I managed to pick up Edengrall again and I was pleased I was able to continue from where I left off. I followed the tutorial a little bit more. It brought me to a plot of land that I cleared the grass from and wanted me to sow 32 carrot seeds and 32 turnip seeds. I was unable to complete that so I went to try to catch critters. I caught 2 sand roaches and tried to fish, but I couldn't figure out fishing. I think the transition between the above water and below water sound should be more subtle.
I will check the tutorial, but each time you plant a carrot or turnip in a medium farm time you plant 4 at once, so you should have enough seeds for that at the start.
Can you tell us what part of the fishing confused you the most, we need to figure out where people are getting stuck
Yeah, so I'd take the rod and equip it. I think it would then ask what kind of bait I wanted to use. I'd pick the sand roach, then cast it into the water. I couldn't cast it very far, so I wasn't sure if I was supposed to get it near the schools of fish in the water. Regardless, nothing would happen, and WASD would move the bobber and reel it in. I was left unsure if I was doing something wrong, or missing a key to cast further, or what. I kept on expecting to be able to wind up casting my line similarly to how you can wind up a swing with the scythe, but it wouldn't work.
You need to cast near the fish, they only go after bait near them, also each fish has their favorite bait, sea roach is a very weak bait and only catches some fish
Not going to look into the Options Menues etc. this Time.
Hoeing the Grass should Hoe where I stand aswell, I know its unrealistic that Way, but currently it leaves an annoying little Circle in the middle.
When moving through the Grass, it should either spring back Sooner, or lay flat for way longer, depending on how fresh you want it to appear. Currently its in a weird middle Spot.
You also really need to smooth out the Transitions between Grass and no Grass Areas. Its fine on the Texture below, but especially at the River or other natural Areas, the Grass shouldn't cut off so extremely apruptly from Waist-high to nonexistent.
And you really don't need this everywhere. Personally I think Grassblades are way more impactfull if used moderately around other Props to hide Transitions, and keep the majority as just a Texture.
I understand that you want certain Areas with high Grass to be able to hoe it down, but you could have those Seperated. ForestPaths with more underwood, some brambles and Stuff but no real Grass, and then a clearing in the middle where it slowly gets higher in patches. Also makes you search a bit more for it Gameplay wise, instead of finding it literally everywhere.
Building has nice Attachment Points now, no need for manual grid movement, thats nice. Took a while to figure out I had to closely hover over them, I think they could be bigger.
On the Fishing, casting is odd. I was expecting to hold RMB and release to throw the Line, not press to go into a back and forth moving distance meter and then press LMB to throw. Having to wait forever for something to byte is pretty realistic I guess, but not very Fun. It could bite a bit faster. But I could look at your Water a lot during that. The Shader is really odd. It doesn't resemble Waves or refraction or whatever its supposed to do, and its incredibly see through, I think it should become darker way faster on downwards distance then it does currently. Its almost like Glass at this Point. Also clashes with the Waves produced from the Swimmer. Which also produced Waves at a very strong Rate.
I can no longer Dolphin-Jump? On the one Hand its good, since it really was odd, on the other I'm a bit sad. Maybe add Flippers to allow it again while increasing Waterspeed?
I did get a Catch by accident after pressing around on various Buttons to see if I could alter Hook-height or if I was missing anything on the Fishing. Got an "Object reference not set to an instance of an object" Bug Report. Guess my Fish isn't setup for me to catch. Sad. Finally figured out I apparently need to press LMB when the swimmer goes down a tiny bit, It'd be nice to have more Feedback on when to do that, right now its hard to tell if you cast far away. Also always got the same Error, your Fish are missing.
I also again got lost in your Town. And its still empty.
Spent all my Energy to get more Wood, you really need to supply a Ton more for the Demo so you can test out building properly. No Way I'm going through multip5le Days of sleeping again to gather only Wood, and no Way am I going to spend the tiny amount of Energy I have to gather Tons of Food and go through your Cooking System to cook something up for a bit more Energy regeneration.
Anyway, if you start building again, but attach the first Thign you build on the second Level, your Grid locks to that and you can't place on the first Level anymore, until you exit and re-enter building Mode. The Grid should really snap to the Floor I think.
