I tried it again with 0.5 just now but the thorns did. We could move the bar up to meet it past the gate as well if that help diagnose.

The spike sound effect plays even if it is off screen which can be confusing. It also plays on the title screen if you quit out of a game while they are in sound range.

Also big thing, we wanted an SFX and especially music volume badly

Well, that was interesting.

I just got insta-killed by a vertical-moving grub. I think it's because it was moving up and I was up against a log (as in, underneath the log). Maybe, since I wasn't able to pop up into flight, it just hit me for all my 3 hearts in the same instant. That's my best guess.....This happened pretty much in the first screen.

http://i.imgur.com/SjD6spI.jpg I picked up a Bomb aura in town, and this happened upon the meter filling up for the first time. I haven't left the town yet, so I don't know what happens next. (It'll be an adventure! :D)

Claymore Aura had one definite bug and one potential bug.

1. The mines were still there the next time I came back to the forest town.

2. Do you want auras to plant mines/bombs in town? The Claymore Aura started that up, immediately, without waiting to get out of town.

http://i.imgur.com/EiHPeMB.jpg

I just picked up the Re-Roll Aura, but it doesn't tell me how to "spend" it. I went into a shop, hoping to find something to help me undersand, but I still have no idea how it's done.

* By ragequitting when falling down a hole, the playerspeed is lowered until the game is restarted.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bp7o4ngHGK4&feature=youtu.be

* This may not be a bug but 100% of my friends are confused about the hitboxes when seeing the tutorial area - since your ingame friends have no hitbox but looks like they would - they think the game overall has inconsistent hitboxes. It obviously gets better once you're in play but I've gotten less good first impressions from it. Might be worth considering tweaking :)

* Oh here's a small one - a questgiver called me Mr. which might not roll with people who dosen't identify as dudes :) It's the reaction to the "get 15 gems" quest

Just ran into this bug a second time: Grub is on a plot. I squeeze my way into it, planting a Thorn Seed, but I don't recieve a thorn. This time, the thorn definitely wouldn't have spawned on top of the grub since the grub was on my right side.

Warpseed is broken in the boss fight, which is a real bummer because it probably cost me winning the game.

Thwomps sometimes disappear from the screen, only to reappear later. I'm not sure what causes this behaviour, but they don't seem to be invisible, they seem to temporarily cease to exist. No idea why, but it does happen with some amount of regularity.

When you digseed a used seedplot, and then try to use star on that new seedplot, it plants cloak instead of star.

Homing shots seem to work very strangely sometimes. Do they not seek flying monsters? They don't seem to. (Is this a bug? I don't even know)

Today, there were 2 instances that I used Red Hot Rock, got hit while I had it active, and then it wouldn't reactivate even though the meter was still there. Is RHR supposed to go away if you're hurt?

- In camps on a couple plays I have encountered enemies. Encountered both a fly and one of those vertical moving things that shoots horizontally.

Most noticeable art things (Most things seem pretty shippable visually, but these are the things that I notice):

-The orb that you carry up the mountain is exactly the same color as one of the mountain strips, so I took damage and it dropped and blended into the ground. Also the crystal seed blends into camp 2 super easily.

-The totally flat colored orb icon when you're carrying an orb.

-The various recharging bars. If they just had rounded edges and maybe a simple trim I think that'd be more than enough for me.

-The gopher like creatures in zone one that just sit there feel a touch out of style from everything else. Not bad, just a bit too much like animals, whereas everything else feels pretty cohesive.

-

I've played over 4 hours, and I've grown to really enjoy it as an escape, even though I still hit hard gameplay walls. Gotten halfway through the desert.

Grabbed Thwompy from the first seed room, but in the test area, it switched me to Avalanche, and then when I left the test room, back to Thwompy.

Homing shot is still super broken. I regularly fire it when there is only a single enemy within two screen heights and it just wanders off in a random direction.

???

log here: http://pastebin.com/VjP2TkN6

First shot of Cannon Spore seems to be broken. Either the first shot it shoots is invisible, or it simply isn't firing.

I think this was mentioned before but there's still a softlock if you press A just as you're springing out of a crystal room.

Sorry for a kinda spoilery screenshot here if you haven't made it to the boss:

This bastard followed me to the cloud! get outta here punk

I figured out that bug where you can't see the level! I made a video to show how I replicated it. Seems to happen if you quit while in a crystal/challenge room and then play again.

This screenshot (from when I wasn't capturing footage, unfortunately) is what tipped me off:

The Vampire aura and the Flytrap seed don't interact properly--if you kill something with a Flytrap, it doesn't give you the heart quarter.

If an Avalanche is initiated and then you go into a crystal/challenge room, the snowballs still show up in the underworld.

greg is cheating

From today's update: a weird soft lock if you restart while falling:

Note that to get the softlock you have to restart before the falling animation finishes. I tried to do this right near the start, but I could only replicate it once I had moved further up the biome.

Teleporters are broken, they send you into nothing-land:

My guess is that this is related to the loading change made in the latest update--you're teleported to an area that hasn't been generated yet.

I hit the spring to go into the next biome from the forest, but apparently I somehow also fell into a hole at the same time, so once I was in the camp for the rainforest it did the whole falling animation and took away several hearts, and then I was somehow in the camp with no seed? Very strange. Hard to replicate because you need a spring to spawn very close to/inside a hole. Easiest way to fix this is probably to just make it so exit springs can't be too close to holes.

One more: the Minemelon sprite looks weird in the seed picker:

If you complete the tutorial with a partially-completed Crystal seed, you'll begin your first run with it still partially completed, so you could get crystals from your first plant.

I fell into a crystal room at the same instant the ***** **** smashed me, so while the camera went down to the underworld my TumbleSeed was nowhere to be seen. When I pressed A i saw the bottom of the seed switch screen, as if the seed was somewhere above what was visible. I couldn't move the vine at all. Kind of a weird one.

Teleporters aren't disabled if you're in the daily challenge. This feels like cheating! (ignore my daily challenge score today for this reason)

Playing 0.7

- There was a totem thing chasing me and got stuck on a house. http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=888589713

- This seems like a bug: I had a quad laser planted and there was a big spider that was triggering it in mid-jump. Seems like it should only trigger when it's on the ground.

2 little bugs today:

1. I quit a run with 1 hp and the alert sound played while on the menu screen
2. I saw a longspore (horizontal) pre-planted plot but when I rolled over it the plot switched to a tallspore (vertical) and it had the effect of a tallspore.

There are still situations where there are totally obscured holes. This feels super unfair!

Uh... where's the spring?

(it's not behind that pillar and it's not behind the building.

If you die in the Snow biome and watch yourself putter down the mountain (without pressing A) the snow effect follows you all the way down and is still there when you start the next round.

Typo in this line of dialogue (should say "The librarians call this" or "the librarian calls this"):

At one point a bunch of the quest dialogues would overflow off my (1080p) screen. Not sure if that's still the case because there's been 2 new builds since I finished all the quests.