This was pretty cute! Overall fun concept, like others said it needs a little more time in the oven. Loved the CRT screen overlay and the swaying of the trees in particular.
I played to about 1.4m/1m $ before accidentally refreshing and some gameplay things I noticed were:
- Like Wired Pixels said, the impact of the upgrades vs the price of the upgrades was not the most satisfying (though it does sound like it's been improved!).
- It seemed like the easiest and most effective upgrades were the woodcutters and woodcutter upgrades, which is maybe not what you want, considering that there are a lot more upgrades for the direct impact of the player. I did enjoy them though. Watching them nyoom through the forest was fun, haha.
- It wasn't clear how long the day would last or why the fog covered up the screen if going back to camp was an option at any point, and it seemed kind of odd that there was no real reason to use the statue to go back when it was so front and center.
- I couldn't tell what effect the X/50,000 had other than occasionally unlocking new kinds of tree. My best guesses were that they upgraded tree regrowth rate? It was fun to hit them regardless, but if they triggered changes, I'd like to know.
- This one is kinda on me but I didn't read the description before playing, so I couldn't figure out how to move or hit things for a couple of loops because the only on-screen cue was [E]. It would be nice to have a control scheme either on screen for the first loop or shown in the settings.
Suggestions:
- It would be cool if there was some kind of penalty for not returning to the statue before the fog hit, or something like that. It's got a very encroaching ~ominous~ vibe and I liked it.
- A visual cue for how big the player's area of effect is and/or how many trees they can hit would be great, and make it much more interesting to engage with the gameplay after getting the woodcutters. Otherwise, some other angle to which the player could more directly strategize about how and where to chop trees would make it much less repetitive.
- Expanding on the kinds of trees and making the upgrades stronger would add a lot to the overall sense of progression.
Bugs I noticed were:
- Occasionally spawning in with no trees. (Running around in circles fixed it within a few seconds.)
- Getting to the end of the gameplay loop and the "return to camp" option not returning me to camp, but instead beginning another loop. (Had to refresh to get out of it.)
- I could walk off into the fog and wander around, noclip style.
- The audio is laggy and "grainy" for me, but I don't know how much of that can be affected coding-wise.
- The SFX for chopping isn't lined up with the chopping animation.