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The new character sprite works well, and fits the feel of the game. I like the new indicator for when you can't place a box. The checkpoints are another nice addition. You may want to have them react when activated, such as the screen lighting up, to let the player know something happened. I had not realized what they were until I died on the red laser and respawned.

The "pit of death" sign was amusing. I had not gone that way last time.

I see a message box and control pad to the left of the start that I have not yet figured out how to get to, but otherwise explored what I could. This was a nice update!

This looks like it could be a useful teaching game. The red may be a bit too bright in the middle, but otherwise the colors work well. I like that you have so many languages, and can switch between them while playing. The layout seems OK so far, though without more content it can be hard to really tell how it will end up.

Thanks for playing and the feedback. We've only been doing this full time since April, and there is still a lot to learn, including about writing good devlogs. Jams have been a great opportunity to see what others are doing, and get feedback, that can help us find what we may be missing and improve our own work. And thanks for joining our jam! This is another new experience for us.

This was fun. I really liked how you had both colors and shapes to tell the difference between things. I also liked that the shape on the player was different but similar to the object shape. I liked how you had the object shapes moving in the background; it gave the background texture without drawing too much attention.

The objects randomly moving in different directions took a little getting use to, but once I did they added a fun extra challenge.

The big thing I noticed was if you clicked “Try again!” after losing, the difficulty seemed to be set at the level you last ended at, instead of back to the beginning. Going back to menu and clicking play reset the level back to the beginning.

The idea of this is really cool, though I think the gameplay needs a bit of improvement.

I went into it expecting the dress up and clothing to be a larger part. The way it was described I had thought you would start by dressing up your doll with fairly basic starting options, go into a dungeon where you would fight monsters and collect loot/more clothes, return to change your outfit, and start the loop again. I was a little disappointed to start without any clothing, and it was a little frustrating that I went through multiple casinos before I got my first piece. Starting the game by getting dressed, even if the clothing options were something really basic and minimal, would have helped.

I wasn’t a fan of the casinos. I may have just had a sting of bad luck, but the rewards didn’t really feel worth the costs, particularly as you continued. Getting any clothing felt rather rare and the randomness of it meant I ended up with multiple of the same slot without getting something for each one, getting a single coin wasn’t really worth the cost of the spin, and the saves didn’t really seem worth much given the fact that you kept your clothes between runs. For me, having something like a shop would have felt better. You could have them set to sell 2 – 4 clothing items, randomly picked from a set, with the shops having better and more expensive options the farther you went. That would still allow for some of the randomness while letting the player feel like they had a better chance of succeeding and would show off more of your clothing options. Plus it could also give the player the decisions of whether they wanted to buy something now, and risk not having enough at the next shop, or continue and risk dying and losing all their coins before reaching the next shop.

I wasn’t expecting the card shuffle game to be the dungeon run, but I think it worked. I liked that you had a minimum number of cards you had to flip over, but could keep flipping cards until you got everything you wanted. I liked the different ways you used to increase the difficulty level, instead of just speeding things up. The first time the cards had a little more flourish to their movement tripped me up a bit, which I felt was a nice touch and made me focus a little more. I also like that it left me with the feeling of trying to be stealthy and sneak through a room instead of trying to fight off the monsters in it. It’s a nice take on a dungeon crawl.

Making it clearer when you could use a clothing ability would have been helpful. I had a bit of trouble figuring out how to use the shirt I got (slow down the next level), and it wasn’t always clear when I had selected something or not.

I think you have a cool and creative idea here.

I am not familiar with Hercule Poirot, so I can’t speak to how closely it fits in that regard. I enjoyed the story; it’s something that can stand on its own instead of needing to already know the characters. It had a very cozy vibe to it. The stakes felt fairly low, but it still felt good to solve the puzzle and figure out the correct answer.