No Character selection/customization, not much to do in the City or anywhere, crashed my GPU after a while ( but thats on me, I forgot I had Unreal, Blender, Krita and a bunch of other Stuff open aswell).
I don't know if there was anything else apart from Fishing and building updates that made it into this DD as compared to the last Time I played it.
Sorry, but the Feedback is probably a bit harsher this Time around, it feels like not enough changed for the Time spent on this, and I'm still a bit mad.
The map/terrain issues we want to solve in the following months, there are many technical limitations to our biome system and a total rewrite is not viable, it would take more than 3 months for little progress.
It is actually really fast for fish to bite... you just have to cast the bait where there are fish, they don't spawn for you, you need to go where they are, you can see which fish can bite your current bait as they now change color to also indicate the difficulty (red = hard, green = easy), if the fish are not changing colors it means your current bait cannot catch them.
Customization is coming some time after we expand the map and start adding stuff like woodcutting
Henlo! I only gave the game a quick try for now, but here is what I think so far.
It's obviously still in early development, but feels like with some more work it could be a nice game to play!
That being said, I think the movement and animations feel a bit off. With the movement it feels like of fast and floaty.
As for the animations, they sometimes don't blend together too well, and sometimes animations play too fast or slow and if you perform certain actions like run then jump you end up with weird animations happening like running really fast in mid air.
I also think that the animations for performing actions like cutting grass and stuff need a bit of work. They should be made faster, but I'm just not a fan of having to wait for long animations, especially when it's a task you will probably perform frequently. Some of them also need to be made more obvious, even exaggerated so it's clear I'm actually performing an action.
I'm sure once the game is closer to being finished, it'll be fixed, but right now it felt kind of aimless. I was given a short list of objectives and that was it. I'm not even sure this could be called a tutorial since most of the objectives weren't clearly explained to me and I had to figure them out on my own. Which admittedly wasn't too hard (except fishing, more on that later).
It would probably help if the start of the game was a bit more handholdy and structured to help people get into the flow of the game.
A bit problem I had though was the UI. I was playing at 4K and the UI in general felt tiny. Even scaling up what I could, everything felt really small.
In particular the text was so small it was difficult to read without getting close to my screen. Other things on the screen like the stamina bar, quest info, clock and so on were also all so small it made it difficult to see them.
One other issue I had which I guess is UI related is the building menu. When I opened it, it was just one huge list of stuff. It made finding things difficult and it was kind of just overwhelming to see 500 different things to build. Maybe add some kind of organization to the list (I did notice there were buttons to filter some stuff, but it wasn't obvious what these buttons were or what they were suppose to filter).
I also didn't like the buttons on the title screen.
The rest of the UI looks good, but it's just too hard for me to see or use at my screen resolution.
I like the art style of the characters! They all look cute, especially the bunny girl! That being said, I think the art style of the characters and world don't match.
Also why does the girl with short blond hair and the pink top wear a bra but none of the other characters do??
I don't want to be too harsh, but the world, especially with the textures used and lack of detail looked like something from the early 2000s. If I were you, I'd try to tone down the detail on the textures and stylize them so they match the style of the characters.
Another thing I noticed about the graphics was a lot of objects popping in, mostly smaller stuff. Grass in particular seemed to pop in and out of existence with every step I took, and it was really hard to not notice.
The town has a nice, unique layout but could do with a map or something. I'm sure with time I would have gotten use to the layout of it, but at times it was difficult to navigate and find things.
At some point it might also be a good idea to add some more variety to the town. More variety with textures, props and so on, and just add more stuff to make the world feel less empty.
The only thing I really didn't like was the fishing minigame. In general I don't like fishing minigames to be fair, but this one was poorly explained and not very intuitive. I couldn't catch a fish after like 10 minutes of trying and just gave up.
From what I understand you have to align the green marker with the fish, then press W to reel it in. Which I did, multiple times, but everytime I'd got the fish marker all the way to the player, it just reset and I had to start again?
Controlling the green marker also felt really difficult, not only was it way too sensitive to movement, but it would slide and bounce around like mad. Luckily it seemed to take forever for a fish to escape so it wasn't as bad as it could have been.
A few last minor thing I'd mention is manually watering plants seemed to take forever. Maybe later on it can be automated, there was sprinklers and what not, but I wouldn't have liked to water an entire field of crops if it was taking that long to fully water each individual one.
