itch.io

It's alright. The unfortunate facts are that the lack of stamina regeneration baseline makes for easy deathspirals and overall limited tutorial make the game's fairly small list of mechanics have a lot of ambiguity.

There's not much encounter diversity other than some hidden number changes, I'd cut the total encounter count in half. The game becomes very stale very fast, barely warranting a second run.

It's cute, seems well optimized, but lacks any staying power or significant mechanical depth while also having fail-out systems baked so robustly into its loop that it makes the actual 

content a distraction from meter management.

A next attempt should probably consider more mechanics beyond Thrusts and Plapping, especially because the hearts always seem to come in a scatter of 3x, with no real way to intervene on that front, you're really just fighting invisible timers in a race to build meter.

Probably the worst element on display here is that there's not really any between-run advantages to pick up, that tanks replayability especially badly since seemingly there is only one model of lay prior to the dragon at the end.

It's fine for a sample game made for building skills and published for free. What it lacks though is any reason to revisit, and its genuinely too long and frustratingly tedious.

Definitely a critical feature to implement now is camera control. There's also some jank with the B interface having gestural input based on stick direction, it'd be good to make it so walking forward doesn't automatically cause doors not to open (supplanting it with rolling instead).

The object interaction portions of the demo are solid enough, I found using the focus-camera input (I think it was L trigger on my 360-style controller) helped with the stair and ball puzzle, letting me line the throws up where I lacked that granular control surface to aim.

The last comment is that where prompts show up is not good. I'd position the text to be directly over the button, this screenshot of LoZ Windwaker is an example of how disambiguating prompt+button context can be very clear. During my play, it took time to figure out that the B button was the omnibutton, as the text was displaying directly beneath the Y button and sometimes over the A button.

Pretty solid demo otherwise. Shows a lot of promise and I think this is the only ant game with biblically accurate ant lore.

Stable & 3.0 Versions have a fun problem with the character menu jittering when your mouse cursor is in the margin. The 'cartoon expand' effect from mouse-over will loop, making navigating the menu by clicking and dragging the bar impossible. Other brief UI critiques include the transient nature of most of the menus when you are clicking on character/asset items on screen, which can layer over/under the default menu options in certain display situations. The UI is cute but at times borderline non-functional when these conflicts crop up, which for me is quite frustrating.

A traditional fixed menu option would be optimal to add as a feature sometime, as it would assist people with interface difficulties in navigating the software and avoid UI conflicts. Thanks!