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You were right on every count, and two of them were bugs rather than choices. Both are fixed and live now, so you can pick it back up.

The wall. You could not reset, reach settings or see the menu because the gate was a fixed full-screen overlay with no close, and it re-armed from localStorage on every load. Once you finished day two the page was bricked for you permanently. That is not a paywall decision, that is me shipping a dead end, and calling it a free browser demo while it did that was fair to criticise. It now has "Play the two days again" (wipes the save and restarts clean) and "Back to the game".

The Spanish. Also a real bug and a good catch. The language picker walked navigator.languages looking for a supported locale but had no case for English at all, so a list like [en-US, es-MX] skipped straight past English and matched Spanish. One missing line. Fixed, and tested against ten locale orders.

The font. You are the fourth person to raise it. The product names on the shelves were rendering at 6px. They are 9px now, department signs 10px, and the share of text below 9px on the first screen went from 48 percent to 20 percent.

On demo length I would rather be straight than promise something. Two days was chosen deliberately to protect the paid version, but you are the third person to say it cuts before the game shows what it is, and your run makes the sharpest case: you were at minus 66 dollars and still fighting the wholesaler gate when it hit, so you never saw a shift go well. That is not the demo being short, that is the first two days being the worst two days. So I am working on the opening rather than only the length. The length is not mine alone to change, but I am passing it on with your reasoning attached.

The soft lock you felt is the same problem. Needing the store closed before you can buy from wholesalers is a real rule, but nothing on screen tells you that is why the buttons are refusing you.

Thanks for the detail, it was the most useful post in this thread. I will get to DualSpace properly.

Thanks for playing it, and the honesty is worth more to me than praise would be.

First: your video did not attach. The post reads "Here is a video of me playing:" and then stops, no embed and no link. If you can get it up I would genuinely like to watch it. "Confused the whole time" is the most useful sentence anyone has sent me about this game, and watching where your hands actually go would tell me more than any description could.

And you did not miss something. You are the third person to say this, so it is the game, not you. After the second report I measured it: on day one, before you touch anything, the screen carries 110 text labels and 29 controls, and a quarter of those labels are just zeros and empty shelf slots. That is what "could not figure out what anything did" looks like from the inside. I am cutting it down rather than explaining it better.

On Hexatown, I owe you honesty. I could not give you a fair playthrough today and I cannot record video at all, so instead of inventing impressions here are two things I could actually measure.

Your web build is a debug export. The browser tab reads hexatown_worker_edition (DEBUG) - the internal working name and the debug flag both going out to players.

And it is heavy for what it is. index.wasm is 10.1 MB and index.pck is 513 KB, so a player waits on roughly 10.9 MB before anything happens, and about 95 percent of that is the Godot engine rather than your game. A release export instead of debug usually takes a serious bite out of that. For something described as a short incremental game of about thirty minutes, that download is currently the biggest thing between a curious person and your first tile.

Neither of those needs a playthrough to be worth fixing. I will come back with real play impressions once I can.

Both of those are actionable, thanks.

Fonts: I raised the smallest labels in the account screens from 8px to 9px and the values from 11px to 12px, and that is already live in the browser build. It is a partial fix and I will say so plainly. 8-9px text is used widely across this UI, and doing it properly is a typography pass rather than a tweak. You are the second person to raise it, so it has moved up.

The pixelation I could not reproduce and I would like to. The browser build runs in a 420x840 frame and the art is authored well above that, so at default size it should be downscaling rather than upscaling, which is not usually where blockiness comes from. Were you on desktop or on a phone, and was the frame at its default size or fullscreen? If it looked worse in fullscreen then it is the upscale and I know exactly where to look.

While I was in there I also fixed a map control that had been dead since launch and some account numbers rendering white on a white tile, both from another tester in this thread. A reload gets you all of it.

This is the most useful thing anyone has told me about the game, and it is also the one I cannot patch, so I want to be sure I take the right lesson from it.

I did ship fixes for the smaller things another tester found in the same 24 hours: a map control that turned out to have been dead since launch, account numbers rendering white on a white tile at 1:1 contrast, and messages that vanished after 1.8 seconds regardless of how long they were. Those were almost certainly part of the noise you hit. But none of them are the thing you actually described, which is that there is too much on screen at once and nothing tells you what matters first.

One question, if you have a minute. When you stopped, was it that you did not know what the goal was, or that you knew the goal but could not find the control for it? The first shift is supposed to be a guided delivery with a character walking you through it, and I genuinely cannot tell any more whether that guide is doing its job or whether it is just one more thing competing for attention on a crowded screen.

Either answer is useful. The second one is a layout problem. The first one means the guide is not landing at all, which is a much bigger rewrite, and I would rather know.

