itch.io

bawled my eyes out. wasn't ready for the amount of grief that could come with such a small wholesome game.

hi guys, I played the most recent build yesterday. here's my thoughts:

- main menu looks great. that art is very fitting for the style. loading screen gets me in the mood and conveys the theme well.
- the room I start in looks quite nice. character is untextured and unclothed (placeholder). lighting is good.

- the place where I place the book looks like something I can pick up instead of an empty space where I drop the book. maybe a dotted line would make more sense?

- the UI is hopelessly confusing and one of the main issues here. I seem to be having two inventories, one to the side and one under I. I don't understand anything about the visuals of them because they're in a placeholder state currently. what's the difference? where do items go when I pick them up? 

- the transition to the forest only became clear through dialogue. this is a shame because if I were to have clicked through I wouldn't have realised I was now teleported into the book.

- forest looks pretty OK. from the screenshots, the rest of the environment does too. the flames are a little strange because they're cards, and I could nitpick the path as there are some resolution issues and it could just use a layer of polish in general.

- the putting together of the well was just broken so I couldn't continue. apparently I first need the wood and then the bucket? but the bucket just kept sticking and the wood didn't seem to interact with the frame at all. this is why I couldn't continue to the rest of the game.

- PLEASE set ESC to 'exit popup' instead of 'return to main menu and restart section of game'. it was very frustrating.
thanks guys! hope you can work some of this out before the deadline. overall, interesting theme, looks like it could be fun but unfortunately broke for me before I could really play most of it.

I played this for a little bit. here are my thoughts:

the art style is fun and clear. immediately shows me where I should be going. I love the little king and the other characters, the animations are fitting and overall give off a very goofy vibe. I like the intro. I would look at text spacing here (punctuation, timing) because I didn't get most of the story while looking at the images. skip function is nice to see. the buttons/UI needs some work, as they're blurry and squashed. initially after completing the first level, the button for the second level didn't show up. this was fixed by going back and forth between the menus, though. 

the houses look like I can enter them, I was sad to see I couldn't. I'm not sure what the difference is between my red and my blue minions.

 the main issue with this game in its current state is that my minions get stuck on ramps, plants, rocks and other 'edges'. the gameplay depends a lot on how 'fair' it feels to lose my minions (i.e. by crossing over a chasm wrongly). this means that the minions getting stuck feels frustrating. when I got to the spitting enemies, you lost my interest, because they instantly killed all my minions and pushed me over the ledge. they didn't really feel balanced compared to the lawnmowers. the pencil swings have a big hitbox and killed a lot of my guys. 

I want to say though that I feel like this game has potential. I know this is at the end of the MVP stage, but as a hypothetical future development idea I would love to see some more interaction with the environment, collectibles, or a bigger integration of the theme 'working together to achieve a goal' (i.e. opening certain gates when having obtained certain minions, or other size related puzzles). Right now it's purely traversal, and I feel like that's fine as an MVP, but it's making the collision issues even more frustrating as it's the main thing I'm doing. I do hope to see the final product in a few days. good luck!!