Sure, always happy to hear feedback. Keep in mind that the game was originally written for a game jam with specific limitations on page number and the like.
Viewing post in Little Garden: A Game of Decline jam comments
Cool game concept. I especially like the boundary and the almost Blades in the Dark style Moves and Threats mechanics. The structured “amount” of play, and the finite end states, make this game ideal for a one-shot. I did find some of the concepts hard to follow given their presentation. Keywords are highlighted only where defined which led me to need to reread things a few times. While I think the cover art is lovely, it is not the same size as the pages of the document which makes the pdf wonky to load. Also, the absence of any real text formatting or document art makes it feel more like I am reading a professional document than a game.
“Player Moves require Players to spend dice from their pool and must meet a Threshold that when rolled to count as a success. Players who do not hit that Threshold have “missed”, incurring negative penalties while rolling above the Hit (H) is called hitting a Success (S) which infers extra bonuses.”
This core mechanical sentence does not make sense. It needs to be rewritten for the game to be playable.
Thanks for the feedback! I can see where the sentence on moves is a little unclear but all Thresholds are listed on the Player Moves themselves, along with Hit and Successes. We can certainly make that more clear however. As for art, it's a free game made for a gamejam which originally had a maximum page limit. Art costs time and money (and takes up space!), none of which we could really excuse for a game made in under a month for a game jam.
Yeah, those are fair points, I will say you have quite a bit of room on the right side of the player and gm spreads and you can grab some free photography from Unsplash or other free image sources. But yeah I think the thing that would elevate this the most is a clarity pass and some text formatting to make the mechanics stick out in the text. Again, I think it’s a cool idea and has some novel mechanics and a very interesting premise. Best of luck, and good work.