All three are fixed and the browser build is already updated, so a reload will show them.

The +/- was the good one. The map bar uses a single delegated click handler: it looks up closest('[data-map-size]') and closest('[data-camera]'), then returns on whichever matches first. But the app root element carries data-map-size as state, so closest() from a zoom button walked all the way up the tree and always found it. The size branch therefore always matched, always returned, and the camera branch was unreachable. Those two buttons had never worked, in any build. Scoping both selectors to button[...] fixed it, since the root is a div.

The white-on-white was exactly as bad as you said. I measured the tiles: 1.00:1 contrast. The value text had no colour of its own and was inheriting white from the menu, which is correct on the dark panel and invisible on a white tile. It is 12.3:1 now. The Account activity labels were 4.2:1 on the dark background, now 8.9:1.

The toast was a flat 1800ms. I counted the 66 toast strings in the game: median 5-6 words, longest 14. At normal reading speed the long ones need about five seconds, so it was showing them for a third of the time required. It now scales with length, 2.4s to 6s, and it counts the localised string because Turkish runs longer than English.

Not fixed yet, and I would rather say so than let it slide: the out-of-cash hint, and the tablet layout. Both are real, both are more than a patch, and you are the second person to raise the tablet one.

Thank you for actually digging. "The buttons don't work" turned out to be a control that had been dead since launch, and I would not have found it on my own.

Free browser demo, no download, no signup: https://rldgamesstudio.itch.io/shelves-and-streets

WHAT IT IS

You run a corner shop and its delivery arm. Before opening you compare four wholesalers, catch the rotating deals, fill normal and cold storage, and pack multi-item baskets for the orders you accepted. Then you plan the runs: combine nearby customers, respect scooter and van capacity, avoid congested streets, and send each vehicle out. The vehicle drives the actual street network, so the order you combine customers in genuinely costs you fuel, customer patience and store rating.

There is no timer during preparation. The shop opens when you say it is ready. The pressure comes from your plan being wrong, not from a countdown.

WHAT I WOULD LIKE FEEDBACK ON, in order of how much it helps me

1. The first five minutes. It is a guided first shift with a character walking you through it. Does it explain enough, or does it explain too much before letting you touch anything?

2. The route screen. That is the actual game, and it is also the part most at risk of reading as busywork. Did combining stops feel like a decision, or like clicking?

3. Where you stopped. If you closed the tab, the sentence "I quit when ___" is worth more to me than any amount of praise.

HONEST FRAMING

This is a two-day demo of a game that is already out on iOS and Android, not a standalone free game. Day two is where the real dispatch desk opens, so the demo cuts after it rather than at the end of the tutorial. Store links are on the page; nothing in the browser build asks you for money. The art is generated with AI, which is declared on the game page as well. The code and the design are not.

THE EXCHANGE

Link yours and I will actually play it and write a real comment, not a one-liner. I did that for Dot Siege on this board earlier today if you want to see what you would get. Tell me what you specifically want looked at and I will focus there.

Played a match on Small vs Normal AI. I deliberately skipped the tutorial, because your first question is whether the capture mechanic is clear without instructions — so here is that answer honestly, plus one thing that looks like a bug.

The bug first: I set FIRST MOVE to "You — You place the opening dot", started the match, and the header said "AI to move". The AI placed the opening dot and I moved second. Either the setting is not being applied or the label is inverted.

On your question 1 — no, not from the board alone. Once the tutorial is skipped there is nothing on the play screen that says what a capture is, how large an enclosure has to be, or that captured dots are what score. I placed dots next to the AI's and nothing told me whether I was building toward anything. The tutorial is carrying the entire rules explanation, so "skip" is effectively "play without knowing the win condition". A one-line hint on the first turn would cover the players who skip.

The Hint button is a good safety net and I would surface it harder in the first match.

Small mismatch worth fixing since it sets expectations: your post here says "a match takes only a few minutes", but the setup screen says Small is 15x15, 6-10 min, Medium 10-15, Large 17-20. The game's own numbers disagree with the pitch. If 6 minutes is the real floor, saying so is better.

Last thing, on getting people to the board: there are six option groups before a first match (mode, board, opponent, first move, timer, end condition). For someone who has played twice that is great. For someone who clicked from a forum post it is a wall. A "Quick match" button using your defaults, with the full setup behind "Custom", would get first-timers playing sooner.

The paper-and-pen presentation is genuinely lovely — the torn notebook, the pens, the stick figures. That part sells itself.

I am doing the same thing with mine if you want to trade: a store and delivery-routing management sim, browser demo, no download — https://rldgamesstudio.itch.io/shelves-and-streets