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Thanks for playing and the feedback.

The art is a WIP right now, and more of concept art, than the final vision. We are experimenting with different techniques to see what we like best before updating everything.

We have a new "Training  Hall" that will be added to the town in our next update, which will hopefully help clarify some of the things that have confused people. We are also updating the tutorials to try to make them clearer, though the game is changing quickly and the tutorials don't always keep up.

Thanks for the feedback. We currently have support for skipping sections of dialog, but haven't yet implemented a system for skipping full sections of story. We will keep it in mind as we add more features. Though this is a heavily story driven game, so skipping story is a bit lower on the todo list.

Thanks for playing and the feedback.

We try to be as accessible as we can while still making the game we have in mind. It helped that we started making this for Godot Wild Jam which does rate on and encourage accessibility. Readability is the main reason it took us a while to switch to using a different font, and we spent weeks reviewing them before settling on the current system. 

In our next update the Trainer Terry interactive combat tutorial is being moved to the Settings, and we will be adding a Training Hall to the Town screen, so people can read up on the topics they care about, and skip the others. Eventually we want to merge them so the Training Hall can start mini-combats to try out individual topics, but that will need some new systems first.

We are redoing the combat system. We have had other requests for the strength of abilities and items, instead of just descriptions, and we will design the new system with that in mind.

I agree that requiring the player take the action is better than just describing it, but the current logic doesn't have an easy way to track that for progressing, and it never quite got high enough on the priority list to get implemented. After the combat overhaul it should get added when we update the interactive combat tutorial.

The Inventory screen can be a bit overwhelming at first. It just got a redesign enabling item stacking and using items. We had a Help tab before, but realized as we were getting ready to upload the new build that it was out of date, so it has been hidden until we can update it. One of the options in it is a button to restart the tutorial. There are some more changes we have planned for the inventory, and we will see if we can implement some changes to make the base UI a bit more intuitive as we continue to work on it. The new Training Hall is going to cover more than the Trainer Terry fight, so hopefully some of the tips added there will also clarify things.

It looks like a lot of progress has been made since I last played. The tutorial feels much better, though it still takes playing through to really learn all the pieces. The visibility of the threat and other zones are much easier to see. A lot of text is more readable.

I would recommend adding a slight margin so that text does not run up to the edge of its container. 1 or 2 pixels is likely enough at this scale. You could potentially add a Content Margin to the Panel Style Boxes, or use a Margin Container. Things are much easier to read already, but this is a fairly easy way to make things a bit better.

I like that as the first fight continues more tutorial text shows up to help point out things as the player is learning.

On the level complete popup it would be nice if the buttons for "restart level" and "proceed" had a button look. When you hover it is clear they are interactable, and it is pretty easy to figure that they should be, but they look so much like the rest of the text in there, with only a slight difference in coloring, that a border, or faint background color difference would help to draw they eye. Personally, I'd also make the "PERFECT VICTORY" text centered horizontally.

When Endgame starts it would be nice if you had a popup detailing the changes that are in effect. The text does not give the immediate impression that you should hover it for more details. When it started I had characters lined up well for a push attack, which I used right away, only to see no damage. Only after wasting actions on that did I acknowledge I should hove the text and was reminded of the no damage on your turn limitation.

After clicking through the menu to look at all the options, I clicked on "Start of level". "continue at" was "<null>", and it loaded the combat UI, but there was no game board or characters. That button should probably be disabled if the value is null.

There are a lot of mechanics in this game. I like that you have a mechanics reference on the pause screen, but it is somewhat limited. It would be nice if you added more of the various abilities and mechanics there. You may want to consider using a Foldable Container for the mechanics display. The title/topic can be a toggle button, and when it is clicked it will expand out to show the details, while all others will be closed. This will allow the player to scroll through a longer list of things with a sort of table of contents, and when they see something they want to read more on they click to just expand that, instead of having to scroll through all the text and looking for the headlines to find what they want to read.

Thanks!

Thanks for explaining. We will think on this and see how we might incorporate something into the story.

Thinking on it, that bit of dialog about looking for the camp after the fight came from our earlier game idea of wanting to quickly move to the camp and not wanting a lot of dialog. We've just left it in since then, but it is something we have discussed revisiting at some point, and it tends to just be left in as an easy way if directing the player toward the camp that is coming up. We will see about reviewing all the early dialog leading to the camp, as it does need more work to better fit the way the story has grown.

Thanks for playing and the feedback.

Yes, this grew from a simple fast paced game to more of an RPG. We are reworking a lot to get a grander RPG feel to the game.

Our game is a story driven RPG. Adding characters in later towns does not fit the story, so we have to work with how best to make it feel better within the story limits. We have heard this comment before, and it is why you start with 2 before the optional Trainer Terry tutorial fight, and then meet the rest of the party. We are working on adding a new Training Hall to the Town where you can click on topics to learn more. We are hoping that breaking each piece up will help.

The art is a WIP. We have had others comment on it looking flat as well, and we plan to go back over everything to add more depth and polish.

Thanks again for the feedback.

Thanks for playing and the detailed feedback.

Yes, for now we want it easy so more people can see more of what we have in place.

We are working on redoing the tutorial. We like the idea of having an interactive tutorial, but enough people have said that the current Trainer Terry fight is too much at once, and not clear, especially on the affinities. The affinities affect both offense and defense. In the next update we aim to add a Training Hall to the Town, which will be similar to the Tavern, but with the combat tutorial pieces broken out into clickable buttons so you can read what you want, and reread any if you need to. We will reword things and try to be more clear. It will likely get more wordy, but we are hoping that breaking it up into pieces that people have to choose to click on will make it easier to understand and less overwhelming. We are also considering adding more topics than just combat.

Thanks for the feedback on the new interactions. We are going for a more classic RPG feel, so there are going to be a lot of random NPCs with short world building, or completely unimportant, dialog. It is there for those who want more in the world. We are continuing to refine things and do want the NPCs to be interesting, but they are also, mostly, optional for those who don't like the extra talky bits. We do have the one that adds a minor side quest, and in the future more will have consequences, such as offering quests or items, but these will all be optional and typical of the kind of RPG we are inspired by.

I'm not sure I follow your points on the combat and enemies disappearing. Most classic RPGs don't talk about what they do with the corpses/unconscious enemies after a fight. They just disappear and the party moves on, unless you are collecting body parts in the loot, or you manually loot the corpse after combat as in some ARPGs, and even then the rest of the remains are ignored. Is your issue that the enemies are humans instead of the typical "monster" enemies? Even when there are human enemies the remains usually just disappear and no one talks about what happens to them. I think part of the idea behind it is that showing corpses and specifically talking about what happens to them may cross some lines for ratings. Many RPGs even switched from talking about killing and death to using terms like "unconscious" and "knocked out". You start in areas populated by Slimes, but as you move on you get to areas with human villages, and many with mixing of various races. The humans living in the area are just as in danger from the invaders as the Slimes, and they do talk about defending themselves from these invaders. As we flesh out the story we will likely include more introspection on the amount of death that is happening. We plan to include messages from others about what is going on elsewhere and at those points there will be more about the greater scope of what is happening. The story is already progressing to show the changing mindsets as the youthful innocence of the team wears off and they accept the grim reality of the situation they are in. 