There were a couple of points where I think it would have been nice if there had been a little more description. For example, when I wrote “Listen to Poirot” near the end, it might have been nice if you had talked about something like the sound of him cooking dinner instead of “I heard nothing unexpected.” From a gameplay point of view, “nothing unexpected” is a good way to convey to the player that this was unimportant and made sense; from a story telling point of view, I would have enjoyed that little bit of extra immersion.

I think you did a good job with this.

I don't know GameMaker, so I'm not sure if this will be of any help. When we did a tower defense game, we had each tower store an array of enemies that were in range, updating as they entered and exited. When firing, or each frame, the tower would loop through the array and pick the best target based on the stat that was chosen for targeting. 

Thanks for playing and the feedback.

I've seen a few games do the speed up when pressing forward at the middle, and after playing our original jam version a few times, it felt like a good fit. I'm glad to hear it is liked.

We'll take another look at the ship and see about making it stand out more. I can see how the lack of contrast is an issue.

The larger green ships are armored and take extra hits, but just go straight. They were meant to add some variety to the enemies, even if they are generally less of a threat.

I'll take a look at the bug of not being able to jump back from the station. My guess is that it somehow spawned the station more than once, such as from a double click. There should have been checks for that, but something may have been missed.

Thanks for playing and such detailed feedback!

This game has grown since our original plan, but was intended to simplify certain things and be a bit faster paced than a typical RPG. The linear auto-movement was one of the choices for this, rather than free exploring. We are releasing this on mobile as well as desktop, so everything is designed to work on both, which can sometimes limit our options, or require creative solutions. There are several features yet to be added that will give the player more to do. Towns are planned to get more interactive components. Some will be tied to events, but we also want to add shops, taverns for additional flavor text and quests, and the inn being optional, possibly with a cost. You will also interact with the Traders to decide how much and what loot goes back to your clan, rather than just saying things are sent back. We also have an idea we want to implement that we expect will take a lot, but would add a lot. You will be able to use items out of combat on the inventory screen, but will have a hunger/fullness stat that limits how much you can eat. Actions in combat, and walking, will use up energy, reducing fullness, and allowing you to eat more. This system is tied to consuming items having additional effects, such as boosting stats, so we don't want players to be able to just eat a bunch between combat and being over-powered for the next fight. There are a lot of details to finish working out for this, but we do want there to be more for the player to do between the fights.

We have heard others comment on there being too much info at once. We are working on an upgraded tutorial based on popups next to each area with basic details, instead of the large amounts of text at once. There will also be a tutorial for the inventory (post combat) screen. We also plan to add some tips into the flavor text, such as when you get the first few berry bushes it will mention who is best suited to that berry's affinity. We will see about rewording the tutorial text on the Guardian ability. It guards all other party members from all single target attacks for the turn (enemies will change their targets to Tanko when it is used). The upgraded version, which you get at town 10 (not in the current demo) protects everyone else from all attacks, including group targeting spells.

We will correct the berry descriptions. The text "A berry that enhances your spit" was our original placeholder text and had been updated, but must have been reverted at some point.

Currently the settings are not accessible after starting as some of them are only read at the start. We need to rework things a bit before we can offer them in-game.

The icons showing the enemy actions and targets were requested in earlier jams, and sounded like a good idea. They can be disabled in the settings for a different play style. We do plan to have some enemies later that can conceal or deceive with the icons. There is a final boss for the game (at level 20), which was in our earlier versions before we started adding story. The boss does have a couple extra abilities, and we will be expanding that system to add more abilities to other enemies. The original jam theme was "Consume", and we had planned the game to be all characters on both sides just using items. Then one of the kids asked if the players could be Slimes, and we changed it to them eating the items, and freed the enemies to have normal attacks and other abilities. We just haven't implemented many yet, party due to the low level enemies not having need for them.

Thanks again for the great feedback!

I am playing this on Linux using Wine.

In the tutorial, it would help if you could add something to show what icon you are introducing and asking people to use for the first time. Either highlight the actual icon/button when it is mentioned the first time, or include an image of the icon in the dialog box. The icons are reasonably intuitive, and there are not many, so it can be figured out, but it would be nice to have.

