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Congrats on the amazing submission here!

Everything here is so good, from the sound scape and music, to the controls for aiming and moving. It's clear a lot of thought and care went into this, and it certainly paid off!

Admittedly, I struggled a lot getting that third chicken, and I struggled to get to all the places in the village (even after having been to each spot once before). I wonder if there's a better village layout that would make it easier to not get turned around and lost as much. Potentially this was an issue of turning around too quickly, and I wonder if an audio affordance for turning would help?

I thought the controls on a controller were pretty intuitive, at least, as someone who has played a lot of Zelda games with target locking, it made sense right away. I think the dojo was really useful too as a way to learn how to use the rod.

I'm not sure if this is because I was on a browser or on Mac OS X, but sometimes when I switched focus out of the window, and tried to go back to the game, the TTS voice just completely stopped working (even when I hard reset the game). Additionally, for some reason, when I was in the dojo and using the divining rod, it didn't pick up that I was targeting the dojo master (after spamming left trigger it finally worked in browser). I ended up downloading the game for Windows and that worked fine. (Note I tested this again on Windows browser, Edge, and I'm still seeing this issue).

I'll echo Patricia's comments that I think the introductory pre-game dialog was a little much (especially when there are so many games to get through for this jam). I think a lot of that content would be better placed on the itch.io page, so players who start the game can get right into it.

All in all, this was an amazing entry, and I hope you and others game developers learn a lot from what's here!

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Thank you so much for the kind words and concrete feedback! We've been discussing a lot of these issues already, but it's great to be reminded of what's still left to do on the backburner. I had tried adding audio cues for rotating your head, but couldn't land on anything that I liked in the jam timeframe. Do you have any examples of games that you remember handling this well that you could recommend for us to study? There is also another setting that you might find useful here, if you ever return to the game:

Settings > Accessibility > Sight-based volume attenuation

This used to be enabled by default, but someone reported that it made it more difficult to use echolocation, so it's now defaulted off. It's a wordy setting, but what it means is that as you turn your head, any sounds that you're looking directly at will be louder, and sounds will drop in volume as you turn away, and be the most quiet when they're directly behind you. I find it much easier to navigate this way, but it seems to be a personal preference (and one that we need to document much better, haha). Our itch page is already getting long, but more collapsible menus should help us keep it organized as we add more information.

Thanks for the heads-up about weird behavior on Mac. We don't have one we can use for testing, but since everything was built in Godot, we should be able to create a native Mac build for the game in the future, and can hopefully just retire the browser version since I think it causes more problems than it's worth at this point.

And we could not agree more about the tutorial needing more refining. Earlier on, we had a much more minimal introduction, and too many people could not figure out how to play the game at all without one-on-one help. I think we probably over-corrected in the other direction out of fear that players would abandon the game without understanding it at all, and misjudge our entry, but this could still use a lot more work to be streamlined, plus become even more immersive like the tutorial in Impulse Response. If you do ever play again, you'll be happy to notice that you can skip the tutorial and/or opening cutscene right away, since you already know how to play.

We're very interested in how far people are getting in the game, especially since there are so many other jam entries that deserve your attention. Valencia Tales is structured like a very minimalistic Zelda game -- after you leave the Village, there is an inciting incident, a dungeon, a boss, and an epilogue. If you'd like to quickly jump to later portions of the game so you can sample more, there are a few teleports in the pause menu:

Debug > Teleport to dungeon
Debug > Teleport to boss

There are also a few entries in the Debug menu for unlocking the bow and bombs, if you just want to play around with them without going through the entire story, and to turn on Debug Visuals if you'd like to see the level geometry and navigate more quickly by sight.

Thanks again for playing!

Maybe if we had access to a compass, this would help? Along with paths to follow? For exammple, maybe we can hear stone paths or dirt paths that connect each house, instead of just grass. If he hear we’re walking in the path, maybe we can follow better and learn the layout of the city. If we’re walking on grass we know we’re far off town and maybe going into the forest. But in town you’d always have stone/dirth paths?

Interesting ideas! We had been discussing a compass feature for the Divining Rod a lot early on, and this came up again from jaogwal. It seems worth exploring again. Thank you!

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Yeah, definitely heard on the "tuning for everyone is really hard". I definitely agonized over that one for this jam a lot 😅.

I would have definitely spent more time if I didn't have all the other games to get through, but I'll let you know I got to the end of the first cinematic (where you get the mine key). I will say, I'm glad I stayed around to that point, because the atmosphere definitely hits when you get to that point - it makes it really feel like a AAA game.

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I can finally exhale, knowing that you experienced the cinematic ❤️. We love Toasty and LBR!