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Willowblade4 years ago

The narration was a great touch to the game. It's been a while since I played a Tamagotchi style game and raising four foxes seems to be hella hard with the world set on destroying them and pizza costing 100$. I think the payment system confused me. There seems to be no proper way to increase it,  or have an impact on it, and it increases day after day. My guess is that when you remove a poop, your payment amount decreased since you're away from your desk and every shift worked it increased a bit. I'm quite frugal in life and don't have kids, but with this I have a feeling of what it's like to live payroll to payroll 😁

I quit after three in game weeks, after one of my foxes died and a day after the 4th fox  I was waiting to mature matured. I think a health meter per fox or at least some more indication of its status would be nice. I was really taken when one of my foxes went to heaven.

I also found that continuously petting the foxes helped a lot in raising the happiness meter, even when they were asleep, bridging their happiness until payday.

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Sage74 years ago

Thanks so much for your detailed feedback! We spent the last day or so testing and balancing, and its hard to get right! You're right about the payment; so you get paid hourly during work hours (I think it's set to 9-5) minus time that you spend cleaning up or petting the foxes, which is reflected in the "next pay". We should have made this a lot clearer.

I'm glad you felt some attachment to your foxes :D We made it so that each fox has a hidden happiness, hunger, and health meter, and when you satisfy all three they can mature (only mature once per day though). Then when they are all mature and meet all three conditions, you win. It was actually harder than we expected to get this across to the player. Initially we thought about giving each fox bars, then we experimented with thought bubbles which resulted in too much clutter and didn't look good, so we decided to try to show it all via the animations, e.g. crying when sad, drooling when hungry, ill when sick.. but I absolutely agree this needed a lot more work. The code is really really spaghetti unfortunately so providing feedback via the animations might not be working 100% correctly so you may have not noticed that your fox was sick 😳

We kept in petting the foxes overnight because the consensus was it was funny, but I guess it doesn't make too much sense :D

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Willowblade4 years ago

There's always a lot of cutting corners going on, and I actually like the approach of showing animations, keeping the technicalities hidden from the player (like real foxes). I think mine have died from hunger 😅, but now I know I shouldn't be petting during daytime...

Oh, one last remark, I thought there was a bit of a disconnect between "the neighbours are playing bad music" and giving the toy to the fox, I deduced from the context it's what I should do, as the other cause and cures are pretty logical, but this one actually had me petting instead of giving the toy.

I just thought (but I don't think you guys will rework the spaghetti to make this possible) what could make this game's shop loop more engaging is to have actual upgrades. A litter box where the turds could go, for example, or increasing food quality by buying a better kitchen or so... Would make it more strategic instead of purely reactionary, if that makes sense.

Anyway, looking forward to the next game you'll make!

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Sage74 years ago (1 edit)

True about the cutting corners but I really struggled towards the end with my God class. To be honest, I wasn't sure how to go about structuring a simulation game and decided to just implement as much as I can and not worry about the structure. We're compiling a list of jam lessons so your feedback is really appreciated :)

I agree on the inconsistency with the bad music event. I think because we only playtested between the three of us, we didn't catch some of the less intuitive aspects of the game. One important lesson would be to get someone outside the project to playtest for our last minute tweaks.

I really like your upgrade ideas and that it's important to have strategic decision-making to empower the player. We'll keep all this in mind for our future projects :)

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