Hello, everyone.
First of all, we'd like to thank Game Chinchila's Youtube Channel for showing our work to a wider audience.
When you focus on storytelling, the visuals and mechanics of your game can become an obstacle - most of the people do judge the book by its cover, but we believe that the power of narrative can overcome the first impression. To the Moon and Undertale are good examples of that. I mention those two games because, even though we're not at the same level, I like to believe that Creaptive Heart belongs, at least, to the same "class" as them.
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Second: we received a Gameplay/Review video by Silversatyr, which I'm really grateful for. Not kidding, we actually like heavy criticism, because mechanics and tutorials can be easily adjusted, but in order to do so, we need people with different perspectives to point out where the game fails at delivering its message.
Let's talk about the apples: To me, in games, apples are food and food is Health - the fact that you can't pick'em up implies this, given the fact that you start the game with full health. That being said, the power of narrative can twist the player's point of view, as stated by Silversatyr in the video. There was a failure in communication, when the mysterious character said that you, player, had to feed the pigs before killing them - When going into Spoiler territory, I could explain the meaning of "Feed", but to the player, at that moment, it could only mean that getting the Apples would be the focus. And, of course, by doing so, the game leads the player to death.
This alone shows how important is to receive feedback from people that are ready to tear you down if they need to. But I admit that it kinda frustrated me seeing the end of review after the first death. Silversatyr, if you're reading this, I'd really appreciate seeing this kind of true criticism towards the story element - it's always been our main focus, but of course, the decision is up to you.
The testers had no problem in the combat sections, also, when we see people beating Souls games with no gear, for example, we tend to think "Okay, we could raise the difficulty a bit", but I ignored a big detail: our testers were Developers, people used to the action combat in RPG Maker, they know my style because they know me, and that blinded me to the fact that Creaptive Heart doesn't feel like a game in which the player should be always on alert - but it is. Now it's up to me finding a way to show that to the player, and I promise I will do my best.