i quickly realized that you could go over the cap of wool if you collected fast enough, and therfor stopped upgrading it ever - (i had a cap of 60 by the end, and was collecting 750 wool every sweep because i maxxed out a lot of collection-based stuff instead of going for "+5 storage", it would have taken me several shops to even collect any more, and by that point it would have been pointless)
would nice to see a continue button, and a timer for how long you spent playing at the end when you break the four digit counter, a little strange that "you broke it" is the way the game ends, you made that counter arbitrarily stop at 9999, when other counters that you interact with go above that, (10,000 wool for example) maybe it would make more sense if it looked like more a physical seven segment display that only had 4 digits, doesn't feel very in theme to the game either other than fitting the "counter" theme,
i do think that the design is good otherwise, and the balance seems to be fine, you're always throttled by something, and you're given multiple ways to solve each of the ways you're being throttled at that moment, and there was always a reasonable upgrade to choose, though the max storage being lenient like it is makes it non-existant as a throttle, and it just boils down to processing time and sheep sheared
edit: forgot to mention them, but the sounds were good here, the main menu was also really nice! glad that got in there, really important for the gamefeel i think
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I appreciate the really thorough analysis!
My goal was to always have some bottle neck / limiting factor you’re trying to expand, I’m glad that came across. I had initially setup a hard cutoff for the wool, but I found it way more fun seeing how far over the limit I could collect in 1s (maybe a bit of developer derangement).
The 10,000 limit was to make sure the game could run well in the browser on older laptops with integrated graphics, and to make sure the game could be beaten in ~15 min for the Jam. I’m brainstorming a secondary loop to implement post jam.
it did feel good i can agree with you there!! i don't really mind it so much, even so there was always a throttle (how fast you could harvest, and how fast you could produce yarn), so it didn't make the game unfun or unplayable, maybe just a touch unbalanced, which is fine
and yeah, i understand there being a limit for hardware reasons! and i understand that there needs to be an ending, ideally - it just doesn't feel as satisfying or in theme (with the rest of the game) to be a random generic number counter that breaks arbitrarily, (like i was saying in my original post, as a player there seems to be no reason this counter in specific breaks as opposed to others that don't, except for the fact that the game needs to end)
other games might have you saving up to buy something like a house at the end of the game, or might have a counter counting all the wool you've produced ever to be set as a goal... here, the ending feels a bit random and dethatched from what the game is about is all!
i will admit there was a bit of foreshadowing with how the number was formatted 0000, but i had no reason to believe the answer to the question "what happens when i get to 10,000?" to be "you 'break the game' and it abruptly ends"
when i was playing i didn't exactly think there even was an ending... which maybe isn't ideal.. my personal goal that kept me playing the game was to play until it crashed lmao (because everything was exponential i just guessed it would become unplayable)