The "Create quest" button could use a bit more contrast with the background. The Quests UI could use some work to improve clarity overall. The color picker felt really tiny on my screen. I understand that it is new, and that theming can take a lot of time, but a basic first pass to give some contrast and basic margins, would help a lot with readability/usability.

While adding UI elements, such as buttons, as prerequisites are met can work, there needs to be some guidance on what is still to be done. As I worked through adding the first Quest and Quest Category I got to the screen where you can eventually "Lock in quest". It was not immediately clear that I had to fill in the "Estimate Pomodoros" field to proceed. I was looking for the button to save and continue. Rather than hiding it, I think it would be better to show it, but have it disabled. It will help those like me who want to see where the button is and understand the screen before proceeding with doing anything. This is another nice to have for the future thing, but adding a highlight of some sort on the things that still need to be done to continue, would also help.

I added the quest and then minimized it and did other things. When I came back, nothing seemed to have happened. I appear to have missed pressing “Start pomodoro”. That button should be more prominent, and needs to change (such as being disabled) once started to give a clear indication it worked/is in progress.

I think the new Quest system is a good idea and has a decent start, but in its current state it is not intuitive.

It would be nice if there was a way to reset your progress, or at least pull the tutorial back up. I manually cleared the save data so I could start over to be accurate on my comments about it.

You have 3 “Resources”, with Knowledge in the middle. It looks like Knowledge is not consumed when placing things. I would include some wording about this. It looks like the Building screen is a shop and you spend Knowledge there, but none was consumed when I placed things. With it being mentioned as a resource alongside 2 others that do get consumed, and being in the middle of them, it feels like an explicit explanation about which are consumed vs not might be helpful in a tutorial.

After placing the cauldron, the character moves to the right side of it. When I placed it to the right of the character, the moved over and kept faceing to the side, with their back to the cauldron. I did not see any mention this would happen, and could affect how people place it. I also do not see how to move the character around. With much of this idler being about deigning and placing things, I think that being able to position your character would be an important feature. When I clicked on them they jump up, and go back to their starting square for a second before returning to the one they had moved to.

I hope this doesn’t come across to harshly, since it is mostly pointing out things I’d change. I know there was a big change made, and there is a lot in progress. I think you are heading in the right direction.

I like the changes since I last played. The circle showing tower range is nice. The tutorial having 2 options and clearly saying how to end it is helpful.

When trying to change settings, I found that I could only click on the left half of the words for Full-Screen and Stretch Screen. The setting did have hover effects, so I was able tell where to click when I moved the mouse around after it did not work. I initially clicked on the checkbox.

Level 3 felt like a significant jump in difficulty. I had to redo it many times to find a strategy that could win, and still lost some HP. I found this one to be the most difficult for me, and took the most tries to beat. I think you introduced too many things there. You had enemies from 2 directions, armored enemies, and fast enemies.

Armor damaging towers should favor targeting armored opponents. It was frustrating how often the armored enemies pass by untouched by those they could destroy armor, yet being hit by towers that could not damage them. Similarly, for level 8 the start and end being so close had many towers hitting newly entered enemies, when the priority there should be the ones closer to the end. It was hard to position towers well to both get their maximum range/effectiveness, but also have them focus on the lead enemies that were the greatest threat at the time. Maybe move the starting path up 1 tile, so the tower placed on the bottom tile will have more time to focus on the enemies close to the end. I’m sure this challenge was meant to be part of the design, but the way the towers target enemies made it more frustrating, than a fun challenge.

Level 6 felt far too easy, especially compared to the difficulty of level 3. I often had a lot of currency sitting around as I decided what might be worth adding.

It would be nice to know how much each upgrade was going to cost. I only did the basic tutorial, and forgot that upgrades were in the game, so didn’t even look at them until around level 7 or 8. Even then, I did not use them much.