For the core gameplay, we are planning an overhaul of combat to give the player more to do. The original jam concept was meant to be fast and simple; something you could play on mobile on the way to work. With the growing scope the combat feels too simple, and yes, we can see how it can get boring and repetitive. 

With the recent update to item stacks we did change how the belts are filled. We no longer auto fill the belts, but let the players decide what they want. Before, with only 5 slots, you always wanted them full. Now, when you can have large stacks you may only want certain items and don't want the belt cluttered with more. When you use all the items in a stack during combat it will be replaced by the first item from your bag that is not already in your belt. Outside of combat the belt needs to be manually set.

Our original UI was based on click to select and click on new slot to swap. We've since added click and drag support, but retained the original method as well. This is something we need to revisit as it doesn't fit the classic RPG UI, and I can see how it would be confusing. We did this largely for accessibility reasons as it works for joypads and keyboard. We may make it an option that can be enabled when using a joypad or just keyboard.

For item sorting, that is a Godot thing. Sorting arrays in Godot is not "Stable", so rerunning it does not guarantee the same results. Equal values may shift positions on each run. The multi-parameter sorting is more consistent due to the additional values that are compared. We will take a look at the sorting and see if there is a good way to make the single parameter sorts more stable. I have an idea that should work for this.

Sorting by Equipment Slot will be more useful later. Abilities will be affected by certain types of items. For example, some of Tanko's abilities will use armor.

I can see how the combat end collect loot, followed by the chest collect loot, with both opening the inventory might be inconvenient. We will look into adjusting that to only open once there. We did also add an option to turn off auto-opening the inventory after collecting loot. The default for now is to keep it on, so we will want to fix the double open.

Cooldowns will be going away in the combat overhaul. We will keep in mind how best to show the state when we redo it and see if there is a good way to display it without hovering.

I will look into why the cookies might be moved instead of used. I've not seen that before. Can you clarify what you mean by "menu" in "Using a cookie in the menu puts it into the character's inventory instead (but you can use it in the inventory)"? Was it in the shared Party Bag (top section)? The Slime's personal Bag (bottom right)?

Thanks again for the feedback!

Thanks for playing and the feedback.

The inventory filters should save between opening and closing the inventory. The sorting currently does not, which is for performance reasons. The item stacks reduce the number of slots by a lot, so we are looking into the possibility of keeping the sorting always active as well.

We also often keep the left panel showing the full party. With the recent switch to staking items, the bags no longer need so much space, so we are reworking the UI to see how best to keep the most useful elements always visible. The item details at the top right of the inventory was added with the item stack update and used to be part of the shared bag's space.

We are planning to add highlighting and details for matching the items to Slimes. We are still working out the best way to do this, both the calculations of who should be highlighted, and the best UI elements for it. The combat is also going to get an overhaul, so this will likely wait for that to be completed so it best represents the usefulness with the updated systems.

We are working to make the combat icons showing the enemy plans larger. Right now we don't have the space for it, as the bottom row already bumps up against the top row. We need to increase the spacing between rows in combat, or rearrange the icon layout. The larger spacing requires making sure they don't collide with anything on the maps. This is definitely something we want to do, but has turned out to be more of an undertaking than expected.

Glad the tutorials were helpful. We are still working to find the right balance, as many find Trainer Terry to be too much. I have plans on a new alternative to the interactive fight that we will be trying in the near future, while looking for a good way to keep that interactive fight as an option.

We have had several requests for a preview of potential damage and it is something we plan to add with the combat redesign. Not sure if it will preview exact damage, or be a potential range, but we do want to give more feedback to help players pick the best abilities and items.

This was great feedback.

Our jam is about feedback, and improving our games and ourselves. I've not seen anything in your submission so far that violates our rules, so I do not see a need to ban it or you. Since you have learned about jams and are working to improve in the future, you are doing exactly what this jam is all about! We will give your game a play when we do our next round of game plays, which will probably be closer to the end of the month.

I don't have any links handy at the moment, and before I'd share any I'd want to reread them and make sure I was sharing a good one with links to the data from a proper study and a clear explanation. That will take time that I don't have at the moment. I'll try to keep an eye out for any new studies and if I see a good one soon I'll share it. Feel free to do some searching on your own as well. AI is a hot topic these days and there are more studies every day.

Most AI bans refer to the results of Generative AI (Gen AI), Large Language Model (LLM), or Machine Learning. There are several common primary reasons for the ban. One of the most common is due to rights. Most Gen AI contains stolen work. You  must have the rights to everything in your submission, and if you use Gen AI that was trained on materials they did not have the rights too, then you do not have the rights to the results of that creation. Even if they claim to only use their materials to train the AI, nearly all of them use a core that was originally trained on stolen material, and few release all the training data for you to validate the claim. This applies to coding Gen AI as well as graphical art.

For some it is due to the environmental impact. The extreme energy and water use requirements are causing severe harm to the communities where they are built. They consume so much for what they can produce. Being run by big corporations they can get away with these harms and the people in the areas nearby suffer without any recourse. Beyond the local communities, they consume so much, and contaminate the environment so badly, that the effects of the ever growing number of these facilities is affecting everyone.

Another common issue with Gen AI, including from a coding perspective, is that people often use it as a way to not have to learn the topic, do the work, or pay someone to do it. You are getting the results of other people's work that was stolen and not learning or improving yourself. There are plenty of people out there to make a quick buck using AI slop to create a bunch of garbage to sell, and often submit to jams for free publicity. Modern AI very commonly hallucinates and gives you bad information. If you never learned the material in the first place, then you won't know when it lies to you. Buggy, messy code, that is based on the work of others, including work that the AI company did not have the rights to, is being thrown together to create garbage that is then flooding the market. Many jams are about the people who participate doing the work to learn and improve. According to studies, the use of AI harms people's ability to think for themselves and make most only become more reliant on it, rather than learning to do better by using it.

We agree with all of these reasons and do not support Gen AI in any form. Pre-Gen AI things like basic auto complete based on coding standards or what is already in your project are fine. If it is powered by one of the Gen AI companies, then that is not. Getting code from a Gen AI system, whether a chat bot or something built into a tool you are using, is absolutely not allowed.

This feels like a good start for a fishing mini-game. The core mechanics are in place and work pretty well.

The biggest thing that stood out to me is the delay between pressing the left mouse button and the fishing rod showing. It would be good to show something right away to give the player feedback that what they did had an affect. If you want a delay before the fishing starts, maybe try showing the rod angled backward, and rotating forward as if casting. Adding a bobbing motion to the rod, or something floating on the water, would also add a bit of feeling like something is happening.

This feels like a good start, but needs polish.