Some of the sound effects are kind of harsh on the ears too. I can't remember them all but got irritated by the sound made during dialog.
If I've got time I'll play it some more later and see if I can actually figure out some of the more in depth systems and what not.
As I said, it's clear the game is still early in development and still needs a lot of work, but you've got a decent foundation to build off of so keep up the good work!
We are struggling to get these animations right, and we have more to add later as we add new features, it might need an overhaul...
The game is going to switch into more survival in the following updates, at the start you will be able to choose between comfy or survival and you will be able to die, we expect the survival elements to give the game more direction.
I think we have UI scale options, but I never personally tested them, specially on 4k resolution, my brother made it, so I have to check later.
I will give the main menu buttons a new look after I am done redoing the base recipes
I only gave a Bra to some girls to make sure you can't see the underboob, just pretend they are all using it, the clothes clip each other and the less layers the have the better.
The town textures are placeholders, I will eventually draw new ones and redo all the UV mapping
The fishing is simple: keep the green bar on the fish using A and D, tap W to pull the line, which interrupt fish specials (when they get a colored circle closing in), some fish get stunned when you do so, but missing the tap punishes you hard, so don't spam it. Most fish have more than 1 battle stages, you can see how many stages they have by checking the red spheres near their stamina bar (the red bar), bigger fish have more stages and gain new moves on each stage, you were probably fighting something way above your level, try smaller fish. You can also tap S to make the bar stop drifting and sliding
Open the map with M, click on the icons to draw a path you can follow
Watering is slow at first, you can make sprinklers, use the watering can special (hold right click) and there will be more options later (Faerie helpers)
The pop ins and sound improvements are on the todo list already.
Itch is a garbage website, so my absolutely gigantic review was removed when i accidentally refreshed or something. Amazing. I'll try and rewrite everything as it was.
So, I was asked in the thread by one of you (I think there's two devs?) to shit on the game extensively to help you improve. I generally don't like shitting on games and try my best to be constructive and ignore small issues that are obviously still WIP, but I'll oblige
Starting off:
Arriving on the main menu is a mixed bag. The UI SFX are great, the art and logo are great, but the buttons are standard unity font on standard unity buttons. Its really lame, especially since clearly a lot of work went into the logo and other visuals
It's bad enough that I'm getting Chinese Mobile Assetflip vibes when I know the game is better than that. You already have a nice wood texture (the one used in the background of the logo), just slap that on the buttons, get a CC0 font and call it a day, it'll be a huge improvement.
Anyway, moving on to settings. You have a LOT of settings. Even a grass and wind tab? I don't know what these are for, but more settings are always beneficial for the player. I didn't touch anything except master volume. If I were to find a fault, it would be the way you use your space. Most of the content is at the top of the tab instead of being spread out. It's really a non issue, but remember: you asked me to shit on it so I'm obliging
So, off to the game:
The spinning loading circle isn't spinning, it's static. I thought perhaps there was a crash but it appears to be working as intended. I guess the game dropped some frames at this time or something. Again, non issue.
The intro plays and it's a bit weeby. I'd say on the nose (mega mint, hmmm) but i'm not the target audience so I don't know if this is what people want or not. No issues here. The weird brown faded in color is kinda weird but whatever.
So, I'm in now. First quest says to make a farm, but I want to explore so I do. The town is BIG. Like unreasonably big for only a handful (10ish?) citizens. I wander about then decide to pull up the minimap after not running into people.
I wish I could zoom in on it since it can get crowded if a lot of citizens are bunched up. I click one and NICE, THERES A PATHING THING TO FOLLOW. VERY, VERY NICE. I did NOT expect something like this to be in a demo. Good job. The caps are there to emphasis that I really went "damn this owns" when it popped up.
So I go to a random citizen I picked to say hello. They have a talk option, but only one line of dialog. I'd like to, like, ask questions about the town or some story element, so I checked with a few others and they all only have one introductory line as of now. Kinda lame, especially since I'm given a story hook. Why does the town lack workers? How do they know eachother? What's the latest news?
