itch.io

Thanks for playing, Senna, and for writing this up.

You're right about the capture. There is a flash, a sparkle and a first-catch card in the current build, but if it didn't register for you it's simply too small. Next build I'm making the moment bigger (longer hit-stop, screen effect, louder capture sound) and adding a small non-blocking card for every catch, not only the first of a species.

The unlock pacing is the same story. Right now the first real unlock is the net gun at Lv 4, and before that there's not much in your hands. I'm adding small milestone rewards at 3, 5, 8, 12 and 15 catches so the first ten minutes keep paying out.

The page: agreed. A short gameplay GIF at the top and a proper background and banner are on this week's list; I'll reorder the screenshots so catching, the card and the zoo come first.

I'll reply here again when the build is up. 🐾

Update, and a change of plan: the itch build now stops at the end of chapter one, Korea (1.0.54 is live). Korea is complete as it was — 57 species, the zoo, the shelter, Grandfather's island. Buy the ferry ticket and board at the pier and chapter one ends there. I'm working toward a Steam release (early access, aiming for next spring), and Asia and the rest are planned for that version. If your save was in Asia, the boat brings you back to Korea and nothing is deleted. Full write-up in the devlog.

Also in since 1.0.50: the field and the zoo run about three times lighter, the dog no longer barks (it was reading as animals charging you), the range circle is a single tick on the aim line, the zoo uses the whole screen, and there's a "Title" button in the help window.

The reason is the one you'd guess: two months left before exams, and I'd rather have one chapter that holds up than two that half do. If you take a pass at the Korea build, the question is still the same — where does it get boring?

谢谢，玩了不到十分钟就写了这么多，很感激。

教程：投掷范围和路线用高对比度的实线画出来，这个我会加进下个版本。试玩关卡先不做，先把正式游戏做完，跟你的判断一样。

优先级：同意。英文问题是因为一位测试者列了具体的错位和漏译，改起来只花了半天，已经处理完了；现在的重点是开局前一分钟的流失和动物园。

反馈：这条最有用。目前"打中"和"抓到"几乎没有回应，只是图鉴里多一格。我会把命中音效、闪光、弹出物种介绍卡加进去，并保证起始区域（后院的麻雀）一击必中。变异体（稀有／传说色）游戏里已经有，但出现太晚、也全靠运气，你说的"抓到几只普通动物之后，通过剧情保证出现一只稀有个体"这个思路我会采用。区域引导现在也是靠祖父的信一封指向下一处，跟你描述的方向一致。

动物园：正在重做，先从"我心里真正的动物园长什么样"开始列细节。

更新上线后我在这里回一句。

Got it, thanks for the link. I'll play Honmoon this week and leave my notes in your thread — where the loop first slowed down for me, anything that confused me, and what made me want to keep going. Will also drop a line here once the build with your points (earlier net gun, visitor reactions, animals routing around trees) is up.

Thanks, this is exactly the kind of read I needed. You're right that everything before the first animal is paperwork. I'm cutting the setup down to one click and moving most of the letter to after the first capture. I'd love the second pass once that build is up, and yes, let's swap. Send me your rain cloud game and I'll do a cold read this week.

Hi! Thank you so much for playing for a full 30 minutes and writing up such detailed feedback. This kind of write-up is the most valuable thing a developer can get.

Let me go through your points one by one.

On the UI being overloaded and the first pebble purchase being hard to find: I've had the same comment recently, so I'm currently trimming and reorganizing the UI text. For the pebbles, I'll have the tutorial point out the shop location one more time.

I'm really glad you saw the capture loop as the core of the game. I agree that after about 20 minutes the bait → hide → hunt cycle starts to feel repetitive. The first new weapon shows up too late, which is probably why that stretch drags, so I'm adding "unlock the first extra weapon earlier" to my balance list.

Animals getting stuck behind trees on their way to the bait is a movement logic issue, and they should be routing around obstacles. I'll look into it.

For the zoo side, you're right that filling it up is pretty much all there is right now. Visitors growing in number and reacting to the animals is something I want to add too, and I'll be figuring out where it fits as I prepare for the Steam release.

Please leave a link to your game and I'll definitely play it and leave feedback. Thanks again :)

1.0.43 is up with the stakeout in. From the moment an animal picks your bait, the grass rustles wherever it is (even behind trees or off-screen), footsteps get louder as it closes in, and the HUD goes "…footsteps" → "Coming. Don't move." While you wait, crouch and hold right-click: the reticle tightens at 1.5s and 3s, and the first shot on an animal that has started eating hits ×1.15 / ×1.3. Walking resets it, so where you stand while it comes is now a real choice. Rare variants leave a colored dot in the rustle so you know it's a good one before you shoot.

Same link, no install. If you get a chance to try the wait again, I'd like to hear whether it reads as tension now or just as more waiting.

Update, in case anyone wants another look. The build is 1.0.41 now, up from 1.0.29 when I last posted here. What changed since:

• The story runs to the end of the Asia chapter. Letters 1-1 through 2-5. The last page is still torn; Europe comes later.
• Endangered animals (16 now, up from 8) go to a shelter at your house. Once one has recovered, a letter opens Grandpa's island, a place on no map where they live. You can take the boat over and walk around.
• The zoo is a new map: five plazas and five habitat loops with a pond, a waterfall and a lookout rock in the middle, and the screen is zoomed in so the animals are actually visible in their pens.
• Money: daily income is now capped by how many visitors your amenities can handle, and upkeep scales properly with variant tier, so one legendary hare no longer pays for the whole zoo. More to spend on at the top end too (facilities to stage 8, shelter 5–6, island upgrades).
• Grandpa's camp in Asia: tent, lookout post, sleeping to skip to a time of day, a telescope that finds a species' habitat.
• A bug where animals you had hit but not caught never despawned, so the field slowly emptied out. If the map felt dead after a while, that was it.
• Every window tab has its own color, the full-map legend is shorter, English gaps are at zero.