The fire tower numbers do not change when upgrading.

Overall, this felt like a nice set of improvements. The game is progressing well.

Based on your decision to report my reply, rather than having a discussion and providing any information on the work you have done, I am not going to wait for the rest of the original 24 hours deadline. All we asked was for you to explain what you did. If you cannot explain even 1 thing you did, then we must treat this as submitting someone else's work. Your submission will be removed and you will be banned from our jams.

No, you did not explain anything. I do not know even 1 single thing that you have done to the work done by others. As far as I can tell you are trying to pass off the work of Eaglercraft as your own. I have asked you to explain what work you did on that base, and you have not done so. Simply saying it is a "remake" does not explain what work you did. Your submission is clearly calling to their websites for its data. There is no question your submission is using their code, yet you do not mention anywhere that you are doing so. In fact, your post here is titled "i made a recreation of minecraft", very much trying to claim that you did all of the work yourself. You also ignored my comment that you need to give them proper credit for their work that you are using as your base. I checked your page and do not see any credit being given.

Our requirement stands. If you wish to remain in our jam, then you must give credit for the work of others that you are building on, and then explain what you did to build upon it during the jam period. If you refuse to do so, then you will be removed. I will also assume that you have done no work of your own and are simply trying to pass off their work as your own. You will be banned.

Thanks for playing and the feedback.

This was our first project as we transitioned to doing game dev full time, and lacks a lot of the polish we have learned to include with our more recent work. Submitting to these jams was to get some fresh eyes on it and see what we missed. I agree that the settings could use more details. We will start by adding some tooltips to help clarify what each does.

The official version of Eaglercraft is at https://eaglercraft.com . According to the console your project is calling to that project. If you have forked that project and done work of your own, then please explain what you have done. You must also give credit to the original authors and not claim that this is all your own work. If you have not done so within 24 hours this submission will be removed and you will be banned for trying to claim credit for the work of others. I will be posting this in the comments of the rating page, and in reply to your post in Community. You may reply in either location, but please start by updating your project page to list proper credit.

Sorry, but I don't understand from your reply what is different. This jam is about the work you do during the jam period. If you are taking someone else's work and building on it, then we need to know what you did. If you are just hosting a copy of someone else's work, then that does not qualify for this jam, and it will need to be removed.

You should also be crediting the original creators for your use of their work, rather than saying you created this and implying it was all on your own.

It would greatly help people in reviewing and giving feedback if you could provide some detail on the work you've done during the jam period. To start, how is your version of Eaglecraft v1.8.8 different from the version by LAX1DUDE?

This is a good start. I played twice. The first time I explored the tides and reached a soft lock where no choices seemed to let me advance. The second time I followed the amulet and was able to play through to the end, choosing the self-sacrifice option.

The main thing I noticed is that there were a lot of buttons that seemed to do nothing.

The relics changed the text in the top section to include "Examining" and the name of the item, but I did not see anything else happen. 

Some of the options in the story area seemed to raise stats in the Soul of the Heir section, but otherwise did not do anything, such as showing flavor text about what happened. It would be nice if there was some story/flavor text, or even just a popup mentioning what happened, or other indicator by the stats that changed, such as a glow effect, to draw the eye. I did not notice them changing early on as I was figuring things out and just had that flicker of something in the area, but not certain if anything changed, and if so, what.

Similarly, it would be nice if any buttons that did nothing, including those you had clicked and are no longer useful, were disabled or greyed out. I think some of the buttons that seemed to do nothing may have been from stats that were already maxed, or at minimum. I did noticed that if a button raised stats I could just keep clicking it to max the stat, and then it did nothing when clicked.

Thanks for playing and the feedback.

