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I loved this, delightful. Took me four tries but I got the blanket ending, might go back and also try to get the day 20 ending. Definitely had fun with the learning curve and uncovering the mechanics. The aesthetics and flavour of the game are an utter delight, and I appreciate the Lint Lapins who I'm sure are relatives of Dust Bunnies. :) Quite interesting managing the health and stress stats. I know what the maid hat does but want to go back and explore some of the other equipment options. Wonderful work!

Love the art and ambience, very atmospheric and combat feels pretty good. Great job!

What I liked: Fun concept, the basic idea of a racing game roguelike and your choice of flavour for it is a cool and daring combination. The art is fantastic, massive kudos to your collaborator. You've put a lot of thought into the mechanics and how to keep things moving and interesting for the player. There's a lot of variety in the kind of units and obstacles on the map.

What I did not like: The controls. The way momentum works and the hard corners and cluttered nature of levels makes for a very frustrating combination. Neither playing nor the learning curve are fun for me, though I imagine people with more experience playing racing games might take to it a bit better. Boomer enemies are very difficult to avoid. In general, it's very hard to get anywhere without crashing. Another more minor criticism is that I had trouble visually parsing the map, specifically what tiles block movement/make you crash and which you can path through. The map looks quite busy and I think more consistent visual colour coding would help legibility.

Still, very cool concept. I would be very interested in playing a version of this that's more of a precision racer (a Snake game-like, if you will), where there's acceleration and braking but turning response is instant.

Yeah, there's definitely a time and place for deliberately letting yourself be caught by the chicken's vision or by the hound or farmer's peripheral vision to cunningly manipulate them. I really enjoyed that too ^^

Fantastic little InvInc-like. I enjoyed engaging the farmer, hound, and the most harmless yet fearsome enemy of all, CHICKEN, in a heart-pounding game of cat and mouse.

+ Addendum:

I'm reminded of Invisible Inc, which is a fantastic game and works in all the right ways... and has a god-awful tutorial that fails to teach you some of the most important mechanics, such as the distinction between noticed and seen enemy vision. I regularly watch new players hamstring themselves by playing on self-imposed hard mode, navigating enemies under the assumption that the "You get seen and *overwatched* here" vision cone is twice its actual size.

It speaks to the flaws in the tutorial, which not only fails to explain the difference, but doesn't even let you move through peripheral/noticed vision, let alone force you to do so to teach you that it's basically safe. I wish the devs had improved the tutorial, but I am very very glad they didn't decide to instead cut the peripheral/seen distinction just because it was confusing to some players. *Shudder*

>I’m curious for feedback here from other designers. My instinct at this moment is to cut diagonal movement.

You're never going to make a game that instinctively "clicks" with 100% of players. I recommend resisting the impulse to fix what isn't broken to reach a broader audience. Besides, you spelled out a much better solution already: Simply rework the tutorial so that moving diagonally is unavoidable and have players repeat it once or twice so it sinks in.

I don't think so, most likely it was a room accessible only via diagonal corner tiles that I missed.

Which, I'm torn about. My biggest issue with them is that it's often very hard to see if there's a corner entrance or not until you're looking at it squarely. So scouting them is a bit of a timesink.

Simple but pretty fun concept! Well done, would love to see a more polished postjam version of this with some SFX

Fantastic write-up. I was wondering about the map-gen - it was sufficiently challenging to explore and navigate without generating completely frustrating dead ends (such as ending up in one "prong" of the map only to find that the exit is on the other prong). Very interesting

Question: I can't speak to this with certainty, but I could have sworn that twice so far I've had maps (both cases it was the first level - chronologically, I mean, not LVL-1) where one of the data nodes was in an enclosed space only reachable via Burrow. One was a particularly memorable occasion because I tunneled into the room with the node and a patrol in it, had the Hunter follow me in, and then circled back around to the entrance I had made to get back out. I don't think I could have possibly missed an existing door if there had been one. Do you know anything about that?

Excellent game with fun mechanics and a great difficulty curve

Thank you for playing :)

Personally, I can say that luring guards out into the hedges works almost as well as with gardeners. They will aggro after a bit, but breaking line of sight seems to reset the timer, so you can pretty easily get away with it. The only downside of their disguise is you don't get the shovel. (And you can't interact with poisonous plants without raising suspicion, but it's usually not hard to do that without being seen, so it's not a major constraint).

It looks awesome and proves less is more sometimes

What a cute game. Thank you for making this.

Nice concept but controls are little too frustrating for something this time-sensitive, I think