Thanks for playing the game.

Controls are pretty bad on a controller

Sadly, there is not much I can do about that. Default control scheme is not good and there is no way to change it since it seems to be hardcoded into the engine. However, you can change them by pressing F1. I think the game says so in one of the hints, or maybe in the initial control screen. 

Also, I don't think there is a way for the game to detect if you are using a gamepad or a keyboard, which makes making UI prompts slightly more difficult, especialy with the limited ingame resolution. It will investigate and think of some solution.

I wish there were better descriptions to know what a given skill does

That's pretty much a problem with most rpgs that I played. You create your character first, but there is no way to know what the game is about at that point. I will fix this by adding longer intro section introducing all mechanics and you will get to pick the traits at the end of that section.

Also, traits are a very new addition, so the game is balanced around having none at all, which is the default.

It would be nice if they didn't disappear, just in case I needed to reread it

I tried that when I was making the hint system and it didn't really look good. There is way too many of those questionmarks, which is anoying. Good thing is, it nudges players to read them so they dissappear. 

However, being able to reread them seems important, so I will probaly add every hint you read into the diary, which is pretty much useless now anyway.

The UI is serviceable to use, a bit busy

Deffinitely something I will be working on. The 640x480 resolution is a big limitation, but it's not that hard to work around that.

Wish running was a thing so it didn't take long to go somewhere

There are several ways to be faster, they are just locked at the start to make players actualy walk around a bit and get used to where everything is.

You can pick a trait that allows you to run faster, you can get speed potions, you can buy a motorcycle or you can get mutations that make you ran faster. You can also unlock shortcuts, fast travel and even set custom fast travel points. As you progress, you spend less and less time walking since you start unlocking all of those options.

Fast travel costs food, but not that much and you can even get a trait that makes it free. Again, this is to make people walk everywhere at the start of the game to learn the map. As they get better, they will use fast travel more often since food will stop being an issue.

Maybe have an unobtrusive popup when an action does something to the player's mood?

I had a system for that almost ready. It's comming.

I was disappointed to have no one who would train combat, since I wanted to be violent and the first enemy, the chicken outside my house, clobbered me big time.

Pretty much everyone I saw  playing the game got killed by it. It's becoming some kind of tradition. 

Olaf, the bald guy, can increase your physical stats a lot and on top of that, you can exercise in your hideout to get stronger too. Weapon skills can be increased early on in two ways. There is a training dummy near the bridge with the guard. You can use it every day for free.  You can also tell Billy to follow you and he will help you fight. He kills most weak enemies alone without any problems and you still get some XP even when you yourself deal no damage.

And that pretty much covers it. Walking is a pain at the start, but that's intentional and it stops being a problem rather quickly. You make a character, fumble around and learn the game a bit. You either continue or you make new character, fix the things you don't like with the traits and start again. This is not ideal and the intro section will fix that.

Again, thanks for playing and commenting.

Thanks for playing the game. Your initial impressions are correct. However, this is a mixture of my inexperience and intended design.

-The map has a lot of empty space, as in, you walk a lot without doing anything specific...

While the map might seem big, there is not that much wasted space. Every map has something that might be useful, be it items, wild plants, animals to hunt, npcs to talk to and so on. While there is quite a lot of walking at t he start, the amount of it gets lower and lower as you progress. 

You can fast travel from your home to the village, you can create your own custom fast travel spot (you can increase the amount of spots you can have by exploring and finding certain items), you can buy or make speed potions to move faster, you can even buy and repair a motorcycle. You can also pick a starting trait that allows you to move faster, or you can developl mutations that also make you faster. And lastly, there are quite a few shortcuts you can unlock to make traveling easier and faster. As I said, world seems big and there is quite a lot of travel, but you will drasticaly reduce your travel time as you progress. I designed it this way to make your characters progression more meaningful than just numbers getting higher.

-Is not very clear where everything is, it took me a while to get food after the tutorial

That is partialy intended since I want players to actualy explore and find things them selves. However, there is alredy a long term teaching system in place.