Anyway, the map is huge. Like really giant. A bunch of buildings seem to have no purpose except to exist, kinda weird. Personally I'd slim down and focus on specific areas to make them super detailed and packed with content. This feel like content/scope creep waiting to happen, but I don't know how you're developing this and if you have a detailed plan. Either way, the area around the game start could use more polish and stuff to see. Remember - first impressions. You want the player to be immediately faced with stuff around him to see or do. Perhaps have an NPC in the room with you who tells you about some stuff. Perhaps they advance the story - why doesn't Edengrall have people? what can I do in the town? What are they up to? anything works
So, finding nothing to do on my own, I decide to do the main quest. Why is that the main quest? Kinda weird, but I don't play farming sims so I don't really know what to expect.
On the other hand, the f1 help menu is very well made. It is clear and informative and very helpful. Props to that.
Clicking the tool to find a spot does the on-screen path line to follow. Again, super good tool. It's clear you had some new player experience overhaul for the mechanics and it shows. I am not lost or helpless due to these 2 things.
So I go and do some farming. I cut grass and follow the instruction step by step. Somethings are a bit clunky but really nothing bad. I end up harvesting turnips, then the next goal is to go to a shop and buy/sell things. I stopped playing at this point, it's been about 30ish minutes.
My main concern is that it feel like there's a lot of hyper specific content (cooking/fishing has apparently a lot of things and mechanics to it) and a huge world, but it does not feel alive or lived in. Some things are also kind of silly, with how staircases have the wooden texture on the rails where it clearly shows that it wasn't unwrapped. Same with the characters, theres a bunch of them but they dont seem to offer anything besides a line or two of text. I saw that there was a whole character page, with moods and such. Their models are nice, but the shader is a bit flat.
Either way, perhaps there's a whole lot of other stuff to experience. The issue is that as a player I'm not TOLD about any of this, and I'm relying on what I saw and experienced so far, and that's telling me there's not a lot of general stuff to do and interact with, even though I know from reading the threads that there's things like extensive building, crafting, fishing, modding, etc.
I'd say go step by step and follow the path of a player first spawning to their first quest, and absolutely pack that path with stuff to see and do and experience. Give NPCs more stuff to say and so on. Add details to every hallway and room you'd traverse to get there. I'd do this before going very in depth with other mechanics, because I fear a player will not reach that far to experience the intricacies you've made.
Anyway, there's very clearly a lot of stuff here, but there needs to be more incentive for me to experience it. Mechanically you're set, but give me a story and more character details so I can play and say to myself "i wonder what will happen once i do this quest, or what character x will think of y"
If I am being overly critical, be mindful that I had fun playing and seeing things and I'm only being nitpicky in an effort to help you out (and since you asked).
Keep it up and I'll be on the lookout for future improvements.
The NPC progress is paused until the AI Update, we want a more advanced AI, about as deep as the cooking itself, we want NPCs that react to you, the world and each other, this will be a solid 6 months minimum to do this, so we are pushing this update to later and try to add smaller features, we want to add Wood cutting, Stone mining, some crafting and such first.
The NPC Overhaul will also allow for events, festivals and a lot of more interaction, including romance and marriage.
Several parts of the UI are also waiting an overhaul, mainly the map, the NPC shops the inventory and the cooking UI.
I like this game a lot. The lighting and character models are a good start but they need work (more shadows in general: the game is VERY bright). The dialogue needs an editing pass. But the actual gameplay and the general atmosphere are excellent.
When I first walked out into the little town and saw the towers I said to myself "whoa, comfy...".
Harvesting, planting, cooking, and fishing are all REALLY good.
The tutorials need more detail (fishing doesn't mention that you can right click to change to the bait camera) and it should pop up with the next F1 menu help when you finish an objective or at least flash the menu up the top so you know to look for more info.
I think the build menu would be better off as a dedicated hotkey like B rather than equipping the hammer and having that open the menu. You could do both.
Anyway, I really like it, and I'll buy it once it's more fleshed out for sure.
Thanks man, we are polishing the current systems for now, and will go back to expanding the game in a month or two.
Which feature would make you buy the game? More progression like mining metals to upgrade tools, a larger world and exploration, combat or better AI? Or maybe something else? We need this kind of "wishlist" feedback.
