This is a great game, The art is nice, the sound design worked pretty well., and it was very polished. The gameplay and progression were satisfying and, as someone who's never played a non-jam 'cozy game', I really liked it.
After day ~10 the portal transfer time becomes quite tedious. This is partially because everything else is much faster by that point (mostly just right clicking the mail, then left clicking the bag, etc) so the portal becomes a much higher percentage of the total time. Partially though,it's because those later rounds have a heavier emphasis on the Moss postage, and there is no mail bag there. I completed the game on day 12, and in the last couple days there were many instances where I had to portal back & forth for say, 4 out of 6 bits of mail. It became very noticeable; would like to see an upgrade to get the mail bag in the Moss universe as well to improve the flow :)
I like that there is a trade-off between repairing the mail ASAP or strategically letting a few go to waste and prioritizing the desk upgrades first instead. By the time I purchased the normal-universe tools I was making my money back for each repaired item (5 seals) which felt good actually; I didn't have to throw away too many before then, which I was expecting. With that said, I think the desk upgrades are a bit undercosted for how valuable they are. I saw some discussion about incentivizing repairs by adding a +1 to the stamps you get, but I think a better way might be re-evaluating the desk upgrade balance. The reason buying repair tools early is suboptimal is the opportunity cost of how strong the alternative (desk upgrades) are. The normal wage reward for delivered mail seems like incentive enough for me given the right balance, I think.
Overall, I think this has a lot of potential and would like to see it fleshed out into a full commercial game. Nice job!!
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Thank you so much for playing and for the helpful feedback!
I like the idea of purchasing the alternate world mailbag as an upgrade option - great idea!
Originally I had designed the desk upgrades to be much harder to get (the first one was at 100 stamps and the final one at 1000), but I lowered it significantly for this game jam because I was concerned about player attention span. I also originally had 12-15 pieces of mail every day, but I lowered that to 4 - 6. I appreciate the thoughts that a more expensive desk upgrade could be a tweak instead of adding a stamp bonus to the repairs (or possibly additionally).