The core is in place, but more is planned for the towns. Instead of just having dialog about sending food back, you will be able to send some of you old loot back to feed the clan, and boost their winter supplies. We are hoping to implement a system that will rate what you have sent back and have benefits for sending back more and better loot, forcing the player to balance what to keep for use and what to send to the clan. A shop is also on the list, though needs to be balanced with sending things back. Now that the quest system has been initially implemented, we will add more quests, and are planning more interactions in towns, instead of just the scripted events, leveling up and moving on.

I'll look into the new game bug. It should have been checking, but I must have missed something.

Part of our issue with splitting the tutorial up is making it mesh with the story. We really liked having the trainer in the town teach, but have had enough feedback that it is too much at once. We will probably make the current training tutorial optional for those that want to do it, and add an alternative system that is more progressive as you play.

Godot's remapping is a little odd, but also pretty powerful, and very friendly to other keyboard layouts. We've had comments about how it worked out of the box with non-QWERTY layouts, and we did not do anything special for it. When we looked into setting up remapping, all the tutorials we found focused on only a single input, and we wanted to have at least 3, preferably 4, so we had to work up our own solution. Since then we've found other options. You may want to check out the Game Template by  Maack: https://github.com/Maaack/Godot-Game-Template . We don't use it ourselves, as we had already created our own template by the time we saw this in the Godot Wild Jam Discord's resources, but it has a lot of nice features, including remapping with up to 3 inputs per Action. Even if you don't use the template itself, it may help with designing your remapping.

Thanks for playing and the feedback. 

We try to make all of our games mobile friendly, and as accessible as possible to all input methods. They don't always make it into the initial jam version, but we keep it in the plan until it can be implemented. We've got a basic on screen controls template that we've been refining with each game, which helps to speed it up now.

Those are both good points.

Originally we only had the 1 ship stats button and it did not need the middle section. The other 2 were among the latest update, and just copied the logic for the ship stats, but using the middle will give more space for other buttons on the left. 

I made sure to clear the old info on the right when selecting from the left, but auto selecting your current component and showing its info would be more user friendly.

Thanks for playing and the feedback.

We left the upgrades open so players can decide if they go for the quick incremental upgrades as soon as they can afford them, requiring more money overall, or save up for the bigger ones to save money. Currently we tend to start with a few of the smaller upgrades, and then save up for the final versions. We are debating a system to give you a partial credit for your previous gear when upgrading, and adjusting the prices up, to encourage players to feel like they can do more incremental upgrades.

Thanks for playing and the feedback.

The Quest Log is mostly flavor text at this point. The story so far is linear, and the "Quests" were previously just mentioned in the dialog. This allowed us to remove them from the main story dialog boxes, to help things flow better, and make them stand out as their own thing. Adding a place to see them was partly to have it feel more important, and partly to let you see your progress, especially for the main food quest. We will be updating things so that you decide how much of your loot gets sent back as food, with different tiers of success on the main quest of finding food for your clan. We are still debating if there will be optional quests.

Thanks for playing and the feedback!

We are working on redoing the tutorial, and trying to figure out how to add bits of it later, while still fitting it into the story. One planned change is to add a popup based tutorial for the inventory and combat that will highlight each section with a brief description. We are also looking to add some dialog later reminding players of key info, such as giving items with matching affinities to each Slime to boost their effectiveness. The semi-random berry bushes will probably get an update mentioning who the berry is best for. The fight with the knight is much easier if your Slimes are properly equipped with matched affinity items. We did not do a good job of encouraging players to mess with the affinities up to that point, which makes the fight harder. That fight had also been the end of the content when we started adding story, so was meant to be a challenge. As we add more story we will reduce the difficulty of the fight a bit so it is not such a big jump.

We are doing the art ourselves for this game. We started with some public domain assets, and a recent update was swapping to our own art. We are still fairly new at pixel art, but are working to improve it. This game has a lot of items, requiring a lot of art, so getting everything replaced took a lot of time, and we did not get as much refining done as we wanted.

I'll take a look at the drag and drop. Were you dropping onto a slot, or just into empty space in the bag?