We are thinking of going for the exploration (map expansion) -> combat (turn based tactical) -> metals & materials for tool crafting and upgrades -> AI update will come last
Comments
I managed to pick up Edengrall again and I was pleased I was able to continue from where I left off. I followed the tutorial a little bit more. It brought me to a plot of land that I cleared the grass from and wanted me to sow 32 carrot seeds and 32 turnip seeds. I was unable to complete that so I went to try to catch critters. I caught 2 sand roaches and tried to fish, but I couldn't figure out fishing. I think the transition between the above water and below water sound should be more subtle.
I will check the tutorial, but each time you plant a carrot or turnip in a medium farm time you plant 4 at once, so you should have enough seeds for that at the start.
Can you tell us what part of the fishing confused you the most, we need to figure out where people are getting stuck
Yeah, so I'd take the rod and equip it. I think it would then ask what kind of bait I wanted to use. I'd pick the sand roach, then cast it into the water. I couldn't cast it very far, so I wasn't sure if I was supposed to get it near the schools of fish in the water. Regardless, nothing would happen, and WASD would move the bobber and reel it in. I was left unsure if I was doing something wrong, or missing a key to cast further, or what. I kept on expecting to be able to wind up casting my line similarly to how you can wind up a swing with the scythe, but it wouldn't work.
You need to cast near the fish, they only go after bait near them, also each fish has their favorite bait, sea roach is a very weak bait and only catches some fish
Not going to look into the Options Menues etc. this Time.
Hoeing the Grass should Hoe where I stand aswell, I know its unrealistic that Way, but currently it leaves an annoying little Circle in the middle.
When moving through the Grass, it should either spring back Sooner, or lay flat for way longer, depending on how fresh you want it to appear. Currently its in a weird middle Spot.
You also really need to smooth out the Transitions between Grass and no Grass Areas. Its fine on the Texture below, but especially at the River or other natural Areas, the Grass shouldn't cut off so extremely apruptly from Waist-high to nonexistent.
And you really don't need this everywhere. Personally I think Grassblades are way more impactfull if used moderately around other Props to hide Transitions, and keep the majority as just a Texture.
I understand that you want certain Areas with high Grass to be able to hoe it down, but you could have those Seperated. ForestPaths with more underwood, some brambles and Stuff but no real Grass, and then a clearing in the middle where it slowly gets higher in patches. Also makes you search a bit more for it Gameplay wise, instead of finding it literally everywhere.
Building has nice Attachment Points now, no need for manual grid movement, thats nice. Took a while to figure out I had to closely hover over them, I think they could be bigger.
On the Fishing, casting is odd. I was expecting to hold RMB and release to throw the Line, not press to go into a back and forth moving distance meter and then press LMB to throw. Having to wait forever for something to byte is pretty realistic I guess, but not very Fun. It could bite a bit faster. But I could look at your Water a lot during that. The Shader is really odd. It doesn't resemble Waves or refraction or whatever its supposed to do, and its incredibly see through, I think it should become darker way faster on downwards distance then it does currently. Its almost like Glass at this Point. Also clashes with the Waves produced from the Swimmer. Which also produced Waves at a very strong Rate.
I can no longer Dolphin-Jump? On the one Hand its good, since it really was odd, on the other I'm a bit sad. Maybe add Flippers to allow it again while increasing Waterspeed?
I did get a Catch by accident after pressing around on various Buttons to see if I could alter Hook-height or if I was missing anything on the Fishing. Got an "Object reference not set to an instance of an object" Bug Report. Guess my Fish isn't setup for me to catch. Sad. Finally figured out I apparently need to press LMB when the swimmer goes down a tiny bit, It'd be nice to have more Feedback on when to do that, right now its hard to tell if you cast far away. Also always got the same Error, your Fish are missing.
I also again got lost in your Town. And its still empty.
Spent all my Energy to get more Wood, you really need to supply a Ton more for the Demo so you can test out building properly. No Way I'm going through multip5le Days of sleeping again to gather only Wood, and no Way am I going to spend the tiny amount of Energy I have to gather Tons of Food and go through your Cooking System to cook something up for a bit more Energy regeneration.
Anyway, if you start building again, but attach the first Thign you build on the second Level, your Grid locks to that and you can't place on the first Level anymore, until you exit and re-enter building Mode. The Grid should really snap to the Floor I think.