I stopped at the base where you can adjust some settings, but things were not clear and a lot was clustered tightly together to make reading the details harder. 2 options were off by default. The tooltip text said if disabled it would do things, but it wasn't clear if toggling the option on would be disabling, or if the current off state was disabled. It also does not describe the alternative.

The controls worked well when zoomed in, though when zooming out the movement seemed to not work much, if at all, and it often felt like there was gravity pulling the ship towards the bottom of the screen. Toward the end I would zoom out to locate the remaining enemies, and maybe take some sniping shots, but if it took more than a single shot I zoom in so I could move.

The way the controls were described with single click to fire Railgun, and hold to fire Minigun, I thought both were active and which fired was based on the button press. It didn't register to me initially that those were the "Main Weapon" that is toggled by Q. I think part of that came from how long the Minigun takes to spin up before firing, which made me initially think it wasn't working. I mainly used missiles for the first fights as I figured out the controls. Once I got it figured out I used the Minigun to start, but then mostly used the Railgun and missiles.

I had a lot of lag when staring, especially when zooming. It got better, but certain areas still lagged as I initially explored. It might help if you could show a loading screen and preload the textures underneath it as the game is starting. I was playing on the web.

I like the concept, and I think you have a decent start. It just needs some work to iron out the kinks to make it more enjoyable. Adding more to the base, and cleaning up the UI there will also help.

Glad to help. These jams are great for devs helping each other out and giving different perspectives.

I totally understand the challenge of a good UI that conveys everything needed to new players, while not feeling cluttered or slow to the  experienced ones. We are working on that ourselves right now, and jam feedback has been great for giving us guidance.

This is a good start. The core mechanics work well. The gameplay is simple and easy to understand, but still challenging to play. The upgrades are good, and there was always something useful. The UI was clear. I used mouse and keyboard.

I started with the default character, and liked the shuirken. After beating the level I moved on to level 2 and tried the second character. I really did not like the straight in front attack of the katana, especially with the eye enemies that swarmed at the start of that level. I did a lot of running as I worked out how to use it and survive. I see that it is powerful, but I much prefer it as a secondary or tertiary weapon, over the starting one. It is great for the boss fights, but even there I prefer to have the other weapons to deal with the swarms and the katana for hitting the boss. I went back to the default character after that level. I liked the scythes, especially when you get 2 or more spinning around you. I largely ran around enemies in circles, letting the attacks do their thing, and collecting what was left behind. I'd move out as a new wave came in and then corral them all into a new circle. I played through the third level and got several shop upgrades. I never had enough to unlock another character, so mostly spent on the top section of upgrades.

The difficulty rose at a good rate. The bosses hit hard, but were also pretty easy to avoid. The harder versions of existing enemies that showed up with the boss fights was a nice touch. 

The description for level 3 says to reach level 10 to awaken its guardian, but I was only at level 7 when the timer hit 5 minutes and the boss appeared.

This was a nice submission and fun to play.

This was a cute and cozy little game.  The gameplay was simple and straightforward. I like that the tree grew back and you didn't have to balance when to grab the close ones vs the ones further away, at least not that much. The arrows pointing to sheep that are off screen was really helpful. I found that when they decided to wander it was a pain to keep them from moving, so I'd go chop a tree in that direction while the moved, and then push them back and toss the log onto the fire at the same time. I did not need to use any torches in my playthrough. I started another to test them, and it looks like you can only have 2 active at a time. After the first burned out I tried to get another, but did not seem to be able to do so until the second one was also gone. I didn't experiment too much with them. Overall a nice submission.

This is a pretty nice survival game. It is tough, but feel reasonable in most ways. There are certainly things a person could use in real life that are not offered in game, such as using wood from buildings and metal of glass from vehicles, but it works well enough for the gameplay to not feel too punishing. The crafting works fairly well, though I wouldn't mind more to craft. I did not replay with any of the other characters, but I like that you have them, and they do add new ways for replays.

I chose to start with the tutorial. There is a lot on the screen, and the cards did not initially grab me as being the tutorial, but looked like part of the general UI I needed to learn about. It would be nice if for the tutorial there was an initial popup based system that pointed to or highlighted the various UI elements to describe what they are. It also starts with the time advancing. It would be nice if the tutorial game started paused until you have a chance to look things over and are ready to start playing. Playing a bit further I got into combat, and that tutorial screen is what I was thinking for the main UI. The combat tutorial is pretty good, though maybe add a button to bring it back up at any time for people who may want to verify things after playing a bit.

I like that the Inventory, Crafting, Map, and cards at the bottom right all still can be interacted with while paused.

I like the hotkeys, and that they are clearly shown in the UI.

When doing things like cutting down a tree, it would be nice if it was more clear what resources will be used. In general, it would be nice if things were more clear on when a resource will be consumed vs just used. In cooking you don't lose your sticks, but that is not clear. Only after doing some cooking with them and noticing the quantity did not go down did I know, but I still did not know what other situations were like that.

I was at very low water, with it showing only 1. I used items to restore water, and the bar did not move much. It seemed odd, until I acknowledged that the numbers are drawn as part of the bar, so they disappear as the bar shrinks. I think the numbers should always show so you can see an accurate representation. It does seem that it has a minimum size that shows the first digit, which makes it even harder to tell how much you have when it matters the most, but it is not really moving. It did seem like sometimes the bar moved differently than others, though maybe I was just not paying enough attention.

The card UI is neat, but can get very full and cluttered. It would be nice to have a way to shrink some down when you are trying to deal with only certain ones. Perhaps a filter to only show enemies, or exclude all enemies. Don't fully hide them, but shrink them perhaps into a stack at the far right with the number of cards shown on top. I missed searching an area at the Lakeside Camp due to so many cards, even after defeating all the enemies. Just clearing all enemies might not be enough, and more filters might be needed. Maybe one to show all places with non-repeatable actions remaining. I do see the icon for no more items, but with so many cards I had completely missed that location somehow. It could also help if the card you most recently interacted with, or its replacement, was favored for being full size/above others. After killing rats the rat corpse car was often beneath all of the others, but I generally cut them up to regen the dog's "HP" before fighting more.

I liked the dog companion. I only used the dog to fight rats, but every rat fight was theirs. Most of the spoils went to them, with some meat being saved for cooking. The Furbuddy sounds interesting. I was wishing the dog would fight with you, instead of alone. Maybe next time I play I will try that character.

I reached the jetty and was able to drink water, which was nice as I was quite low at that point. It would be nice if you could save your water bottles to refill at places like this. In a survival situation I would certainly save containers to refill when the opportunity arose.

It would be nice if the button to go to the next page in crafting was more noticeable. I missed it at first and only saw it when I was realizing there should be more to craft by now and looked for a way to see more. It blends in with the background a bit too much.

While I understand needing to craft an item to get more details on it, it would be nice if crafting that is stationary had an icon noting this, even before you craft it.

I crafted a weapon, only to try to equip it and be told I had no free space. The equipment limit should be mentioned sooner, and possibly a warning provided when crafting.

