One of my favorites so far
My feedback (Please take it constructively)
What worked well:
The gameplay premise is neat and well thought out for a jam game. Excellent job of providing players with more than one thing to think about, and forcing them to balance their time and make decisions.
It's super cozy. The bells on the herder, snow particles, and lighting all come together cohesively and are just such a vibe.
What could be improved:
In my opinion, the mixels here were quite distracting. Inconsistent pixel sizing can work well if used carefully, but here it added noise and made it feel tossed-together.
From my own experience and looking through the other comments here, it's really hard lol. As a general tip, and I know it's hard to find time to balance in a jam, but try to make jam games easier than you think they should be, unless you have a specific reason to do otherwise.
Viewing post in Sheep Keeper jam comments
thank you so much for the feedback! this is genuinely super helpful.
the mixels are something that didn't occur to me, but now that you've pointed it out I can't unsee it haha. we randomize some of the scaling on the tree, bush, and rock assets to give the map a bit of variety, which I think is where most of the different pixel sizing comes from. I think if we were to have made the assets ourselves and had the time to, we might have just made different assets for the different sizes. it's definitely something i'll keep in mind for future projects, thanks for pointing that out!
the game indeed came out a bit harder than intended! the core gameplay mechanics came together about 24 hours before the submission deadline, so we didn't have as much time to playtest and tweak it as we would have liked. ideally we would have made the sheep stay much closer to the fire at first and stray further over time.
this was our first jam, so we didn't anticipate how the difficulty would come out (or at least I didn't). we'll absolutely try and suss that out a bit more for future projects (especially for cozy ones haha!)