No Character selection/customization, not much to do in the City or anywhere, crashed my GPU after a while ( but thats on me, I forgot I had Unreal, Blender, Krita and a bunch of other Stuff open aswell).
I don't know if there was anything else apart from Fishing and building updates that made it into this DD as compared to the last Time I played it.
Sorry, but the Feedback is probably a bit harsher this Time around, it feels like not enough changed for the Time spent on this, and I'm still a bit mad.
The map/terrain issues we want to solve in the following months, there are many technical limitations to our biome system and a total rewrite is not viable, it would take more than 3 months for little progress.
It is actually really fast for fish to bite... you just have to cast the bait where there are fish, they don't spawn for you, you need to go where they are, you can see which fish can bite your current bait as they now change color to also indicate the difficulty (red = hard, green = easy), if the fish are not changing colors it means your current bait cannot catch them.
Customization is coming some time after we expand the map and start adding stuff like woodcutting
Thanks for checking out the game again!
Henlo! I only gave the game a quick try for now, but here is what I think so far.
It's obviously still in early development, but feels like with some more work it could be a nice game to play!
That being said, I think the movement and animations feel a bit off. With the movement it feels like of fast and floaty.
As for the animations, they sometimes don't blend together too well, and sometimes animations play too fast or slow and if you perform certain actions like run then jump you end up with weird animations happening like running really fast in mid air.
I also think that the animations for performing actions like cutting grass and stuff need a bit of work. They should be made faster, but I'm just not a fan of having to wait for long animations, especially when it's a task you will probably perform frequently. Some of them also need to be made more obvious, even exaggerated so it's clear I'm actually performing an action.
I'm sure once the game is closer to being finished, it'll be fixed, but right now it felt kind of aimless. I was given a short list of objectives and that was it. I'm not even sure this could be called a tutorial since most of the objectives weren't clearly explained to me and I had to figure them out on my own. Which admittedly wasn't too hard (except fishing, more on that later).
It would probably help if the start of the game was a bit more handholdy and structured to help people get into the flow of the game.
A bit problem I had though was the UI. I was playing at 4K and the UI in general felt tiny. Even scaling up what I could, everything felt really small.
In particular the text was so small it was difficult to read without getting close to my screen. Other things on the screen like the stamina bar, quest info, clock and so on were also all so small it made it difficult to see them.
One other issue I had which I guess is UI related is the building menu. When I opened it, it was just one huge list of stuff. It made finding things difficult and it was kind of just overwhelming to see 500 different things to build. Maybe add some kind of organization to the list (I did notice there were buttons to filter some stuff, but it wasn't obvious what these buttons were or what they were suppose to filter).
I also didn't like the buttons on the title screen.
The rest of the UI looks good, but it's just too hard for me to see or use at my screen resolution.
I like the art style of the characters! They all look cute, especially the bunny girl! That being said, I think the art style of the characters and world don't match.
Also why does the girl with short blond hair and the pink top wear a bra but none of the other characters do??
I don't want to be too harsh, but the world, especially with the textures used and lack of detail looked like something from the early 2000s. If I were you, I'd try to tone down the detail on the textures and stylize them so they match the style of the characters.
Another thing I noticed about the graphics was a lot of objects popping in, mostly smaller stuff. Grass in particular seemed to pop in and out of existence with every step I took, and it was really hard to not notice.
The town has a nice, unique layout but could do with a map or something. I'm sure with time I would have gotten use to the layout of it, but at times it was difficult to navigate and find things.
At some point it might also be a good idea to add some more variety to the town. More variety with textures, props and so on, and just add more stuff to make the world feel less empty.
The only thing I really didn't like was the fishing minigame. In general I don't like fishing minigames to be fair, but this one was poorly explained and not very intuitive. I couldn't catch a fish after like 10 minutes of trying and just gave up.
From what I understand you have to align the green marker with the fish, then press W to reel it in. Which I did, multiple times, but everytime I'd got the fish marker all the way to the player, it just reset and I had to start again?
Controlling the green marker also felt really difficult, not only was it way too sensitive to movement, but it would slide and bounce around like mad. Luckily it seemed to take forever for a fish to escape so it wasn't as bad as it could have been.
A few last minor thing I'd mention is manually watering plants seemed to take forever. Maybe later on it can be automated, there was sprinklers and what not, but I wouldn't have liked to water an entire field of crops if it was taking that long to fully water each individual one.
