I had fun playing this game. I also had fun breaking it.
First, What I Liked:
- The title. It's simple and fits the game well.
- The art. I really liked the art style. It gave the game a cute horror vibe with the atmosphere, the little monsters, and the toys protecting the girl. I also like that the art was well-thought out and fits the game. The "protectors", for example, are her toys, which are also shown through the toy box.
- Your creative take on the Jam theme. Instead of experiencing a nightmare, you prevent the nightmare.
- The horror. It was horror in theme rather than scares, which isn't super common, but still fun and still horror. I'm a coward who still likes horror-themed things (the entirety of Halloween, for example) so I always appreciate these types of horror games c:
- Pause/Next Level buttons. Having both can cause some balancing issues (see below), but I'm the type of person who plays most games on the easiest difficulty, so I appreciated it!
Quality-of-Life Issues:
- Instructions. Stating somewhere that you can right click to "put down" the toy. I was able to guess it, but only after trying to pick up a different toy and finding a bug (see below). Also a short explanation on how to play.
- Selecting toys. The ability to place multiple toys without having to re-click the toy each time.
- Placement. Being clearer on where you can and cannot place things.
Balance Issues:
- Pause/Next Level buttons. They make each other redundant. If you remove the next level button and put it on a timer, you can still pause whenever you want. Likewise, if you removed the pause button instead, you would still have little breaks between waves as you could choose when to continue. If you want to make it stressful, you could remove both, and just have an initial longer time. It depends on what feel/difficulty you're going for.
- Teddy bear spam is crazy OP (see Screenshot #1). Spam some bears until you have enough money for robots, then spam robots. Then, just for fun, spam some fairies and let them pretend they're helping. This is completely understandable, though, as balancing games is difficult, especially on a time limit!
Bugs:
- Toy selection. Spam-clicking a toy while having another selected creates, well..see the bottom right of either screenshot.
- Toy costs. The robot only cost 10 coins. I don't know if it was like that in the beginning, or if I managed to break it. I noticed it after finding the previous bug.
- Next Level button. Spam-clicking next level was...a bad idea (see Screenshot #2). Definitely get a boolean in there to protect people like me from ourselves.
- Image overlap (see Screenshot #1). A very small thing, but the toys overlap in a confusing way. I don't have experience programming this exact thing, but maybe basing their depth (z-index) on what height they're placed at?
Screenshot #1
Screenshot #2
Despite all of those things, I still enjoyed this game. I know the feedback is a lot, so I tried to break it up into lists with a short sentence "label" at the beginning of each bullet.