Post by POY's in Akácvirág ~ The Beekeeper's Loop jam comments

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Ouuh, nice! The controles are a bit awkward though: could've been nice to have the spacebar also detected as a an action key, when you're not used to play games with keyboards, E being near directionals, it is easy to miss-press keys and to move instead of act/to act instead of move. And when like me you try to prevent that happening by using directional keys instead of their letters counterparts, the game randomly ask you to use the mouse to continue/pass dialogues/other game phases, and you have to reposition your hands every times.. :/

Also, the game randomly skipped 3 morning of the week, making me wait all the afternoon doing nothing, and without being able to buy anything in the evening time because I didn't earn more wildflowers that day 🤔

and last reserve I have ( I promise after comes the good stuff): the lofi music seemed a bit random, and the fact there was no music at all for most sequences of the game was a bit hard for me, that have trouble focussing/reading in silence. The music of the 8th day was a really good choice though!

Now for everything I liked:

The theme was good, the bees were cute, the story was interesting, the vibe was immaculate. The gameplay wasn't "cozy" running everywhere, but it was fun! First day was a bit overwhelming, but when you take a use to it, it easy to get in the zone, to find systems, an organization! The discovering of the queen bee was a great moment, and I got what I know is my favourite one: the wild flower queen (wild flowers are my favourite flowers, and the queen portrait was just too cute)

It was a really cool mechanic to let us choose every morning how to take care of the bees and all!

Overall a great jam game, it is not perfect but there is plenty to be proud of! GG!

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RolandKissGames27 days ago(+1)

Thank you for such detailed feedback!

Honestly we didn't go too far into the details of the controls, WASD and E to interact is overall an industry standard that we went with, we added the arrow keys as an alternative to the WASD as well for those that find that to be more intuitive. I think a potential miss input when trying to press E would exactly either move you out of the interaction area or make it so that you aren't still able to continue doing what you were. The dialogue advancement works both with spacebar and with the mouse click, but overall it is a slight oversight not to also include "E" as someone else also mentioned this in their feedback. Nevertheless this is good feedback and I think it would probably be best if next time, or as an update of this one we can potentially include input controls that you can set for yourself which would help accommodate a larger demographic of players.

About the morning bug, I am unsure as to what you mean by randomly skipped 3 mornings as this wasn't anything that came up in any of our playtesting, but if you could maybe better describe as in what the "skipping" means (the buttons didn't show up and could only press continue, the morning phase never showed up at all and it went straight to midday etc.) and perhaps what you were doing when it happened - this would be a great help for us to find why this problem could've happened. No pressure if you don't remember or anything!

The composer we had originally on the team (the one who did what we ended up having as the main menu music) unfortunately due to unforeseen personal reasons was unable to continue and we had to find CC0 music and sound effects at a scramble towards the end of the deadline. We thought that the repetition of the same songs would be more jarring and troublesome than perhaps some music that felt a little less cohesive to the rest of the game. This also largely addresses the lack of music while reading (this is also more of a personal preference as I am unfortunately the opposite, and struggle to read the dialogue when music is playing).

I am not quite sure why the gameplay was not feeling cozy, the penalties for not reaching somewhere in time is very often minimal, and most of the mechanics are very forgiving - the game does obviously get easier the more you play it an understand which is also why we themed in a full tutorial explaining, and directing the cues for everything in the beginning. I understand overall it is quite a bit of walking, but we tried to balance that out with having dialogue, morning and evening screens which slow the pace down and offer a calmer/less involved experience to the player

I am glad you enjoyed the queen cultivation and the queen bee reveal, it was something we felt was important in the gameplay and something we wanted to add as a personality and attachment to the beehives and the story overall.

Thank you for the feedback, kind words and for playing our game, it means a lot!

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POY's27 days ago(+1)

Oh don't get me wrong, the fact I didn't find it cozy wasn't a bad thing, just an observation! I really did enjoyed the gameplay! Also if you wonder why it didn't feel cozy despite the minimal consequences: it's because in first playthrough consequences dont matters, we don't know the game yet, all we see are fast going bees, fast going timer, a lot of things going on everywhere and the fact we still dont know that consequences are minimals. All off that is setting the player in a certain mindset even before the game really started. As I sayed it didnt bothered me at all, but I figured my input could be of use if you were going for a slow paced type of experience.

as for the bugs, the morning didnt show up at all, it jumped from the continue to the mid day and I really couldn't know what I did for that. maybe I was clicking to fast on the continues as they appeared?

at last: it's true, E is an industry standard nowdays, but I suspect it is mostly the case in actions games, those that requires a lot of different keys to be played, with an hand on the mouse at all time for camera movements. If you need one hand for the mouse, then the most conveniant action key, is also the nearest one from the directional keys, the E.

for cozy games, we don't need as much different actions keys and we don't need a hand at all time on the mouse, that's why one hand on the space bar and the other on the directional pad is a good configuration for those type of games. I would also advise not to disperse yourself regarding on the interactions inputs (Im not talking of alternative keys here, those are always good to have), if you can put everything on the same input, for accessibility purpose, it is good to do so (by that I mean that there is no reason to pass dialogues with the mouse if everything else is made with E, adding buttons should only be to prevent the player to trigger differents actions at once)

Anyway, I hope I didnt annoyed you to much with my text wall!

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