Enjoying the game. Feels like it has a lot of room to grow and be fun.
I see you've already made several of the UI suggestions from earlier, like the shift-tabbing for inventory items. I have some other suggestions to improve some of the pain points and/or make things cooler:
- Maybe instead of moving with the arrow keys and shift-arrow to change facing, instead maybe make it so that the first arrow key hit in a given direction changes your facing in that direction, and you only move if you hit an arrow key and you're already facing that direction. I find I spend a lot of time just fiddling with that, and I suspect this would be more intuitive and easier.
- Make an explicit key for eating something ("E" maybe), rather than space bar. I find myself accidentally eating things all the time, which can kill you in the early game if you eat the wrong things.
- A craftable "gate" item that you can walk through that animals can't would be a really solid quality-of-life improvement. Or don't make animals move diagonally, so that you can safely enter a paddock.
- The "memory" of the map that shows the last state you saw on map tiles that are out of view is a great addition, but maybe it shouldn't show animals. It's very confusing when you see two "p" tiles and go looking for two animals. (This is especially true at night where "memory" tiles are very difficult to distinguish from "nighttime visible" tiles.)
- I feel like the "you're tired" versus "you need to sleep" thing is confusing and ambiguous. Maybe it would be better to just unify those two mechanics - you get tired when you run out of stamina. OR you can have a separate bar that shows how sleepy you are or something so you know when you should be thinking about going to go sleep. But right now, you can watch your stamina bar but it doesn't seem coupled with when you need to sleep.
- I feel there should be a command that lets you rest without sleeping. I.e., if you wake up and chop a lot of trees, so you're tired but it's only been an hour since you slept, you ought to be able to rest a bit and then resume chopping.
- Related to the above, the character's circadian rhythm seems off. I often find myself sleeping and waking up in the middle of the night. Maybe have something a little more tied to daytime / nighttime cycles so that you get tired at night, you wake up in the morning, etc.
- Maybe show your credits somewhere? If you have a lot of messages when you wake up, it zooms right over showing you your current credits.
- Is there something I can actually spend the credits on?
- What exactly can you put in the machine? Only plants? It appears to let you put animals in...?
- I kept losing seeds, and I realized it's because you can accidentally plant two seeds in one plot.
- It would be nice if I could "fix" a random tilled spot that I didn't mean to till, just so the land around my homestead looks nice.
- Some decoration blocks would be nice.
- I encountered some mushrooms growing in caves. That was neat, but it seemed like all I could do was destroy them? Seems like I ought to be able to harvest them. (More generally, being able to range around and find new things would be fun.) A compass to get back to your homestead would help with that.
- Also, I think I accidentally tried to use rocks on a mushroom, and the game froze.
- The number of animals that showed up around my homestead suddenly seemed to jump at one point in the game, where there were dozens of animals roaming around. Might be a bug, or maybe it's intended behavior once I get a farm going?
- I don't like control to pick things up. It's in an awkward spot; it was better when it was comma. Also, if there is nothing in front of you to pick up when you hit that command, maybe check the tile you're standing on.
- It appears that monsters spawn on water tiles, making them trivial to catch because they cannot move; you just raft over to them and pick them up.
Anyway, it's a fun diversion already. I hope the above doesn't come off as ripping on the game; these are all just minor things that I think would improve it, but I wouldn't bother mentioning all the above if I didn't think there was a solid basis here that offered a lot. What's there is already quite engaging, and it would be nice to see this fleshed out into something larger!