Congrats on finishing and great job with the game! It reminds me of a friendlier version of factorio where you have to gather resources peacefully/without exploitation.
Here's some feedback on your GDD and game since you filled out my request form:
GDD
- Generally speaking with making any type of document it's helpful if the formatting of the document was clean. In the case of your GDD that means font sizes for headers are cascading in size and more bullet points. Regardless of how good your document might be, if it looks a little messy people are less likely to read it/may bounce immediately.
- It would be useful to put in your target audience. Think of one specific person who would LOVE your game and describe them.
- I wasn't familiar with the games listed as references. It may be helpful to include more information and an image.
- I'm not entirely sure why the theme was listed in the introduction section but I don't think it added too much because of theme interpretation later in the document. I think you could remove it.
- I think the game summary could be improved by including information about what type of game it is. Since there was resource/crafting involved this could be highlighted.
- You could also mention more of the game loop in the game summary: gathering creatures to harvest their resources to upgrade your tools and develop a cure.
- Selling produce was included in the game but was unmentioned in the document. The document also failed to include information that animals could escape the pens. It's important to keep the two in sync.
- More information on the mechanic and how it relates to the design would be nice. For example I thought the first mechanic's description about the light was good.
- You may have benefited from including a diagram with the crafting upgrade/unlock tree in the appendix at the bottom. It can also help point out problems with the upgrades.
- The art section was very light on details and it's difficult to understand what you mean by "simplistic" and "detailed". Even if you mean something like "pixel art" or "low poly" there are different degrees of both (ex. 1bit, 8bit, 16bit, etc.). More images may be helpful, especially for explaining something like albedo.
- You would benefit from including information about why the art style was chosen and how it reinforces the game theme.
- Audio details are light as well. Here you should also include information about why certain music styles were chosen. "Fitting mood for a forest" isn't particularly helpful - is it a peaceful forest? A scary forest? etc.
- I found the audio cues relating to the animals to be important for the game play as it made it easier to find the animal you needed. It may be worth it to highlight this more as a reason to use animal SFX.
- Given that P for Pause is a little unconventional the explanation was nice and helpful.
Game
- Good job for including the tutorial! Try adding an interactive tutorial in the future instead of a text dump.
- I found it a little hard to read the dialogue at the start of the game. Try to make the dialogue advance based on user input instead of automatic. It also helps for accessibility reasons.
- Being able to see the creatures at the end with the cutscene was really nice. I really enjoyed that.
- The audio cues were helpful for finding the creatures.
- I didn't really understand why I could not pick up the pig or capybara - I thought it was a bug. Some sort of feedback would be helpful to direct the player to needing the upgrade.
- I wasn't sure why we needed the shops to sell resources - I didn't use them and getting gold was easy.
- The tech tree was well formatted - upgrades were in order and let you get more resources to get more upgrades.