The game had a nice retro Game Boy feel to it. It could use with some guidance on the controls and how to play. I got past the main screen with pressing Enter, and could move around with arrows or WASD, but the tried Space and Enter, before moving on to randomly pressing buttons to find what did something. I found Z to be the main action button. If there is a cancel button, I didn't find it. You could just list the controls on the game page.

I ran into some bugs while playing. After getting bait and doing some fishing I got the message about being out of bait, but pressing Z to advance the dialog, then tried to fish again, in a loop. I manged to escape by hitting Z and immediately pressing W to go up and away. At that point I also got a message about having caught something, even though I'd been getting messages about being out of bait. When I wen to get more bait I was told I was already baited. I'm not sure if there was more to the game, or some kind of score shown at some point. With the bugs, I ended it there.

This seems like a decent start for a game template. I like that you have music and SFX for the volume settings. One thing that stood out was the movement of the main menu. While it may have been an intentional effect, it would be nicer if the buttons stayed in place to make it easier to click on what you want. The buttons are big, so it is not a major issue, but for accessibility it would be best if your main menus are easy to use and not moving about.

I got through two portals and spoke with the sun-like being that turned into light balls. Then I wasn't sure where to go and jumped off the edge into an unending fall. The general idea seems like it could turn into a decent game. The biggest thing that stood out to me was reaching a point where I wan't sure where to go, and when I fell it was unending. It would help if you added something to detect the player has fallen beyond the play field and restart them somewhere, or give a game over screen with a button to do so. A bit more guidance on where the player should go and being able to see the next ledge would also be appreciated. One other thing that stood out was that the starting dialog used space to proceed, but the in game dialog used E. For consistency it would be good it space worked for the in game dialog as well. I did restart once and when I tried to press L to skip it did not initially seem to work. I pressed space to advance the dialog and the tried L with and without holding Shift, and at some point it did skip the rest.

It was interesting playing solo and trying to manage 2 ships. Once I got a feel for the basics I kept one near the station to collect, while the other went out to explore. I lost the one that was out further. There was a message that the other could revive the lost ship, but  never figured out how to do that. I did find that I could do upgrades at the station, but none of the options seemed to be repair of the companion ship. I think this could use with a bit of a tutorial to teach the basics, including buying and placing upgrades, and repairs. I was not always sure which upgrades were for my ship and which were turrets. Initially I did not realize some were placeable turrets and bought a bunch  when I first found how to get upgrades, which got dumped when I hit the button without knowing what it would do.

This was a fun little puzzle game. You did a decent job with the level progression, though I think you might have benefited from having a few more levels to help slowly introduce some of the concepts. For example, you could have a level between 3 and 4 where you introduce the water tiles with a slightly easier puzzle. A few more levels at the end, once you’ve introduced all your concepts would be fun as well. I was having fun and would have enjoyed more.

The timer option was a nice touch. I liked that it was off by default, so that the base game has a slightly more laid back feeling while still giving you an in-game ability to see how long it took you to do any given puzzle. It was also nice that the game kept track of the time, even if you didn’t have the timer active, so you could go back and see your highest scores afterwards.

I think you have a good base here and that it has potential for more.

This was eerie in the way a good physiological thriller should be. Everything felt just slightly off, even if someone couldn’t explain exactly why it felt that way. You did a good job with the visuals and the hints of story throughout left me wanting to figure out what had happened.

I definitely had to think outside the box with some of the puzzles. Some I was able to solve fairly easily, while others I was glad you gave some hints to help with them. I got one of the endings, and some of the clues for a different one, though I haven’t been able to piece them together to figure out what I’m suppose to do next yet. I may give it a couple of days and come back to it to see if coming at it fresh might help me see what I’m missing.

I think the volume could have done with a little bit of normalizing. I found the intro, before I could adjust the volume setting in game, to be really loud, and there were a couple of other points where the volume felt really loud compared to everything else. The sounds themselves worked well for the game, I just found myself adjusting a few times in order to make the game more enjoyable for me.

