itch.io

Hey thank you so much for playing through our game. So glad that our design intentions were communicated for you that you found it a enjoyable and relaxing experience. I really appreciate you taking a moment to provide thoughtful feedback too. There is a wealth of information in seeing someone play through your game without developer prompts/assistance and talk through what they're thinking about as they do it!

You had some fresh takes on the game and I took a few notes from your comments.  Some of what you said we were cognizant of already but time didn't permit, particularly with providing sufficient feedback to the player through ui/effects. I actually toyed with the implementation of more explicit feedback through numbers popping up but thought it detracted from the visual purity of the experience. Particles were also on the cards but I couldn't get them to a state that I liked. I like your suggestion about showing quantities in the bar itself though, an elegant solution!

Adding more context and implicit story to the game was something that we tried to plan for but we got caught up in the aesthetic of the experience. Up until the last hour there wasn't even a proper game over state! It's a shame we didn't prioritize it more though because as you said in your stream, even a simple statement such as "you lasted x years" or "your network supported x plants" would have pulled a hefty amount of storytelling weight in relation to it's ease of implementation. A lesson learned to be sure.

We will be doing a few little updates sometime in the next week to bring the experience to the level we were hoping to get to in the jam. I expect this will include balance adjustments, feedback/ui tweaks, some light tutorial elements, and an expansion on the game end screen.