It would be nice to be able to see the cooking recipes before spending the time cooking, to be sure there is something useful to cook. I cooked several recipes such as roast and stew. I don't recall them all, as I just went through the list and cooked everything I could when I had a fire to do so. It seemed like any of the results were better than not cooking them.

The map is oddly centered. There are points when your equipment covers the area directly in front of you, making it hard to see what is there. The area south of Camp Silverlake is the one that really stood out, though the centering was something I noticed at the start with the bottom UI buttons feeling a bit in the way.

It would be nice if the "You died" screen told you why. I died while resting. I'd recently had food and drink, so I don't think I should have died from those, but I may have misjudged and not paid enough attention to the bars. I was on day 9, and unlikely to make it to the goal, as I was working my way around some of the tougher groups of zombies. Only after did I acknowledge that I might have been able to build a barricade to help and go through the shorter route.

It wasn't too bad, but there were times when the diagonal paths were not clear on what button would move me there and I did have cases where I did not go the way I intended. Being at a fork and having to go straight down, then right when I wanted to take the down-right branch felt odd.

Overall a really good submission.

I think the new visual effects are nice and fit the game well. The music works well for the game. The drama is an interesting feature, which adds a bit of strategy of deciding to go with unaffected sheep, or deal with the troubles for the multiplier. It would be nice if the current multiplier was shown somewhere on screen. The game is easy to understand and play. The feel of the game fits well with the setting of being at a show.

It would be nice if the cost of the ribbons showed when you hovered over them. I was able to get a ribbon before the tutorial popup mentioned them, but did not see the cost. I was not able to afford the second one that popped up right away, and it did say not enough points, but did not say the cost either. Even just adding the cost to that message would help, as people may forget the cost, especially new players trying to learn everything.

It would be nice to be able to see what a ribbon does after adding it to your sheep. Either adding it to the sheep's tooltip/popup, or adding a new popup that shows when you mouse over a sheep that has a ribbon. It could be at the top, or perhaps to the left or right side of the sheep.

The tooltips on the shop page can be hard to read. I'd update the theme to give the tooltips a darker/less transparent background. Maybe increase the font size 1 or 2 points.

The dialog box and its text feel a bit big, especially compared to all the other text. It may be great for readability, but I think it could probably be dropped several points and still be highly readable, while letting the player see more of the screen. I think the look of the dialog box could use a bit of polish to better fit the look and feel of the game. A different font might help. Perhaps add a little more to the border, such as using a nine-patch-rect to make it a rope or ribbon. Readability is important, so don't overdo it, but a little more to make it better fit the showy look of the game.

The pacing feels better than I remember from the last time I played, but the popup messages between rounds still feel repetitive, and like they slow down the gameplay. I'd also remove the Thumbs Up gave 0 points message and only show it when it does give points. A smaller notification message/status icon above the sheep that was affected by a status would probably flow better. You could use text with that status name, or an icon. Possibly both. I'd recommend icons that stay above the sheep showing all their current status affects, with a short popup when they get a new one that has the text name of the new status affect, possibly with the icon as well to be sure players know what the icon means. The icon could also be added to the stage hazard description. While the status messages are showing, you could continue showing other messages, as long as they don't cover the sheep and the status messages. In general, I think the dialog boxes should be saved for click to advance messages, while anything that fades on its own should have a different styling to let players know at a glance if they need to click or not.

The tutorial is helpful, though again with everything using the same dialog box it can be hard to tell when it is something to click on to advance, or another message that will fade. I suppose that the text is yellow, but I had not acknowledged that until reviewing things as I'm writing this. Perhaps an icon at the bottom right to signify click to continue could help.

Placing ribbons by clicking on a ribbon and then on a sheep feels out of place. I'd much prefer this being drag and drop as well, and getting rid of the dialog box about being in Ribbon Mode.

It would be nice if the end screen had stats for the game overall. You include total number sheep. How many varieties of sheep. Number of status affects on stage. Total score. Number of ribbons or times ribbons were triggered. It doesn't have to be fancy, just make a bit of a show scoring card look and put some numbers you can track with simple counters.

Good to see you too! It's nice to be able to play games we are familiar with in these jams and be able to see the growth, as well as give better feedback knowing how they've changed.

Thanks, glad the accessibility is appreciated. It does add some challenges, but we are learning a lot about how to do it better, and to plan our designs for it from the start.

Our current default sorting is to put the newest items at the top. The sorting is not overly optimized currently, so I'm not sure how well it would do running for every item movement, but we will take a look at options to see if we can allow the player to have an auto sort.

Loot is an important part of the game, and we are getting close to implementing the systems for sending the excess back to your clan for the main quest. It will be in the new Town UI. We can certainly add some settings to adjust the collection speed to make end of combat faster.

Thanks for pointing out the dialog issue. The dialog stops most processing, but we must have missed something with the Town UI when we added dialog to it. We may go with the overlay just under it as a precaution for the future.

While working on the item stacking I did notice that the drop area is a bit too small on the buttons. I plan to work on fixing it so the whole button can be used for drag and drop instead of just the inner portion.

Thanks for the great feedback!

I like your changes since I last played. The customizing and test area are great additions. The different arms for doing different things works well.

When I started the Master volume was at max, but the Music and SFX were at or near zero. I played a bit, then had to take a break. When I restarted later the volumes were back at the original settings.

The menu buttons could use with a hover effect/styling. In general, having a hover effect show what is and is not interactable helps a lot with UI.

The UI for customizing builds works, but could be improved. When I clicked on a slot it highlighted, but nothing else seemed to happen. I expected that it would pop up the options to customize it, or more details on the selected part. When I clicked on edit slots, it always selected the Base slot, regardless of which I had selected. If nothing happens, then you should probably disable selecting the slots above the "Edit Slots" button. When you click to edit the slots, I think it would be better if you always showed the larger view with the edit options. You could remove the Edit button, and move the Clear button down with Select. Cancel could also be removed, and End could probably go down there in place of Cancel. Clicking on the slot at the top could then update the lower section as if you had clicked on it and then clicked Edit. Right now it feels like too many clicks to do things, without a reason for the extra clicks. When I'm in Edit mode I expect that selecting the next slot will update the lower section, but I have to click on the Edit button as well. It works, but it just feels like there isn't a reason for the extra clicks. If you have more planned for in between, then this might make more sense. I added a new build taao experiment with, but wanted to remove it before starting the next step, but did not see a way to remove a build. I also did not see a way to rename them, which would be nice to have.

If you click on Edit, and then click End, without first clicking on Cancel, when you next click Edit Slots, the focus will be on the lower section and the Edit, Clear, and End buttons will not show. Clicking a slot at the top, even after clicking Cancel, does not bring them up. I had to Click Cancel, and then click on Edit Slots again, to get the buttons to show.

As I was writing notes from the base screen I noticed that in addition to pressing E you can also click to interact. It wasn't clicking on the console, but clicking anywhere, such as when I clicked to regain focus. Click to interact is nice, but it would be nicer if it was clicking on the object, when in range of course.

