I think the concept is very interesting, and the whole creature collection aspect of it appealed to my love for Pokemon-likes. However, the game does lack polish and it suffers for it IMO. Here’s a list of things I found that hurt the overall presentation (and I’m sure you must’ve just ran out of time to deal with some of these, but I list it in case you find some things you didn’t consider):
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It was not too clear initially on how the friending mechanic worked. I just ended up spamming left and right clicks and it seemed to get me more friends, so I was happy. But I think the tutorial could be a bit more hand-holding in this regard, or maybe the UX needs some work. I’m not entirely sure how this can be dealt with.
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A tiny/simple change would be to fix the z-ordering of the characters and trees, etc, so that stuff like this doesn’t happen.
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The collision with characters felt very “sticky”. The first time, I was running from the wolf and just got caught in a goop of collision meshes from my friends who trapped me to be the wolf’s dinner (deservedly so perhaps!).
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The dialogue system feels very unresponsive. As in, it blocks user input abruptly with no feedback and makes for a bad user experience I feel. I wouldn’t know how best to deal with this either since I’ve never worked with a dialogue system before.
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I was hoping that the endings would result in something different at the end, maybe a still-frame showing different outcomes, but it just kicked me back to the main screen :,( On the flip side, the game was fun enough to make me want to do the run again to get the other ending. I think even the possibility of friending the wolf somehow would’ve been nice (kind of like in PokePark 2, where even after you defeat the Big Bad, you end up friending them!).
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Minor nitpick, I burst out laughing at one instance of the dialogue. Initially my fox friend goes, teary-eyed, “Are you feeding our friends? :,((”, and then the next the time wolf comes, she’s like “Are you ready?” XD full well knowing what my strategy is ahahahh. I’m sure I’m just interpreting this wrong, but that was fun.
Overall, I think the idea is fun and definitely has the core of a good monster collector. The special powers of the different creatures were very cool to try out as well. The SFX and visuals overall was really nice and added more incentive to friend new creatures just because they looked so cool! I think it’d have been nice if they also had idle poses that weren’t just a frame of the walk animation (but then again, there were so many creatures, so I understand you had to cut corners).
I really hope you don’t take this the wrong way; I just wanted to provide a full picture of my experience so you can figure out what worked and what to improve upon! It gets rather hard to realize it as the developer I’ve found.