I realize this is a game jam submission so take my feedback with a grain of salt. Congrats on the submission!
Edit: Please tell me you won all of the prizes from the Time Pass Game Jam 2023 -- you were the only submission. De facto winner!
PROS:
- Enjoyed the splash screens
- I always enjoy a good leaderboard!
- I like how the user can tap to set the player's path, that was intuitive and seemed to work well
- I like the concept, a race against time to harvest fruit.
- It appears that account creation works, nicely done
- I like that you have different features between offline and online mode, like the "news" section
- This is a complete game concept with heavyweight infrastructure built around it, certainly feels like more than just a demo or jam submission because of that
CONS:
- Difficulty settings were hard to select in the scrollbar window because they are squished at the bottom of the screen (a scrollbar here would be unnecessary if the element was higher on the screen).
- Volume slider doesn't seem to work
- No immediate feedback on what differences there are when choosing different Visuals settings (might be nice to show an example of the differences when picking each option)
- Fruit was sometimes generated in impossible locations to access
- Clicking on tree canopies is possible and prevents clicking on the ground beneath for movement
- Countdown timer should stop when the game is won
- Looks like I got two wins on the board after winning one game (Easy mode)
- Provide feedback to the user on the account Sign Up page (both for errors and on successful registration).
- For example, I could not click "Sign Up" because my password was too short, but I had no indication that it was a problem.
- Once I signed up, nothing happened. Clicking Sign Up again informed me that the name was not available, which suggests that my previous submission worked.
- Might want to do email validation, since I just entered a random email address.
- Scrolling or "typewriter" text in the news section... I personally find typewriter text annoying and harder to read than if it was all just displayed at once.
- I was not able to play a game in online mode. I clicked Play Game and it did not load, but all buttons were disabled.
RECOMMENDATIONS:
- Make UI components larger for mobile devices (e.g. the buttons, the volume slider in Settings)
- Remove components that do nothing (e.g. volume slider) until implemented - users will react more negatively to broken features than missing features.
- Consider releasing game jam entries as playable in the browser. Installing a .apk file from an untrusted source is a high barrier for most potential users, and in order to run the app you have to allow untrusted files to be run from Chrome, which is a huge security vulnerability. If the user allows this, they must explicitly disable that again after installing, or their device will remain vulnerable.