I started my first trip to the planet with just the default builds. I built 2 wardens, but mostly only used one. I built towers around the base and first crystals, and then set the worker to start mining. I explored and cleared the area with the warden, checking back to set the worker to the next crystal when they finished the one they had been on. Over time I built more workers and spread them out to cleared areas building towers nearby and then mining. I only built the houses after all the nests were cleared.

After building all the houses I clicked Return and created a custom build with a laser and construction arm, and using the Advance Base. I'm not sure what the Advance Base does, though I'm guessing more HP. I went back to the planet to try it out. The goal had not reset and still showed the houses I had built the last time as complete. I went ahead and played through since I was still only going to build them at the end. I completed that run with only the starting worker and my custom build. After I tested a new build with 2 mining arms to see if it would mine faster, and it looked like it did in the test area, as long as you clicked to use both arms. For my play style of building layered towers where I need defense, and exploring with a single warden, I think these 2 builds would be all I'd need. Perhaps as the game progresses and more difficult enemies show up, the extra firepower of 2 lasers, or newer more powerful options, would be needed. Right now I like having my exploration unit able to build towers, which can then be used to help fight off enemies if getting overwhelmed.

I found that the worker did not always mine the crystal I thought they should. I'd face a crystal and click on it, but they might start mining one off to the side. Similarly, I'd have them facing and close to one, but not be able to get them to start until I readjusted. The warden shooting the nests had a similar problem of it looking like the laser should be hitting, but no sign of damage. It could be rapid firing at the same spot, and suddenly it just stops showing any damage until I move the aim. I dealt with this by moving the mouse back and forth while shooting them.

Having played the older version, I went in knowing a bit of how things worked. Still, I think the UI does a good job of showing the hotkeys to do things. I think the core game loop works. It will need more, such as unlocking new parts, and new planets with different challenges, but it feels like you have a good core here. My kids watched me play and were comparing it to RTS games we've played.

Thanks for playing and the feedback. Glad you liked the story.

The art is early and being worked on still. We had used public assets initially, and fairly recently switched to our own art. There is a lot that still needs to be improved. One of the main reasons we switched to our own art was so that we had more freedom to add animations. We will be adding animations and effects to combat over time.

I've not had a chance to play the game yet, beyond starting it. We will play later and give a review of gameplay then. Here are some thoughts based on first impressions of your game page.

There are 2 things that very strongly stood out as soon as I opened your game page. The first was the number of jams you submitted to. Over time submitting to many jams can happen if you submit to continuation jams like this one, but a fairly new submission with that many jams stands out. As soon as I saw the number of jams I started looking at the names of them. It was very clear that only some were continuation jams, and that your game was unlikely to be able to qualify for for all of the jams. Many jams are exclusive, meaning you must create your game for that jam and cannot submit to any others during the jam. I looked through your submissions to many of the jams and see that you have been disqualified from several of them already. Being seen as someone who spams your game to jams it does not qualify for will build a bad reputation. You may get banned from being able to take part in those jams in the future, even if you were planning to follow the rules for a future submission. Before submitting to any jam be sure to read all the rules and make sure your game qualifies.

I have not seen anything so far that would disqualify your game from this jam. I just wanted to point out that it looks bad when you spam many jams you don't qualify for, and plenty of people will skip your game as soon as they see that. Were this not our jam, we would likely have move on from your game as soon as we saw the submissions to jams that disqualified you. My first thought when I saw the list was questioning if we were going to need to remove your submission. I'm happy to see that you are already active in the jam leaving feedback, and that you do have an actual game submitted.

The other thing that stood out was the color choice. The yellow on red can be hard to read. If you want to keep yellow and red, I would suggest adding a bit more contrast. Make the red a bit darker. The yellow might be able to be a bit lighter as well, but I think the darker background would be the bigger help for readability.  It will also help with the links, such as to your devlog, which are a pinkish color and really hard to see against the red background.

Speaking of devlogs, you don't need to fill out all the fields to submit to this jam. Only the first is required. The rest are optional. You can click on the "Edit this submission" button and remove your "devlog not ready" text until you have one ready to put there.

Thanks for playing and the feedback. Glad you are enjoying the story.

The tutorial is due for a complete overhaul. It was created before we had the popup tutorials. The interactive combat is probably going to be dropped, and replaced by a Training Hall, that will be something like the Tavern where they player can click on what they want to learn about. We can then add more of these in later towns as well. We've been working to not make the tutorial more wordy, but also try to better explain the affinities and that all items are consumed by the Slimes. The original jam theme was "Consume", and we like the combat keeping that as a core mechanic to help the game have something distinctive. Items will also be getting a secondary description for how Slimes can use the items when they eat them.

The previous version was too difficult for many people, and they were stopped at the fight with the knight at what was then the first town you visited. This meant that very little story was seen. We decided to go the other direction for now, and make it easy so that people can see more of the game. Once we restore the ability to save & load, we will up the difficulty. Without saving you have to restart at the beginning, so it made the situation even worse for jam reviews.

There are currently 6 towns in place, plus the starting town. The plan is for around 20 towns, though that may change as the story develops. We have the key locations and events worked out, but everything in-between is evolving as we get to it.

The art is very much a work in progress. We had been using public assets during the original jam, and have switched to our own, but there is a lot of art for the game, so it is currently early concept art, with polish planned as we have time.

For the Banjo, on one hand, you are supposed to be playing it, so doing an animation of it being played and the player unable to move around or leave the yurt would make sense, but then the length could be an issue with some people, like me, wanting to move around and explore while listening. Ideally you'd want to implement a way for the player to end it early, if you did change it to limit movement, or shorten the length. Instead, you may want to treat it as just being a change to the music track that is independent of any other interactions. Since it breaks when leaving the yurt, I'd also suggest setting up a signal that is emitted when you leave the yurt, and which then banjo interaction connects to. That could trigger the early end of the interaction and restore anything that was disabled while it played.

For making the interaction areas clickable, you could use buttons, perhaps texture buttons, placed over top of the interactable objects. You already have your labels popping up, so just add a button as well. They can be mostly transparent. If you go with a texture button, you could take your existing art and do an outline or greyscale of them, and overlay it to give a highlighting/glow effect to show what is interactable, and where the clickable area is.

We've also used SilentWolf in the past, and have seen it discussed often in GWJ, so I suspected that was the one used. I confirmed by using the browser's developer console (pressing F12) and looking for it in the output. SilentWolf outputs messages at several steps when connecting.

Your Nessie is cute. The artwork in general is nice. This is a good start for a learning project. Looking over your devlogs, you've made great progress.

I hope the below doesn't come across too critical. These are just some things I noticed.

After clicking to play the instrument in the yurt I walked away and then was not able to interact with anything else. I had to refresh the page.

After clicking to sit on the log I tried to click again to get off, but no matter where I clicked it kept sitting back on the log. I also tried using WASD to move. After a bit the character got off the log, but I was treating it like the lights as something you toggle. I'm not sure how best to convey that it is a preset animation, rather than click to sit and click to get up. One option would be to disable/ignore the input while the animation is running so it doesn't restart with each click.