Two things I'd still like eyes on: (1) the tutorial, specifically the "back away, then creep in" step, and whether the help panel gets in the way of seeing the bait; (2) Asia, whether the first Asian species (moss frog, jacana) feel unfair with the tranq gun. The bait-wait change discussed above (rustling grass, footsteps, held aim) is next.

Same link, same English toggle under the start buttons: https://dlgkrwn02.itch.io/deulsup-dogam

Thanks for the offer, but I'm looking for human playtesters on this one, and I don't pay upfront. If you'd like to play it and leave feedback here, I'd be glad to read it

Thanks — that's exactly the spot I've been unsure about. Right now the wait is just "crouch and hope." I'm going to make the approach visible before the animal shows itself (rustling grass, footsteps getting louder) and let you hold your aim while crouched so a steady first shot hits harder once it starts eating. Should turn the wait into a "don't move" moment instead of dead time. Will be in the next build.

Thank you! I'm glad the direction makes sense to you. The flock and herd behavior is one of the parts I'm most excited about — the goal is to make those rare encounters feel like a small event rather than just another catch. I'll share more once the per-habitat variations and weather/time conditions are in a playable state. Thanks again for taking the time to read through it!

Good question, and it's the thing I've been working on most. Right now the approach already changes in a few ways: dangerous species tear nets, so you need the tranq gun and have to deal with them charging you; some species only show up at dawn, at night, or in certain weather; cliff dwellers (goral, lynx, golden eagle) need climbing gear and slow you down on the rock; and the Asia map cuts your gear effectiveness in half, with tracked hunts where you follow calls and prints instead of waiting. Bait is a lure, not a trap — it only lowers an animal's guard for a moment, so a jumpy species in open grassland plays very differently from a slow one in the reeds. Endangered species each have their own condition (a time window, a habitat, sometimes rescuing them from a poacher's snare).

What I'm adding next is more of that per-species and per-habitat: grandpa's camp will become a feeding site that draws certain habitat groups at dawn and dusk, and a sighting log that gives you the exact time/weather/zone conditions for a species' legendary variant. I'd also like flock and herd behavior (spooking one bird spooks the group) and species that react to your dog differently. So the long-term answer is yes — fewer new animals, more different ways to reach them.

1.0.29 is up with all three. Blank name now reads "pass to his grandchild" on the notice and "to my grandchild" on the letters; the HUD order and letter lines measure the text and shrink to 7px before they ever clip, with a wider column in English; the full-map dot key drops to a second line when it won't fit next to the biome key; and the 20 lines that were falling through to Korean are translated (Camp, Ferry, full-map title and legend, the save-code notes and tooltips). The build now diffs TR() literals against STR.en, so a missing line shows up before upload rather than in someone's screenshot. Devlog: 1.0.29. If you spot anything else in the English, I'll take it.

Thanks, this is exactly the kind of thing I couldn't see myself. All three are going into the next build: the blank-name template gets its own branch ("pass to his grandchild" / "To my grandchild,"), the build script will now diff every TR() literal against STR.en so missing English shows up before upload, and the canvas text gets measured and shrunk to fit instead of assuming Korean widths, with the map legend moving to two lines in English. I'll reply here again when it's up.

Hi, I'm a solo dev from Korea and this is my first game.

Deulsup Dogam ("Field & Forest Field Guide") is a free top-down pixel game that runs in the browser. Nothing to install. It opens in Korean: click the small English link under the start buttons on the title screen and everything switches over.
https://dlgkrwn02.itch.io/deulsup-dogam

The loop: you put down bait, back off, and wait. While the animal is busy eating, you sneak into range and shoot it with a net gun (later a tranquilizer, a bola, a stun gun...). Chasing doesn't work. Caught animals go on show in the run-down zoo you inherited from your missing grandfather, and filling in the pages of his torn field guide reveals the letters he left behind, which is also what sends you on to the next continent. 108 species so far across Korea and Asia, 16 of them endangered. Those you can keep in a shelter for donations, or release back into the wild for a bigger payout and reputation.

Full disclosure: it's made with AI (Claude). The code and the pixel art are AI-generated; the design, the direction and 25+ rounds of feedback fixes are mine. If that's a dealbreaker, no hard feelings.

What I'd really like to know after 5–10 minutes:

1. Where do you stop? The most common note from friends was "fun at first, then no reason to keep going". I added the story and the shelter to fix that and I can't tell if it worked.
2. Is the tutorial clear? Earlier testers got stuck on the step where you have to creep into range before shooting.
3. Does the English read okay? I'm not a native speaker. If a line sounds off, I'd rather fix it than leave it.
4. The zoo screen. I'm about to redo it to look more like an actual zoo. What's missing?

Controls: WASD to move, Shift to sneak, mouse to aim and shoot, Space to interact, H for help, L for the letters. F2 opens an in-game feedback box (anonymous, no login).

Thanks. Happy to play and leave feedback on your game in return, just reply with a link.

앗 다시 해볼게요!