itch.io

Cute game. Here are my criticisms:

The font is just too much. How do S and Z both look like an I? But I looks like an =.

I broke the game at some point by clicking the next node on the world map, then another that I had noticed became enabled for the animation. I had clicked the next fight node, then the reward branch I hadn't picked before. I completed the fight, then ended up stuck at the reward branch on the journey map with nowhere to go.

In my opinion, economy upgrades in games like this are always boring. I also wasn't really sure what upgrading range or speed was good for most of the time. Everyone seemed fast or ranged enough.

I was thinking maybe there could be obstacles you need to design your vehicle to overcome, or blocks you have incentive to drill first or last.

If evasion is actually simply your chance of avoiding any given attack, and defence is a fraction the damage is reduced by, both seem virtually worthless in the early game.

I suspect that maybe you realized they become extremely powerful at high values, so you wanted them to grow slowly. But now their usefulness curve makes them practically irrelevant early and then late game (if not limited) they suddenly shoot up to damage immunity.

There are functions out there that exist to help make their usefulness more linear with their numerical value. Basically what you care about is their impact on effective hitpoints (EHP).

Are you okay?

Right up my alley as a concept, but it doesn't really work as a game. There is no reason to ever do anything but wall of drills. Fuel tanks are irrelevant because of the coal upgrade not being bound by them. If fuel tanks ever became useful, the next strat is just a mass of fuel tanks behind the wall of drills. There is never any reason to use structural blocks, or pistons, or more than one magnet. Not sure what sticky wheels do.

I will try this again if it gets updates.

Cute game. Here are my criticisms:

The tutorial broke on me. It told me to upgrade the weapon, I upgraded damage. It didn't acknowledge that I had upgraded it. Then when I clicked the system slot, it just gave me the tutorial for equipping one. But then it gave it again, when I clicked the other system slot. And it gave other tutorials again as well, until I had beaten two waves, then they finally just stopped coming up at all.

I think the shop broke at some point. It started only ever giving me Hull Reinforcement, Pulse Laser, and I think Reactive Hull. This happened after (somehow) unlocking a bunch of things, which I never ended up seeing.

The first run was a little too long for me, especially because I didn't realise I was working towards unlocking new things with my actions. I think I would have been more interested if that had been communicated to me. I did eventually unlock things but I had no idea what I had done to unlock them.

Lots of things are just a bit unclear, including the UI itself, but you probably know that already.

Wow, do not unlock any dial on the second row. It slows down your income immensely.

Cute game. Although the plant upgrades never seemed relevant, and there is no way to spare useful plants.

There is some bug causing stuttery audio and gameplay on the main menu and in the game but not in the upgrade menu. I played in Chrome. I'll try this again once you fix it.

The gameplay doesn't really change over time. Many of the upgrades are just economy upgrades that change nothing about how you play, and any exceptions have really small effects. Even the dogs don't really change anything since you can't trust them to go for a given sheep. At best they reduce how many you miss.

In fact the dogs might be a little bugged with how many sheep they'll ignore. I don't know if there's a deliberate cooldown or what.

So crafting circuit boards upgrades the research production thing automatically? That was not clear to me.

This seems to skip over the thing I am actually stuck on. I don't have those numbers you get in the bottom left of the control center, with the T input field. It just says "Access denied".

Some buttons behave oddly. The crafting x1 x5 x10 buttons flicker on mouseover and will usually fail to respond to my click. The intercept button also rarely works. Everything else seems to work fine.

The sound for raising the tech tier is horrible.

I am playing in Chrome on PC.

I cannot find the action "Insert Circuit Board" leaving me with very little to do but wait for science on that tech level and the next.

Cute.

Too much clicking early game for my tastes, but pretty quickly you can stop doing it. Though that will block some late game unlocks.

Way too much explanation for my tastes as well.

The second additional spell is basically a worse version of the first. Maybe swap it with bomb and/or make it more interesting.

Kind of peters out in the late game and I lost interest before finishing everything.

I probably would find it cooler if it weren't based on these sort of sessions you finish, and instead you could travel between zones by clicking the roads and ladders and such, and you could look at the orders and such any time. Maybe the zones could be unlocked by potions that are unlocked by prestige levels, rather than the prestige levels themselves, with some implied story that you need that potion to overcome some obstacle to travelling there.

Also, I couldn't help but notice each character has a little blurb but it has nothing to do whatsoever with what potions they ask for, even though it sounds like it should.

I was pleasantly surprised when I unlocked the second ship and I didn't have to choose between them. Then a bit disappointed when it turned out there were only two ships!

I hope in the late game there will be some upgrade that lets you go back and forth between the ships as lives are lost.

Playing in Chrome, at dinner time, and maybe already a bit at second snack time, the physics just seem to break down. The game slows to a crawl, but it seems like different components of the game don't slow down in sync. Things that shouldn't really be possible start happening, like projectiles bouncing off nothing while chunks hang still in the air.

