Beautiful and fun game. The atmosphere is immersive and relaxing, and it really provides the opportunity to make the world the way we want it. We really like the friendly tone that the characters set. For example, everyone seems to be smiling, even the kibot that doesn't technically have a mouth. The color scheme really lends itself to that as well.
There is a little more of a learning curve to it than there probably should be, so more indicators of what things are in the UI would be helpful. Also, the tutorial is a bit too "tutorial-y" and while it definitely covers most of the controls, that might be better spread into the actual gameplay rather than before you get to the first biome. Also, some of the sentences didn't quite make sense and while we were mostly able to get the general idea, you may want to spend a little time refining the wording.
Some of the things we'd like to see built into the game as you progress may already be on your roadmap but just in case, here are some examples.
- Labels on the items in the inventory
- An undo button (see the part where we accidentally destroyed the pond we loved)
- The ability to have anything that's already in the world in our inventory (e.g. rocks and ponds)
- The ability to change the first-floor level of buildings
- Maybe some hints as to how to accomplish the tasks on the task list
- A mode that allows you to progress to different biomes without having to unlock them through tasks first (e.g. story mode vs. creative mode)
We did run into a few things that didn't seem to function correctly, which we fully expected since this is a pre-alpha build. For example, the music at the menu screen stops playing after a while. Also, objects like the grass or buildings would get rotated at a diagonal axis and we couldn't get it to go back into alignment with other objects. The precision of the aim for the destroy feature could use some tweaking, as we never really could tell where it was going to destroy something in relation to where we were aiming.
This may be something that's being built into something you're planning for future in-game tasks or challenges, but we found the time limits on the toy category objects discouraged us from placing them in the world. If they're just going to disappear, why place them? That's how we felt, anyway.
You definitely understood the assignment with the cute little animals, because it was fully rewarding getting to pet them and seeing the visual feedback in the form of swirls and hearts and the animals' happy behavior. We really liked that. We also really liked how they would come from other areas to graze on the grass we put down.
Overall, we love the direction this is going and are excited to see how this shapes out as you get closer to finishing. Keep up the great work!