This was a cute retelling of Sleeping Beauty. It was fun playing with the genders swapped. The prince was a sweetheart, and I liked that his core sweetness remained with each of the different endings. I felt each of the different endings worked well, and it felt like my decisions had an impact on the ending. I liked that you included the percentage of the story you uncovered, to encourage multiple playthroughs to try to get that 100%.

The art was well done. The different facial expressions on the prince were delightful. You did a great job conveying his emotions. It was also really nice that you gave different options for your character’s skin tone. Being able to type a name was also a nice touch, though there were a couple of points where my character called the prince by the default name instead of the name I used for him.

I would love for there to be more story, something like a game that takes place between when she left and when she returned. The idea of the phantom thief legacy was intriguing, and I would enjoy learning more about it and how Leslie got involved. Was she born into it? Was she found by someone and taken in to be taught? How did she find the items she was looking for and return them to their rightful place? How long has the phantom thief been around and how was it started? So many questions and I’d love to learn more.

This was a cozy and comfy puzzle game. The graphics were nice, the cat was adorable, and using the outline of a cat to show that Maple wasn’t there was a nice touch.

The puzzles felt good; they were that right balance of hard enough to make you think without being so hard as to feel frustrating. I think it might have been nice if there was a way to zoom out so you could see the whole puzzle, to help with planning and making sure you know where your cat is, without having the pause menu covering part of the puzzle.

The movement felt okay. There were a couple of times where I thought I was in the right position to push a pumpkin, but was a little off and had to adjust. It didn’t feel too bad, particularly since the game wasn’t timing based, but it was something I noticed while playing.

The ending was very sweet. It was a lovely way to finish an enjoyable game.

Thanks for playing and the feedback.

We are working to optimize the tutorial. There is a lot to cover, but also want it to flow better.  We plan to try some alternatives such as popups showing different info, and adding a help screen accessible later for a refresher. We will also add an in-game skip in addition to the setting to skip it. The affinities are a big pain point for conveying important info, but also something that isn't as important early on. That mini-boss fight with the knight is the first fight where they can really shine. We may add something later on, but before that fight, about them as a reminder to equip the Slimes with the things that match their affinities to be better prepared for it.

I played a bit. From the start I would randomly get black squares showing up in place of the water, and even blocking the ship. Eventually much of the screen was black.

After a bit I saw the enemy ships in the distance and the note to press F, which I did, and headed towards them. I tried the various controls listed at the bottom right and then tried space and clicking the mouse to fire, as that was not listed anywhere I saw. It took a few tries before I noticed the smoke from the guns to indicate they were firing. It took longer before I acknowledged the targeting icons changing from a plus to a progress circle after firing to show the cooldown. While the indicators do work once you know to look at them, they are small, and with the guns not making any sounds when they fire, if you miss that they fired while looking for what buttons to press to fire, it can be a bit problematic. It would help if you added mention of using the left mouse button to fire, along with the reticle icons changing to show the cooldown before you can fire again. Adding mention of the various guns you have and that they may have different ranges and cooldowns would also be helpful. This can be on the game page to start and does not need to be in game yet.

I played twice. The first time I was messing with things and learning some of the controls. Eventually I think I was destroyed as there was a lot of red, but the screen was also very black by that point. I'm not sure if I ever hit the enemy as I had not noticed the enemy health numbers and was mainly focused on learning how the firing worked. The second time I paid more attention to the enemy ships and that is when I figured out the targeting reticles showing the cooldown and also saw the enemy health. That time I was able to take the first ship down to 0%. I then had to press F to unlock the target and again to target the second ship, which I was also able to bring down to 0%. While writing this comment I went back and forth several times and eventually saw some stats, including the 2 ships sunk, popping up when I moused over the Resume option. It would be nice if those stats were always shown on the pause screen, unless there is other data that needs to show. Currently nothing else shows up, so having the stats there always would be nice.