Some of the sound effects are kind of harsh on the ears too. I can't remember them all but got irritated by the sound made during dialog.
If I've got time I'll play it some more later and see if I can actually figure out some of the more in depth systems and what not.
As I said, it's clear the game is still early in development and still needs a lot of work, but you've got a decent foundation to build off of so keep up the good work!
We are struggling to get these animations right, and we have more to add later as we add new features, it might need an overhaul...
The game is going to switch into more survival in the following updates, at the start you will be able to choose between comfy or survival and you will be able to die, we expect the survival elements to give the game more direction.
I think we have UI scale options, but I never personally tested them, specially on 4k resolution, my brother made it, so I have to check later.
I will give the main menu buttons a new look after I am done redoing the base recipes
I only gave a Bra to some girls to make sure you can't see the underboob, just pretend they are all using it, the clothes clip each other and the less layers the have the better.
The town textures are placeholders, I will eventually draw new ones and redo all the UV mapping
The fishing is simple: keep the green bar on the fish using A and D, tap W to pull the line, which interrupt fish specials (when they get a colored circle closing in), some fish get stunned when you do so, but missing the tap punishes you hard, so don't spam it. Most fish have more than 1 battle stages, you can see how many stages they have by checking the red spheres near their stamina bar (the red bar), bigger fish have more stages and gain new moves on each stage, you were probably fighting something way above your level, try smaller fish. You can also tap S to make the bar stop drifting and sliding
Open the map with M, click on the icons to draw a path you can follow
Watering is slow at first, you can make sprinklers, use the watering can special (hold right click) and there will be more options later (Faerie helpers)
The pop ins and sound improvements are on the todo list already.
Itch is a garbage website, so my absolutely gigantic review was removed when i accidentally refreshed or something. Amazing. I'll try and rewrite everything as it was.
So, I was asked in the thread by one of you (I think there's two devs?) to shit on the game extensively to help you improve. I generally don't like shitting on games and try my best to be constructive and ignore small issues that are obviously still WIP, but I'll oblige
Starting off:
Arriving on the main menu is a mixed bag. The UI SFX are great, the art and logo are great, but the buttons are standard unity font on standard unity buttons. Its really lame, especially since clearly a lot of work went into the logo and other visuals
It's bad enough that I'm getting Chinese Mobile Assetflip vibes when I know the game is better than that. You already have a nice wood texture (the one used in the background of the logo), just slap that on the buttons, get a CC0 font and call it a day, it'll be a huge improvement.
Anyway, moving on to settings. You have a LOT of settings. Even a grass and wind tab? I don't know what these are for, but more settings are always beneficial for the player. I didn't touch anything except master volume. If I were to find a fault, it would be the way you use your space. Most of the content is at the top of the tab instead of being spread out. It's really a non issue, but remember: you asked me to shit on it so I'm obliging
So, off to the game:
The spinning loading circle isn't spinning, it's static. I thought perhaps there was a crash but it appears to be working as intended. I guess the game dropped some frames at this time or something. Again, non issue.
The intro plays and it's a bit weeby. I'd say on the nose (mega mint, hmmm) but i'm not the target audience so I don't know if this is what people want or not. No issues here. The weird brown faded in color is kinda weird but whatever.
So, I'm in now. First quest says to make a farm, but I want to explore so I do. The town is BIG. Like unreasonably big for only a handful (10ish?) citizens. I wander about then decide to pull up the minimap after not running into people.
I wish I could zoom in on it since it can get crowded if a lot of citizens are bunched up. I click one and NICE, THERES A PATHING THING TO FOLLOW. VERY, VERY NICE. I did NOT expect something like this to be in a demo. Good job. The caps are there to emphasis that I really went "damn this owns" when it popped up.
So I go to a random citizen I picked to say hello. They have a talk option, but only one line of dialog. I'd like to, like, ask questions about the town or some story element, so I checked with a few others and they all only have one introductory line as of now. Kinda lame, especially since I'm given a story hook. Why does the town lack workers? How do they know eachother? What's the latest news?
