Your itch.io page looks incredible, you're really talented at design. It feels like I'm looking at a custom website haha, and definitely sets itself apart from the rest. I'll need to try to learn some of the tricks I'm seeing here! All of the trinkets in the banner and the raccoon gif are sublime.
The game art style is really fantastic, I think my partner would really enjoy this game, as it fits her sense of aesthetic. I think it's awesome that you made your own font for this game, that's super. I enjoyed the sort of fractal paw/river appearances of the Don's fur, it's a really nice effect, and all of the theming and characterization is so en pointe. The main character is cool, and goofy looking. The walk animation is great too. Oh, and the scene transitions :O
This game could only benefit with more interaction with these great characters, additional locations, and all that fun stuff. The looping mechanic works well, and I liked how this lead to the players sort of rushing to collect items, and returning more thoughtfully after an initial failure. I think the idea of an underground river is very sad and captivating. This game reminds me of a gothic Ghibli picture, and that game Night in the Woods, though I've never actually tried it.
My critical feedback would be super minimal. I would like the space bar to have the same effect as the enter button in your game. I'd also like the left mouse button and Enter key to advance dialog. In a nice story game like this, you don't mind really zipping through the dialog and enjoying it at your own pace, and I liked (a lot) how your dialog choices always made the most neutral default answer answerable to the enter key. It's a nice small introduction of player choice. Adding hover states to the message selections would be good. I might even suggest moving the interact button to be achievable with the space bar too. I feel like this game rewards simplistic and accessible controls. On the repeating time, it might be interesting to move characters in different locations or put them in situations requiring further loops. The river/loop theme is so good! The music gets repetive, as you said you whipped it up yourself. The tone and feel of the loop is really nice, it needs to be expanded with some more ups and downs, tensions and reliefs. It does the trick though. The game tells you to talk to Clarence to leave, but that doesn't do the trick. I did have to hot-swap to the final scene to enjoy the ending.
Please excuse me rattling off all the bugs I'm sure you're aware of XD
This is wonderful.
All very valid points!
Since I was so new to Yarn Spinner, I was a bit ham stringed on my knowledge of how to make it as a manager work better for me. I looked into Speech Bubbles after purchasing it to try it out, but ran into enough snags I dropped working on it in favour of progress in other areas. Looks very cool and I intend to try it out more, but time limitations on the solo project just meant I just needed the time to focus on the other stuff. I also really wish I had time to do the speaking stuff I had been looking into, but both seemed like they'd take significant time either up front or later. So it goes.
I wish I could've done more with the music, and in terms of all of my skills is definitely the most lacking. I had made about 1-3 crescendoing tracks that added to each other, as well as an audio drone which was removed due to testing feedback on it making the game nauseating to play. But coming into implementation my knowledge of audio programming got hit and also got cut (I am really fast to cut if I spend more than an hour or so without progress. It was a cool idea, but my knowledge wasn't there yet).
Definitely wish I had had more time for longer character interactions. I like them all a lot, and learning about the specific histories of each creek was nice. There's someone who gives guided tours for walks of Toronto rivers, and I only learned about Lost River Walks while making this and I think it would be nice to go and see them. I like to think they like to be visited.
Going to Clarence was added in the last few builds, so it is definitely buggy. I think in certain situations you can talk to him to return to Don, but in others it doesn't. It likely has to do with my mismanagement of the passing variables through scenes, which is DEFINITELY hacky as heck and not how you're supposed to do it. I got good advice via Tim about setting up Yarn Spinner stuff better, but at that point it would've required me rearranging the whole project on the second week. So- system shipped with bugs!
Moving the characters would've been a very good choice, I didn't actually think about it at all! Likely wouldn't have been that hard, but I also likely would've just copied the scene entirely (which I did for the Conclusion cause I thought that made sense, in both hindsight and writing this now it doesn't, literally nothing changes!)
Thanks for taking the time to write a comment <3