I'm not sure if you want criticism or not but I'm gonna go on a little bit of a rant here but I think this game is a great example of how important player onboarding is... I can clearly tell there was lot of work put into this game and there seems to be a deep amount of complexity when it comes to brewing potions. But if you don't TEACH the player how to interact with the game then they won't be able to experience any of that. I tried the game, gave up, went back because I felt I needed to try harder, read the book, looked at your breakdown of how to do the first potion, did it, went to the 2nd one, couldn't figure it out. I think this is why early playtesting is so important. It's obvious that you spent a ton of time adding in content and complicated mechanics with this wide variety of ingredients, potions states, solvents, spells, science, etc. etc.... But just dropping them all on the player at once with an extremely minimal (basically non-existent) tutorial really does a disservice to your game and shows that there likely wasn't anyone else who actually played the game before you released it. I bet if I spent an hour studying all of the different mechanics of potion making and how they interact, I bet I could really enjoy the game and start to feel like a real scientist. But am I going to do that? No. It's really a shame. I went back to the game at least 4 times while writing this comment to try and figure it out and it's just not gonna happen.
All that being said.. The game looks great. I can tell you spent a lot of time, probably too much time, on the content of the game and I wish you would've done some playtesting and spent more time and care on a curated tutorial that actually taught us how to play. I'd rather have 1/3 of the content that you have in the game, but actually have it be a fun experience instead of being felt like I was dropped into a science lab and expected to produce a result.
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Hi there, thank you so much for playing our game and taking your time to write this comment, it really means a lot to us. As this was our first time finishing and releasing a game, we underestimated the importance of onboarding and player tutorials and thought it was an area we can skimp out on in lieu of the time constraints, which is really a huge mistake on our part and this decision literally gatekept most players from the better part of the game.
Regarding the play testing, there was actually three people who played it before release, and one of them actually completed the game without any help, who gave us the confidence on the tutorial system. However, due to the small sample size, what we failed to realise was that for every one science nerd who figured the game out and completed the game, there’s probably ten other players who could not figure the game out at all. It was only after release and more players playing that we realised that the player can only effective play by themselves after physical handholding past the second level.
Once again, thank you for giving our game a chance and allowing us to learn from this opportunity ❤️
I appreciate the kind response! I will say again, I was very interested in your game and I really wanted to learn it. You really can tell you guys put a ton of effort in. I'll likely go back to it just to see if I can figure things out just because I think it would be cool to know all of these little science tricks to make the potions.