The NPC that stands outside of your hideout will give you series of very simple quests that teach you the basics of the game. First task you get is to work for Billy, the farmer who you met in the tutorial section. This teaches you how to pass time, get money and what food is. After working for him for  about two weeks (I actualy forced  Billy to stay in same location for some time so you don't have to go search for him), the NPC will return to your hideout and give you another quest, learn certain farming and cooking related skills. And after that, he will tell you how to farm, how to cook and so on.

The farmer that lives pretty much next to you also sells you cooked food and you can also buy food in the village, so you don't even have to farm if you don't want to. Yes, this will take some time to figure out, but I don't think figuring out that farmer or innkeeper sell food is that much of a stretch. On top of that, there is no running time limit. Time only advances when you want it to so there is no hunger bar forcing you to quickly search for food so you have all the time you need to explore the game world more and find where everything is.

-Tutorials aren't the nicest, I feel overwhelmend seeing so many question marks in the map.

That's probably the biggest problem with the game right now. I don't want the tutorial to be too long (It is already quite long alredy to be honest), so I split it into three parts. The tutorial pretty much throws shitload of information at you at the start. After that, you can learn more slowly from the basic quest NPC and you can also learn from question marks, which are always place near the thing they want you to teach.

It could be done better. I plan to replace the current tutorial with relatively long and linear optional intro section, which will teach you more things and also give you some time to get accustomed to them. This will also allow me to get rid of some question marks, or even all of them. 

While the current system is in no way great, I feel it is passable. This is not a game you can just pick up and start playing immediately. There is a learning curve and you need to spend some time to learn the game, since there are quite a few mechanics which are not that common in other games like this.

But as I said, I agree the tutorials and conveing information to players is somethig that deffinitely needs more work.

Thanks for playing the game. Let me explain some things.

Tutorialisation is somethings I struggle with the most. There is a lot of things to explain to new players, but the game is also meant to be played through multiple times. I tried to make the tutorial area short and put the rest into hint markers around the world, but it's not a perfect solution.

However, controling the game is not that difficult and I play it with the arrow keys, enter and num 0, using other keyes like Q,W or shift only when they are necesary, which isn't that often.

As for getting lost, it happens a lot to new people and I honestly don't know why. The entire map is pretty much a big circle with only few dead ends and every single enemy on the overworld will scream at you for a few seconds before attacking, giving you some time to retreat. Going south to the beach or east around the cave entrace will eventualy lead you to the only town in the game right now. Simply stick to the road and avoid enemies and you will get to the village.

The two weapons part means that you can equip two weapons at once. One is on your belt, second one is on your back. You can equip any weapon you want outside of combat. In combat, you can freely switch between these two wapons, but you can't access your inventory and equip new ones. It basicaly tells you that you can equip a bow and a club and switch to a club when you run out of arrows while also telling you that equiping two ranged weapons is not a good idea since you can run out of ammunition and be stuck with weak bash attacks for the rest of the fight.

Resourcess you get from gathering spots are indicated by their icon. Axe means you get wood, pickaxe gets you stone and so on. Using these advances time by half a day, so you can only do this once before you need to work for someone or rest in your tent. Doing so advances time by 7 days.

Resting in your tent actualy helps you if have enough food. You can still rest when you have no food to advance time, but you will get some debuffs if you do. 

Storing cooked food items in that brown chest near the entrace to your tent turns them into generic food resource which you use for working, training or resting. You can buy already cooked food from some npcs or in the Inn, in the upper right corner of the village where Billy goes sometimes, or you can learn to make it your self. You get ingredients for that by hunting and farming.

As you can see, I just wrote a large wall of text explaining pretty basic stuff. Putting all of that into long tutorial section would put anyone to sleep. Hints in the game world explain pretty much everything to some degree, but the game opens up pretty much imediately right from the start and that can be overwhelming.

To me though, this seems partialy like a good thing. The game is supposed to be played multiple times. There is about 30 different things you can unlock by beating the game and enough trait combinations to make new playthroughs interesting. I really hate games that focus on replayability, but they either have long mandatory tutorials or slow intro sections where new mechanics slowly open up. In sinathir, you can make new character and start playing without any tutorials or introductions in about 30 seconds, which is great for people who played the game multiple times but rough for those playing it for their first time.

I will ofcourse do something about it. I don't want the game to be that hard for new players.

That's a shame, but completely understandable. Tutorial and initial sections are not made that well, on top of the game itself being very niche.