It might help if you required the player to click on the object to trigger it, instead of clicking anywhere on the screen. You can have a generously large area be clickable. I just think it would be nicer if you clicked on the object, as clicking in different areas causing me to get back on the log seemed a bit odd to me.

When the exclamation mark appears above the frog's head, I clicked again, which restarted the fishing. It made me think it was an interactive event and you had to click quickly enough when it appeared to catch a fish. After seeing the animation restarting I acknowledged it was just an animation, like with the log.

When first bringing up the Pause screen it looks like the volume slider is set to 0/the bottom. Clicking anywhere but the top lowers the volume, when it looks like it should be raising it.

For web, pressing escape exits fullscreen, so it is good to have an alternative input option, such as P, to pause.

Overall, this is looking nice. Keep up the good work.

This was a nice little puzzle game. I played up to chamber 22. The puzzles were fun, and difficulty progressed at a good rate. There were a few that took me a bit to figure out, but most were pretty straightforward. I read through the devlogs before playing, so it helped knowing a bit about the slimes. I liked the tips in game when something new was introduced. 

Pressing R to restart is not on the "tutorial" screen.

This is coming along pretty well. The leaderboard feels like a nice addition for the game. I didn't notice SilentWolf mentioned in the credits, or your devlog on adding the leaderboard. Since you are listing credits in game, you may want to update it to include them.

It would be nice if there was a way to end gameplay early, other than accelerate to max speed and derail. Perhaps adding Q as a key to quit to menu, or even P for a pause screen, which could include the volume settings as well as a quit to menu button. Speaking of volume, I noticed that the volume settings did not save. Not a major thing, but something that would be nice to see in the future.

We are also trying to make money from our games. The thing is, you have to have something that is worth paying for before you ask for money. There are thousands of new projects every day. You need to make yours stand out and for people to want to play it. Small indie/solo devs are not going to make a living on their demo projects. You need to take part in jams, and be part of the communities to build a following, which is going to take time and effort. We switched to full time game dev almost a year ago now, and have made almost no money. The game we have in this jam is the one we hope will do well enough to finally make some money, and we've been working on it since last July. Sure, smaller games can be made faster, but for us this is where our creativity lead us and where we feel we can do a game worth playing. You could try to make simpler games. Perhaps make games for ad based sites. The point I'm trying to make is to set reasonable expectations. You are a grain of sand in the desert. You need to draw people in and build community. Don't just spam your game to every jam. Many jams are exclusive and you are only supposed to make a game for them. If you dump your game in jams that it really does not qualify for, or that it clearly is not following the rules of, then you are going to get a bad rep that could follow you for a long time.  There are a lot more make a new game during it jams, than continue your game jams. You may want to do several new game jams to experiment with ideas and get feedback from the larger communities in some of those. Picking one or two jams that happen regularly, such as monthly, and doing several of them, while being active, can be a good way to get recognition. Also keep in mind that Itch has its own algorithms for sorting, and the more active you are (karma) the more they show your game in jams.

We have put a lot of work into our games, and into trying to build a following. We found the best way to get feedback and plays in jams was to play, rate, and comment on as many games as we could. Early on our game was only rated by less than half of the ones we rated, and fewer left comments. It has not been huge, but we have slowly gotten more recognition and people from earlier jams have come back and played our submissions to later ones. We were often told in jams that we left good feedback, and that inspired us to consider if this was a skill we could use to help our games. We started this jam because we wanted to build a larger community of like-minded devs who want to continue working on a project, and get feedback, rather than just ratings. This does take time out of our dev work, but we see it as paying for itself from the valuable feedback we can get. There may only be 1 or 2 good comments sometimes, but even 1 good comment could be just the thing to make the game better in some way. It also builds more recognition. I am certainly not suggesting you try to start a jam. I am pointing out that you may need to expand the effort you are putting into promoting your game into areas you had not considered. Being more active in jams is the first step. Play, rate, and comment on games. Try to leave good feedback. It doesn't have to be a lot, but try to make it meaningful. Be sure that your comment is something that makes it clear you have played the game. I've seen people in the bigger jams who go around and leave generic comments on every game without actually playing them, just to get other people to play their games. Commenting on a specific mechanic of the game will go a long way to reassuring people you played their game and they should at least take a look at yours.

 In the end, there is no easy answer. We ourselves are still working to try to make a living from game dev. These days it is easy for anyone to make a game and publish it, but that means that you are out there in a sea of many new entries, and many are very low effort or outright scams. You need to draw people in, and also quickly show them that you are a legit game dev making something worth playing. My comments on how your game page looks are because it presents as a low effort money grab that many will dismiss. If they do play the game, and see that it is in such an early state, the paid content will just reaffirm that view. I'm sorry, but game dev is not easy money. It often takes a year or more to start making money, unless you get really lucky (or know the right people who can promote your games). Most indie devs don't ever make much money. I don't know your situation, so all I can do is give general advice based on my experiences and what others have said about theirs. You can try to build up your own brand/studio and make money selling your game. You can also try to create games that show off your skills and then use those as a portfolio to show when applying for a job at an existing studio. If you want to make money as a game dev, trying to get a job at a studio is generally the best way to start for most people. The experience you gain there can help you to reach the point where you might someday be ready to go off on your own. If you just want some spending money on the side and treat it as a hobby, then make games you think are fun. Get them to a state that is worth paying for, and then put a small price on them. If you want to go the freemium route, you need to make sure the game is fun and has enough replay value for someone to feel it is worth spending money on.

I had some issues getting this to play initially. The Unity loading progress bar would get to around 95%, and then stop. I tried in several browsers and it happened in each. I waited and tried again later with the same issue. Eventually, after several tries, and a hard refresh of the web page, I was able to get it to start.

It feels odd that the truck has a lower durability than most other options.

With there not being a cost to select your vehicle, and one being clearly superior to the others, it feels like you should always just choose the best car.

It would be nice to see how much money you have when customizing your car, especially when starting the game and not having seen the amount anywhere else. I like that the cost goes red when you can't afford the purchase, but I'd still like to know how much I have in advance. I see that clicking on the HUB button it does show the amount.

The game page says to interact with the race via the HUD, but I do not see a HUD. Nothing I click on or press seems to do anything. After the race I got a score, but then the cars just kept racing and I seemed to be stuck.

The score looks to be using a floating point number and can have a lot of decimal places. At some point my score ended up having .79999999... in it. It would be good to format it to only show 1 or 2 decimal places, or force it to always be an int if the decimal places are not intended. With the long number, the score covered up the # of keys I had, making those hard to see. I restarted and cleared my score, and did not get the decimals for the bit I tested. I'm not sure what caused it the first time as I was not paying attention to the score when it happened.

I would give the key image that is used as part of the UI showing how many keys you have, a background, or something else to signify it is not one to collect. Maybe it is because the score covers it up, but it often looks like it is on a tile, and I start to go for it before realizing it is not collectable. You could also make it static, or animated differently that the ones you can collect.