I think the next thing to focus on would be improving the basic user experience so people can play enough to give more feedback. This is largely what I mentioned above about giving more details on how to play. It would be nice if the enemy info was easier to see. Perhaps adding a HUD with info on the targeted ship. Simiarly, a HUD showing your weapon cooldowns more clearly might be nice, though once you know what to look for it is not too bad as it currently is. Adding firing sounds, or making the guns firing more obvious could also help. Once the basic UI/feedback is in place, I'd work on the shooting a bit more to give more to work with when working on the strategy.

The game was pretty easy to pick up with a bit of playing, though could still benefit from a bit more details on what things are used for/do. Is there a benefit from more crew? Can you get anything other than gold from exploring islands? What does the spyglass do?

When I first started I was surrounded and destroyed pretty quickly. The second try I ran as soon as I started and slowly figured things out. That playthrough I quickly was able to upgrade the ship to max and felt like I ran out of things to do. The islands just gave gold, which seems to only be used to buy temporary upgrades such as a shield, which I didn't need, and a spyglass, that I'm not sure what it does. There looked to be status/informational indicators that I had these and time remaining for them on the left side, but it was flickering and showed faintly making it hard to read. I sailed around for a bit trying things out and getting a score over 1300, before getting bored of simply wiping out everything I came across without a challenge. The game could use with a better difficulty progression. The start should give you at least a little time to get your bearings before sending in enemies. Late game needs more to do to challenge the player.

The game was also fairly laggy. It was playable, but could use optimizing, as the regular lagging was annoying.

I think that having an indication that it could not drop would be fine, especially if the instructions mention that it requires a clear space, and you have a sprite showing the direction you are facing.

The map seems reasonably clear. The one on the left is the easiest, and the deliveries get harder as you progress to the right. I only managed the first, but assume that getting all 3 would unlock the forth. Adding additional details such as how much money you get from a delivery, as well as showing your current total cash, would be good. It would also be nice to see the deliveries you've completed marked on the map.

I never quite got the hang of the kicking. It felt like sometimes I'd barely get the box to move, and then I get a "lucky" hit and launch it down the hallway, usually past the turn I needed to take. I found a single kick almost never moved it far and I need to kick once to lift it up and then again to move it, but the timing and angle of that second kick had a big impact. I never quite felt fully in control. I managed to get close to delivering the second package several times, and once thought I'd made it, but it did not show as delivered, so I must have still been a bit off from the target zone.

The game was pretty easy to pick up, and the tutorial was a nice addition. It would be nice if the tutorial showed each of the equipment options and mentioned their benefits, so players could test them out there. The bouncing bullets were a nice surprise when choosing the pistol. It felt like the player was a bit big for the play space. It did add to the difficulty, so I can see that being intentional. One thing that I would have liked would be for the melee attack to be usable with the right mouse button. Since the primary attack is left click, it intuitively makes sense for the secondary one to be right click, and I often found myself starting to right click for the melee attack before remembering it was a keyboard key. Similarly, having the special ability tied to middle mouse would be nice, though with that being more limited use is less important than the melee attack.

It took a bit, and several deaths, to figure out that I could reattach to the machine. I only went back after finding the wrench to see if I could use it on the machine. After that it was pretty straightforward what to do. I only died once after that when I was heading back and saw one more piece to collect, that cost me the last seconds I needed to make it back. I only got the initial Idle upgrades, as that was the least important to me for playing, and then they were removed after getting all the others. It would have been nice if that had remained as an option when the other one was added, as I would have maxed out all of them before choosing the final option, but didn't feel like restarting to try getting them in a different order. I know it was mentioned that there are 2 endings, so my guess is either that you need to max out all the others, including idle, before the final option, or that there is something else to find. Overall, a pretty good game.

It would have been nice if there was an additional upgrade for the navigation that caused the indicators to be sized based on how far away the target was, so you could prioritize them by distance.