itch.io

Hey mate, sorry for my slow reply. Things have been quite hectic, but I got around to playing your game. I recorded myself playing, but couldn't voiceover, so I took notes.

I really liked the game, and will definitely follow up at some point to try the further levels, as a tutorial-only gameplay doesn't do it justice. But alas, here are my notes:

Bunny Bunker Feedback:

Main menu

1. Polished UI
2. Nice settings UI

Tutorial:

1. Clear instructions
2. Love the "making new bunnies" particle fx
3. BUG: When we get instructions, the speed shows 3x but it's been reset back to 1x
4. Nice set of buildings to play with
5. Pretty mature (well thought, not too crazy) economic system 
6. Day-night cycle where day = farming sim, night = tower defense is quite fun and engaging
7. Lovely theme music. Didn't make me exhausted from repetition
8. Nice to be able to zoom

Points of attention:

1. NavMeshAgents of the defenders act a bit weird when lumped together. Perhaps the fighters should patrol randomly around the map to avoid clumping up in the bunker.
2. Although I saw them chatting with each other there, so IDK if there's a lore reason for them to just hang out in the middle of the map
3. I had a snake break through my gate and destroy my shit before any of the bunnies did anything about it. Because of fog of war, it was invisible. I couldn't command them to move either, or I wasn't sure how. You can see that in the video. I selected the bunny, then clicked on the location of the enemy. Maybe this is a skill issue.
4. Zoom and pan controls feel a bit loose, like there's a huge ease value on the cinemachine cameras. I personally prefer my camera movement a bit more snappy.
5. Fix the communication on time controls: Value on the UI should reflect actual speed, and changes made to the time scale should come with a sound effect so users are more aware when this value has changed.
6. Rocket says "launch me" even though it has no fuel

All in all, great little builder, cute visuals, cohesive design, well-thought mechanics, and some innovation with genre mixing thrown in.

Excellent game mate!

TESTING QUESTIONS:

Is it predictable?

Yes. To someone who is vaguely familiar with these kinds of games, I quite quickly understood how to interact with the game. However I jumped the gun and started building the rocket before I had fuel, but the tutorial quickly indicated that to me at the "right" time.

Maybe you could change how you emit the tutorial messages to make the fuel message appear when either of these happens first:

• get to the point where the message usually shows up
• build a rocket or anything else that requires fuel

Is it consistent?

Yes, I wasn't caught by surprise by any occurrances.

Does it give instant feedback?

For the most part yes, save for the time control issue I encountered. Perhaps also indicating that a building needs workers more clearly, which is already done by the top UI that lists your workers/builders, and how many are idle (which was 0, predictably); the point is, my building was missing workers because I didn't "make" enough bunnies, but I took a while to realize it, after already assigning workers to it and thinking it would do the trick.

Easy but deep?

Yes, absolutely. When I have more time, I wanna continue playing it to see how far the rabbit hole goes :)

Player automony

Yes, I felt free to build how I wanted, even if the order of buildings was not quite right.

Regarding your review of Recolonizer:

1. Thank you so much for taking the time! And good to hear you had a decent time with the game. I am watching the video and responding to certain points as I see them!
2. Not sure if it was the case at time of recording, but I added a setting to control camera move speed with the keyboard, which seemed to be too high in your video. But now you can at least control it...
3. The buy-UI fails to update when you get money, but I am pretty sure you can still buy it if you click it... Sorry!
4. Indeed the progression is quite weak at the moment. There's no communication in the UI, and there's no real progress between levels. My upcoming major updates should address this in the next few months: 
   1. Infinite waves: I'll overhaul the wave system to show which wave we're in, whether it's the last wave, and a button to call the next wave. By design, it should be able to procedurally call in waves for a new arcade mode.
   2. A real campaign mode: I'll introduce a real campaign mechanic, where you have your ship which carries your cannons and money, allowing you to bring some of your defenses and cash to the next level, giving a better sense of progression.
   3. The combination of these two should enable an interesting mode where you bring your campaign ship to defend an island on arcade mode, putting your defenses to the test, and increasing replayability.

As for the written feedback:

1. Good to hear the design of the upgrades and cannons + placement locations had the intended effect of promoting strategization!
2. Thanks for the feedback regarding booty collection, I agree 100%, and in fact the booty collection ship is a tower that is not yet in the works, but it's in the pipeline as an idea I want to work on.
3. Good feedback on the positioning of the location selection buttons. Originally the only interaction you could do from the map view was collecting booty, but I accidentally enabled upgrades from there, and liked it, so I kept it.  I'll address this in a future update. 

Thanks again for the review trade, and I hope you come back to Recolonizer at some point! :)