The movement is a bit too quick. For a puzzle game you don't need to be rushing around. Control is more important. You may even want to implement a system for moving only one square per button press, such as by holding Shift. Several times I stepped too far, either stepping on a death tile, or pushing a block too far. You should also think about how a player can resolve situations where they pushed a block they need into a position where they can't get to it, or where it otherwise blocks further progression in the game. It feels like it would be very easy to do something early that could prevent you from completing the game, and not knowing until later.

You only list arrows in the tutorial controls, but WASD also works. With the use of Q and E for the shifting, WASD makes more sense to use, so I would at least mention both are available options.

I think it would feel more intuitive if you only had one button that toggled between day and night.

Overall, this is a good start for a puzzle game.

The first thing that stands out is that you are releasing a new version with its own page and full release version number fairly often, when it is more like the latest minor version of a single game that is still early in development, and that you are putting a price on it. Is this really Voidloop 4 v1.0, or Voidloop v0.4? If this was not part of our jam, I would quickly be moving on. I can understand having 2 pages up so you can ask for comparisons between versions, but you have 4 game pages for variations of "Voidloop", with the oldest only being uploaded 51 days ago. It seems like you are creating these as new "games" so you can spam them to a bunch of jams for free publicity, especially with prices being on each. This gives a bad impression. Depending on your goals, you may want to think on if this is the best way to present your work. Trying to make money on your work is understandable, but the way it is presented looks bad. Since you are commenting on games in our jam I am playing and reviewing your submissions, but I would not do so in any other jam I saw such a submission. If you are looking to get more feedback and plays, then I would suggest presenting its early development state more clearly, and removing the price. Leave it so people can voluntarily donate, just don't set it as for sale. In many jams people will simply skip anything with a price on it, so that alone reduces chances of feedback and plays. Submitting to a lot of jams, especially something that was just added, and doesn't look like it fits all of them, will also get many people to look at it as scammy and avoid it. Again, I don't know your goals, so you will have to decide how best to proceed to achieve them.

The amount the player # buttons on the bottom of the menu move seems a bit excessive. I also had them flicker in certain positions. Maybe have them move about half as much.

The greyish-purple text on grey can be hard to read in some places. It is very hard to read when it is over top of other things, such as buttons. Your screenshots show text below the buttons, so this may be based on the fonts you use and how you position them. My guess is that you are using system fonts that are not available on all OSes. I am on Linux, so if you have a Windows or Apple only font, I would be seeing a fallback font that may be a different size. If you can include your chosen fonts in your game that could help with this issue.

The game starts with showing you have "Lives: 1" when I die it goes down to 0, then I died again and the game continued, with it staying at 0.

The game feels very laggy and jumpy. I don't know if this is intentional and part of the gameplay experience you want for it, but I found it unpleasant. It felt more like the game was simply not optimized well and the controls just did not respond in a timely manner.

The core game itself is a decent concept for a simple game for people to play when they have a bit of time. Personally, I feel that it is a bit too random luck based. I'd prefer if it was more skill based, with the player having more feedback about what is about to happen, so they can make decisions, and more responsive inputs to implement their choices. Right now it feels like I should just go toward the gems, not step on a death spot, and hope one does not randomly pop up and kill me. With the lag from input the quick changes just feel worse.

Thank you for playing and the feedback.

Saving is currently disabled. We have made several major changes to the logic that broke saving, and have not had a chance to implement a new system yet. We plan to make the game easier in the next update so testers can get further. Saving will be restored after we finish our overhaul of the core systems.

Thanks for playing and leaving feedback.

Saving is currently disabled. We have made many changes to the backend that broke the previous save system. We want to finish a bit more refactoring of the core logic before we dive into updating the save system.

There is currently not a way to use items or heal between battles, but it is on our list for the next update. We are working on figuring out the best way to update inventory screen UI to add using items. The plan to start will be to only allow using healing items from the inventory.

We plan to completely change the game's combat. The original game design was focused on being simple and quick, so we limited the number of buttons and clicks to do things. With our new focus on being more RPG-like we want to expand the combat so that you can do more, even if it means more clicks and menus. We are leaning towards full access to the Slime's personal bag, rather than just what is in their belt. They will have more abilities, though they will still be tied to consuming items. We have a lot of other potential ideas, but this is the core direction we are thinking in.

Our next update will be reworking the early game to make it easier. We plan to add a new town before the camp fight, and to make the camp and knight fights a bit easier. For the original version the combat was the core gameplay, so it was combat heavy, and we tried to use the harder knight fight to force people to learn the affinities before going further. We really failed on making the system clear enough so that fight has been a barrier for a lot of people to seeing the rest of the story. The combat overhaul is still a ways out as we need to redo a lot for it, so in the interim we will simply make the combat easier, to allow people to get further in the game and see more of the story. We currently have 5 towns in place, in addition to your starting town.

Did you check out the Tavern? Our latest update was the start of adding the ability to do more in towns. The tavern is the first piece of that, with a bit of extra story and personality. We have other locations planned. For now this is just a menu with panels showing the location's options, but we are working on a toggleable option to see your party move to each location as you choose it. You won't have free movement with this system, but can explore the town from the menu. This is also why we have the minimize button in place already.

Thanks again for playing. Glad you liked it enough to try twice!

I totally understand the early state of things overall, and that the newest features have the longest internal to-do list. No need for excuses. Though hearing your thoughts and intentions does help give perspective for future playthroughs. When I do jam game reviews I try to look at it from the perspective of both player and game dev, so will point out things that as just a player I might ignore. It always helps when I'm enjoying the game I'm playing, rather than just doing a review out of a feeling of obligation to the jam we are participating in.

The pausing while building is something that I think matters more for people just starting out, and will be less important for those who have played enough to really know the core game. I think it would make a good optional setting at some point. Veteran players can turn the pausing off to give a bit more challenge and intended gameplay, while new players can get the extra time to explore all the options.

For the music, it may just have been my personal preferences and dislike of the track that made it stand out. I like when the music matches the feel of the game. If things in the game change, then having the tone of the music change feels good. The gameplay didn't really have a feel of changing. You could say that as you get closer to the deadline there might be a bit more intensity if you are far from the goal, so having the music switch to a more intense track would work. I do like the idea of multiple tracks to keep things from getting stale and feeling too repetitive. You don't have changing areas to switch tracks for, so having the music loop through multiple is good. I don't want to push you too deep into feature creep here, so take these ideas with a huge grain of salt. One option could be to add a "radio" into the game that allows players to change the station to fit their mood. I've seen this in some city-builders and it is a great way to let players personalize the game. Of course, that feels more like a polish feature, than something for early dev. Another thought goes back to my above comment about intensity increasing as you near the deadline. This could be done by changing the selection of music, perhaps each day.  There are also some music packs that include the same track at different intensities, allowing you to simply swap between them as the intensity of the game changes. We often use music from Ovani Sound, which offers every music track at 3 intensities. They have a Godot plugin to handle some of the swapping, but it did not work for our web export when we tried it, so we just made our own. I don't recall seeing mention of what music you are using and if it paid or free. These are paid, but they often have bundles on Humble Bundle with a pretty good selection, if you are interested. Again, I am not trying to push you in any specific direction, but do want to offer options we are familiar with.