I think it would be a step in the right direction if the player could own multiple ships, even if he can only fly one at a time. I want to have a scout ship, a pirate hunting ship, and a mining ship, but I don't want to actually deal with the money loss each time I change ships or parts.

Cute take on the genre.

Here are some things I noticed:

It became very unclear over time what the best picture would be. There are so many factors I can't all keep track of, and so many things I don't know the interaction of. This isn't necessarily a problem, but I think a little score breakdown of why a particular picture, or just the best picture, got the score it did, would go a long way.

Dandelion field and fall area both say "Your photos get x1.5 currency" so it is unclear what the point of dandelion field is.

I don't know what "x10 900 per photo" means.

After dandelion field, follower gain becomes a bottleneck, with several runs required with no upgrades to reach the next goal. After that next goal I could buy out almost every upgrade unlocked past it with other currencies, only to have to grind for followers again.

I feel like I was vaguely punished for buying loot boxes before maxing the slots in them, since the cost goes up exponentially and I can't go back and get the extra items from the old boxes.

Opening many loot boxes was tedious and meant I ended up never reading any of the actual outcomes.

There doesn't seem to be anywhere to read what you have in terms of cats or items. You also can only read what they do when you get one.

The 3D environment is unnecessary but very cool and that's a big thing that I like in video games. I only wish that it were larger somehow, with more to discover over time. And maybe the "prestige" concept can be dressed up as taking the ship to different places.

As for the core gameplay, the upgrades felt a bit linear. There isn't that much choice at any given point and often some of the options available are clearly much worse than others. Also, I really don't like when a game makes me mash a mouse button. I would much prefer some minigame for energy recharging, or even just turning a wheel (hold click and move mouse in small circles) or something.

You can make infinite money without in-game time passing by buying a "scarce" item, making it go "critical", then selling it back, repeatedly.

The grains are the seeds.

It's charming. I played to what I guess is the end of the demo. My main criticism so far is that the energy system is painfully opaque. It is very unclear what the practical impact of any of the energy-related upgrades is.

I beat the game only ever putting points into luck. It seemed much more relevant to progression than corral size. I finished with 7/10 luck because towards the end I stopped prestiging since it didn't seem like it would get me back where I was quickly enough to be worth anything. And I suppose I got moderately lucky to get all the colours in the last two corrals in one try.

You should not incentivise players to farm levels they have already beaten. In fact I wouldn't even allow it. Instead you should make sure the first part of the next level is doable and rewarding for players who did the entire previous level. Rewards don't seem to go up at all with missions, which is odd.

For me it doesn't really matter what the game has you build there, as long as it challenges you to acquire the space for it. But if you want brainstorming: a large crafting station. A large harpoon gun to catch some objects farther out. A fast travel station (human cannon?). A wind turbine energy source. A drill that mines the cliff. I do like the idea of some special plant requiring the space, too.

The idea being any of these would be required for progression. Except maybe the fast travel, which players would build regardless.

This is a very charming, fresh take on an existing concept.

Here are my criticisms:

The start seemed glitchy. I had one soul but had to go get another just to feed the tree its first one.

The pacing was awkward. Early game I had to do several runs without any upgrades that change how the run goes. Late game I could buy my way through several levels of a newly unlocked artifact.

The first round of artifacts only give you economy bonuses, which at that point don't let you buy anything except economy bonuses.

The Dark Cemetery, for me, performed just a little bit worse than the Enchanted Forest, all game long.

The plant growing aspect was unintuitive, with the plants fruiting then wilting, unharvested, while I wasn't even looking at them. And now that I did figure it out, it seems like it is not useful at all. Even if harvesting always worked, you have to waste valuable time in a run collecting plant seeds.

If holding E to deposit as many souls as possible was explained, I missed it. Holding E to gradually deposit many over time would be more intuitive anyway.

Maybe this is a nitpick but I think the tutorial signs damage the charming atmosphere.

Maybe I am easily entertained when it comes to sandbox building games, but I thought this twist was quite cool.

Here's where I would take it:

Have interesting features on the cliff, like little ledges, small hollows, interesting plants or abandoned structures. Some could be hidden from view at first by the geometry of the cliff.

Lean into a global grid, so pre-existing features can be placed grid-aligned where desired.

Play with the structural side of it, like including some rare, finite elements like beams (player-placed or pre-constructed) that allow an occasional larger area or longer reach away from the cliff. Come up with a way that that matters. If you really wanted to play with it, you could introduce support cables.

Remove repairing as a concept. Structures can be either invulnerable or just die if an enemy attacking it is ignored for too long. Or they could self-repair or something. Repairing is not fun.

Alternatively, maybe enemies could go for key infrastructural elements, which the player has some reason to protect. Repairing would be limited to those.