Hey, thank you for playing! Awesome feedback.
On Monster Difficulty
We made it that the monster is at the same speed as the player, but the monster cannot pass in as tight spaces as the player, so you have to outsmart him and make him take a longer route than you to be able to break his line of sight and lose you. Of course we are listening to peoples feedback and considering balancing.
What I have noticed (watching friends play) is that as soon as you learn how to evade the monster and and where to best lose him, you kinda know how to beat the game without losing a single villager.
But don't worry about you gaming skills, we consciously made it hard to instill a feeling of dread and vulnerability, and we would consider it a failure on our part if a player beats the game in their first run. Every time I lost and got the instinct to rebalance to make it easier, I had to remind myself that this might have just been a failure of me as a player and not necessarily as a designer 🙃
Map and orientation
This is a hard one, I am very much open to suggestions. Part of me thinks that it's a part of the game to get familiar with the village by just walking around and discovering the areas. Another part of me is pulling towards making it accessible and less likely to frustrate players.
I can at least rule out the following:
- Minimap - This is an absolute immersion killer and players would be looking at the minimap instead of the game world
- On screen map that you can open that pauses the world - this feels like an unnecessary element to include in the gameplay that would take away from the experience of being chased.
Maybe what we'll end up doing is adding a map in the starting house that you can view similar to the notes that are scattered around the map.
On the Story
Wow, thank you. I stayed up until 6am on submission day finishing the last note, saying to myself: nobody will read this, but on the off-chance that someone does, I really want there to be a little bit of world building that explains some of the gameplay. Why would the villagers have their only gun separated into parts scattered around the village.
When the game will get it's updates I will bake the story some more to fill in some of the blanks, and this comment lit a fire in me to keep writing. This is my first ever time doing game writing, so I'm willing to stumble and fail in my pursuit of telling an interesting story.
The game is currently under review by Steam, as soon as it passes I will link to it on the Itch page so you can get my latest updates if you want to stay in touch and keep playing throughout my journey of turning this into a fully fledged game with multiple areas and rich storytelling.
Again! Thank you for your gracious feedback, and I promise to always listen to anyone who has taken the time to play.