We intend to host these feedback jams monthly, unless something significant happens to prevent it. We currently are planning to add the next months jam toward the end of the previous month, as we make changes based on how the previous one is going. This is only our second time hosting a jam, and last month's did not have good participation. This month is going much better. We are very grateful that you have already gone through to play and comment on so many games! We look forward to continuing to play your game as it grows and working together to help each other. Hopefully, over time we will be able to build a larger community of like-minded devs helping each other out! March's jam is now up. You can use the following link at any time to see all of our jams to find the latest one: https://itch.io/jams/hosted-by-dragonsisle .

I wrote this as I played, so it is mostly in the order I came across things, with a bit of editing after I finished.

Here are some things that I think would be nice to see added:

• An option to rest until energy is full.
• It would be nice to know what type of zone was going to be established before choosing to do so. My second zone was also residential, but I would have preferred to do one of the others next. I see that the zones you can unlock are limited, and more are added as you establish others, but when there are multiple options available, I'd like to know what each is and decide.
• I'd like it if the rest of the game paused while choosing a building. As a new player I like to take time to learn what each can do, and why I might not be able to place them. With time passing I felt rushed to try to make a decision.

It would be nice if there was a bit more feedback on why you can't place certain buildings. Highlighting unmet requirements in red, or an effect like you have for money where the missing requirement flashes red, being applied to other requirements could help. I saw Required, but was not initially sure what what things like "EC" meant. I looked around and saw the Rating area had the same letters, so figured out this was likely what was needed. With the buttons being disabled/greyed out when you haven't built the prerequisite buildings, when they activated I was ready to place them, and it took a bit to see that I still had things left before I could do so. Even when knowing what the requirements were, it would be nice to draw the eye to the one(s) you are missing.

I used escape to pause while on the Choose Building screen, and when I unpaused it was not working properly. Hover and clicking reacted, but the info panel did not change when clicking a new option. The red X button also would not close it. The panel was showing something I could place, but clicking Apply resulted in setting a path to move to the road beneath it. It was as if everything had been set to ignore the mouse. Clicking on the tile, and choosing Establish again, fixed things.

Some of the music has an overly rather relaxed feel to it that doesn't quite fit with the feel of the game for me. I can see a bit of inspiration from Sim City, but at least one of the tracks just miss that bit more upbeat tone that would make them fit better. One of the tracks has that peppy feel that makes me think Sim City, but it was another that had me notice the music and think on it. Having multiple tracks is a good way to keep the music from feeling repetitive, it is just that the one really stood out to me as out of place. This is of course personal preference, so go with what works for you.

At the end of my first playthrough I felt like there was still a lot I did not know. I hadn't even been paying attention to the vote deadline as I was still trying to figure things out and was surprised when it popped up. That is likely in part to it being an early and short demo version. Part of it comes from that bit of feeling rushed to choose buildings due to the timer continuing. I restarted and played with a focus on clicking around to see what else I could interact with and taking more time to read things. Of course, with many things needing to be unlocked as you progress, this only offers a chance to learn the early stuff.

I think that the buttons for moving through the Goals could use with a bit more contrast. I was mainly focused on the game board and seeing what all I could do, and I totally missed that there was a second page of Goals. This was likely because it started with only a small number on one page and no buttons. I had not acknowledged when more were added later that pushed it beyond 1 page and added those buttons. I had only glanced at the goals to see which I still needed to do, and did not really look at it to see the extra arrows at the bottom.

I like that you have a tutorial. It offers a decent start, but there are certainly some areas that could use being mentioned. I'd add a line about the ratings at the top right and telling the player click on them to see more details. Perhaps a mention about the Stats and what they do, or telling the player to look at them and adding the same kind of click to learn more for them.

Your instructions mention double-clicking to move, but it seems like it is clicking once to select a spot to move to, and again to move there. Typically double-click means you have to click twice quickly, rather than the click to select and then click again after any delay to do something else. It would also be nice if a mention was made of Right-Click to cancel movement. I stumbled onto it when I was testing things, but there was a point where it would have been nice to know.

Overall, this is a pretty good start. The current version gives a good feel for the intent of game. The core systems work well for the early state. You have a good start for the tutorial and popups with extra details. I enjoyed playing and look forward to trying future versions.

We use Linux, so I appreciate that you offer a Linux build.

I played through to the end twice, winning both times. Here is a screenshot of my first playthrough game over screen. The second time was more about exploring things and I was more even on score when the last day started, but I had ~250 Rally Points, so at 08:00 I went to a block of houses that favored the opponent and rallied as many as I could to quickly gain the points to win. 

I don't think there is a good way to make what looks like a health mask being removed work well, no matter the explanation given. It just looks bad in the current environment, especially with the mask being tossed off onto the floor. Even if in your mind it is to make eating more enjoyable, it is still discarding something meant to protect health for enjoyment, which is very irresponsible. 

Here is a screenshot of one of the red buttons.

Thanks for for including our game. That was a great overview.

I like the setting for this. A tower defense game based on working fast food is a great idea.

We use Linux, so this was played in Wine.

The first thing I noticed is that loading feels very slow. I also wasn't always sure when I needed to click to advance and when it was just taking time to finish loading. The long load times, even for simple screens, made me not want to just click around and explore the way I normally would.

Once it loaded, I saw 2 red buttons with what looked like no text. Hovering over them the text became a bit more clear, but was still hard to read.

When I started the game, the text felt too slow, so I clicked to see if it would show it all. It looks like it skipped to the next bit of text, instead of showing the rest. I would suggest making the first click show all, then the next advance. I'd also increase the speed of the text. You describe the game as fast paced, but the starting experience feels very slow. As long as the text does not auto-advance before you can read it, writing it out faster is fine, as even slower readers can read at their own pace before advancing, but those who want to read fast or just skim the text, and get into playing, can also do so.

I found placing the "towers" to be inconsistent. I often had to move the items around until they indicated they could be placed, rather than being able to click and drag them to a known spot where I could place them. Sometimes it felt like I had to drop them in the middle of the table for them to be placed on a plate. For a fast paced game, the player needs to be confident in where to click to have things happen.

I got to the point where you had people wearing surgical/health masks. The mask got knocked off part way through. I'm guessing this was meant to be like an enemy with a shield, but this is a terrible way to do it! People wearing masks for health reasons is not something to make a joke of, and having your gameplay involve "attacking" them to remove their mask was reason enough to stop playing right there. I can understand wanting to add something symbolic of an increased challenge, but with all the serious health concerns going around these days, making light of people who wearing masks for health reasons is totally unacceptable. Maybe you could use sports or motorcycle helmets, or other non-health related items.