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Wild Haven - Looking for feedback

A topic by rchava created Sep 04, 2024 Views: 303 Replies: 10
Viewing posts 1 to 5

Hello,

We recently released our first demo of our game Wild Haven on Itch.io, and we were hoping to get some feedback.  The demo is an early build of the game and we are mostly looking for feedback on the core game play loop, and how difficult it is to pick up.  Of course, any other feedback is appreciated!

Link to Itch.io pagehttps://rchava.itch.io/wild-haven

One run playtime: ~15 mins

Developer log(with more details)https://rchava.itch.io/wild-haven/devlog/793764/first-demo-release

Premise: Wild Haven is a nature builder where you rebuild the forest and create a thriving ecosystem. Clean up the polluted land, strategically place different wildlife together to discover more complex plants and animals and return your land to its natural state!

(1 edit)

Hey, left you some feedback. Very beautiful and rewarding experience, you and your brother did a really great job! My game is over here if you'd like to tell me about your experience with it on the game page: https://wasabiiii.itch.io/grass-elemental-demo-demo; Any feedback is much appreciated!

It was a good idea putting that ecosystem gif on the page. My ecosystem ended up having a bunch of unused land, so it's a great reference to have when trying to get the most out of the experience!

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Thanks for the feedback.  A lot more positive then I was expecting!  One question for you, how difficult/easy was it to understand the gameplay loop and what you could do?  I'm trying to understand if the tutorial is good or bad.

Your game looks really interesting, unfortunately I only have a MacOS(M1) so can't play Windows build.  If you have a mac or WebGL build I would be happy to try it out!

Yeah so at first it was a little bit challenging to actually think about what I was doing, but that isn't the tutorial's fault. It tells you pretty much everything you need to know. Once I started exploring new lands things started to make more sense, like eventually I figured out that the material requirements mean you have to be adjacent to the material to use it (for instance, 0/1 flowers would be 1/1 flowers if what you're trying to make is next to flowers). If you want you can make that a bit more clear, but otherwise it's fine!

Aw man! When I first released the game I was desperately trying to get a Mac port somehow, but nothing worked. And Grass Elemental deals with game files and window resolutions so idk about WebGL... Someday when the full demo releases, I'm going to figure out how to get a Mac port.  

That is really good feedback and I appreciate it.

Yeah, getting a MacOS build ready definitely wasn't intuitive.  I had the benefit of releasing some stuff for iOS App store which made it a little easier.  Once I get a PC(hopefully soonish) I'll try it out!

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Hi all,

We are looking for some updated feedback on the game.  Since our last request for feedback, we've made a number of substantial changes to the systems from real time to turn based, balance changes, a new soil system and updated UI.  We would greatly appreciate any feedback on how the game plays, any bugs etc.  Thanks!

Link to Itch.io pagehttps://rchava.itch.io/wild-haven

One run playtime: ~30 - 60 mins

Latest Developer log: https://rchava.itch.io/wild-haven/devlog/847458/wild-haven-developer-log-4

This game is great... I think I grew too many mushrooms too fast but that's more of a user error on my end. I'd be happy to offer free musical services if your looking to add to the in-game soundtrack (electronic or acoustic) Let me know if you've got any ideas in that department. Can't wait to play more! 👾

(+1)

Thank you for the kind words!  Yup, we'll be looking for music help early next year once we've prototyped out all the core systems and gameplay.  I've followed you on itch.io and will keep that in mind once we are ready for that stage!

(+1)

Very good! Looking forward to it! 👾

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Hello, We have some feedback for you! We’re a group of French video game students and we had to organize a playtest of an itch.io game. We had 3 different people play the game.

To begin with, we liked your game (which is why we chose it). The general feedback for the game was that the mood set by the game is really cute and relaxing. We loved the discovery of the randomized set of tiles and the general idea of farming and building our own little forest. For the core gameplay we can’t really give you more than just a general idea of what the players thought of the game. The readability is really where we have the most feedback to give you. So this is what we got from our playtest session:

  • The main objective is difficult to identify. The points calculation system is not presented, so we don't know what will happen at the end of the 50 rounds.
  • The tutorial doesn't provide all the key information but is still too long. The fact that it's not an in-game tutorial makes it difficult to visualize and assimilate the information.
  • Some UI elements are not legible/clear:
  • in the left-hand menu, some players didn't understand that the red coins corresponded to the cost of the element, and the green coins corresponded to the gain per turn.
  • in the bottom menu, players would like to know what the different elements correspond to, but there's no tooltip.
  • in the right-hand menu, players didn't understand what the little green bars below the number of pieces meant
  • The number of remaining actions per turn is not always clearly understood.
  • The Clear a tile function was not discovered by every player and was not understood by the one who found it.
  • The font is not legible enough, some items (especially in the left-hand menu) should be displayed in larger fonts.

We hope this could help you and we can’t wait to see what you will do with the game next. Good day!

(+1)

That is great to hear you guys liked the game after playtesting it, and we really appreciate the feedback on the UI and readability!  We'll definitely incorporate the feedback on the UI into our future updates and fixes.

Definitely agree that the tutorial needs to be reworked and moved away from the videos to an in-game tutorial.  

For the main objective, we've been working on designing a task system to give some directed ideas to players as they progress through the game, but from your feedback it sounds like it would be important to build out a points system directly into the game so the player isn't surprised by the score screen at the end on their first run through.