Anyway, the map is huge. Like really giant. A bunch of buildings seem to have no purpose except to exist, kinda weird. Personally I'd slim down and focus on specific areas to make them super detailed and packed with content. This feel like content/scope creep waiting to happen, but I don't know how you're developing this and if you have a detailed plan. Either way, the area around the game start could use more polish and stuff to see. Remember - first impressions. You want the player to be immediately faced with stuff around him to see or do. Perhaps have an NPC in the room with you who tells you about some stuff. Perhaps they advance the story - why doesn't Edengrall have people? what can I do in the town? What are they up to? anything works
So, finding nothing to do on my own, I decide to do the main quest. Why is that the main quest? Kinda weird, but I don't play farming sims so I don't really know what to expect.
On the other hand, the f1 help menu is very well made. It is clear and informative and very helpful. Props to that.
Clicking the tool to find a spot does the on-screen path line to follow. Again, super good tool. It's clear you had some new player experience overhaul for the mechanics and it shows. I am not lost or helpless due to these 2 things.
So I go and do some farming. I cut grass and follow the instruction step by step. Somethings are a bit clunky but really nothing bad. I end up harvesting turnips, then the next goal is to go to a shop and buy/sell things. I stopped playing at this point, it's been about 30ish minutes.
My main concern is that it feel like there's a lot of hyper specific content (cooking/fishing has apparently a lot of things and mechanics to it) and a huge world, but it does not feel alive or lived in. Some things are also kind of silly, with how staircases have the wooden texture on the rails where it clearly shows that it wasn't unwrapped. Same with the characters, theres a bunch of them but they dont seem to offer anything besides a line or two of text. I saw that there was a whole character page, with moods and such. Their models are nice, but the shader is a bit flat.
Either way, perhaps there's a whole lot of other stuff to experience. The issue is that as a player I'm not TOLD about any of this, and I'm relying on what I saw and experienced so far, and that's telling me there's not a lot of general stuff to do and interact with, even though I know from reading the threads that there's things like extensive building, crafting, fishing, modding, etc.
I'd say go step by step and follow the path of a player first spawning to their first quest, and absolutely pack that path with stuff to see and do and experience. Give NPCs more stuff to say and so on. Add details to every hallway and room you'd traverse to get there. I'd do this before going very in depth with other mechanics, because I fear a player will not reach that far to experience the intricacies you've made.
Anyway, there's very clearly a lot of stuff here, but there needs to be more incentive for me to experience it. Mechanically you're set, but give me a story and more character details so I can play and say to myself "i wonder what will happen once i do this quest, or what character x will think of y"
If I am being overly critical, be mindful that I had fun playing and seeing things and I'm only being nitpicky in an effort to help you out (and since you asked).
Keep it up and I'll be on the lookout for future improvements.
The NPC progress is paused until the AI Update, we want a more advanced AI, about as deep as the cooking itself, we want NPCs that react to you, the world and each other, this will be a solid 6 months minimum to do this, so we are pushing this update to later and try to add smaller features, we want to add Wood cutting, Stone mining, some crafting and such first.
The NPC Overhaul will also allow for events, festivals and a lot of more interaction, including romance and marriage.
Several parts of the UI are also waiting an overhaul, mainly the map, the NPC shops the inventory and the cooking UI.
I like this game a lot. The lighting and character models are a good start but they need work (more shadows in general: the game is VERY bright). The dialogue needs an editing pass. But the actual gameplay and the general atmosphere are excellent.
When I first walked out into the little town and saw the towers I said to myself "whoa, comfy...".
Harvesting, planting, cooking, and fishing are all REALLY good.
The tutorials need more detail (fishing doesn't mention that you can right click to change to the bait camera) and it should pop up with the next F1 menu help when you finish an objective or at least flash the menu up the top so you know to look for more info.
I think the build menu would be better off as a dedicated hotkey like B rather than equipping the hammer and having that open the menu. You could do both.
Anyway, I really like it, and I'll buy it once it's more fleshed out for sure.
Thanks man, we are polishing the current systems for now, and will go back to expanding the game in a month or two.
Which feature would make you buy the game? More progression like mining metals to upgrade tools, a larger world and exploration, combat or better AI? Or maybe something else? We need this kind of "wishlist" feedback.
We are thinking of going for the exploration (map expansion) -> combat (turn based tactical) -> metals & materials for tool crafting and upgrades -> AI update will come last