Critique/Feedback:
- Onboarding: Don’t rely on your game’s page to onboard new players. When I first started the game, I had no clue what was going on, what my objective was, or how to interact with the game. Since I’m the host, I took a moment to look at your controls on the game page and see what my objective was, but you have to figure that your normal user will not do this.
- UX: It was frustrating to have $5 knocked off every few seconds when I couldn’t get to the pumpkins. While purchasing upgrades in the skill tree alleviates this later on, I think that a player approaching this will tend to quit rather than continue for what they might think is a bug (Again, nothing tells the player that they need to blow up the pumpkins to avoid the drop in money, and blowing up the pumpkins doesn’t provide a visual benefit to the player). The game also doesn’t pause during skill tree buying, so if I make the exact amount I need but am not quick enough, I lose out on buying the skill and have to go back to grind again for a few annoying seconds before trying to buy again.
- Gameplay: Grinding is right - it was annoying to have to switch between bombing pumpkins and ‘mining’ trees, especially with no hotkeys to switch. Once I upgraded the first time, I just ignored the pumpkins and ate the cost of letting them persist, and I was able to beat the game without blowing up another pumpkin. Once the drain stops being a concern, the race to the finish is fairly vanilla.
- Graphics: I liked the graphics to some extent, but the overall field seemed… cluttered? You had many interesting things in there that only served as decorations, which seemed like a missed opportunity for interesting interactions.
- Sound: I like that the sound was unobtrusive and appropriate for the gameplay. I wish you’d have included music though.
Overall, the game felt very prototype-y. I know I’ve been critical up to this point, so I will say that it seems like this game was going in a good direction - it doesn’t seem to have any bugs, and the bones are there. I think that you could have done more with this. I encourage you to examine your process a bit more. you stated that you used AI to learn the concepts, which I think was the right tact in this case - you didn’t ask AI to do things you weren’t prepared to do yourself yet it seems. I’d keep going with AI in your workflow, learning to use it more effectively while keeping abreast of what each part of the game dev process looks like. Don’t let my critique discourage you - I hope to see improvements and more work from you in the future!