This game... is quite interesting. I'll start with the positives: the sound design is immaculate, the game looks quite good as well, I can tell a lot of work went into making this look like an actual shop, and I really enjoyed the concept of running your own shop and doing everything. Unfortonately, I think that it is held back by a few design and gameplay choices. First of all, the game explains you everything in the pause menu, that doesn't actually pause the game which means that you have to learn the game while costumers are demanding items. I think that for a game this complex you'll need a tutorial or at the very least explanations while the game is paused. Because of this, in my first time playing the game, I didn't understand anything until I found that it was explained in the pause menu, and by the time I was done with that, I had already lost. Then in the second time, I knew everything so the first 10-15 minutes were quite easy, which meant that I spent most of the time waiting for costumers to show up. It did get more interesting after that when customers came in faster and started asking for more specific items, but then it felt like the difficulty jump was too high and I pretty quickly lost, and I don't really feel like waiting another 10-15 minutes just to experience the harder difficulty again. Secondly, picking up and placing ores on the anvil was quite annoying to get right, especially when it was necessart to get them exactly on the anvil, which the experience into frustrating more than anything. More compplaints are that you can't really do anything with the gold you get (like upgrading your gear) which makes it feels quite meaningless, and also going into the main pauses everything in the main game, which cancels any concept of difficulty in that part. I know I have criticized this game quite heavily, but that's only because I felt like a few small changes would have made it into one of the best games of this jam, but it ended up only being pretty good. Still a really solid job all around!
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Thank you for your generous feedback! I appreciate you taking your time explaining and describing your experience in detail and providing well thought out helpful criticism. There are definitely things I'd improve if I was going to do this game jam again. I think getting someone to playtest earlier before the deadline would have helped me identify some of the issues surrounding it. Oh well, game jams are a great way to learn and get better and hopefully I'll be able to avoid making these mistakes you outlined in the future. Thanks again!