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(2 edits) (+2)

Neat game!

I did have a little trouble getting into the game. In particular, I started by looking at all the buildings, such as the bench, which I learned gave me extra actions. But I couldn't figure out what number actually represented my number of actions. I considered that it might be the hand symbol, but I figured that couldn't be right, because the repair button for the home base was available and there were 0 hands available, so if I really had 0 actions I shouldn't be able to repair the home base.

I ultimately thought maybe the tutorial had said how many actions there were, and so I immediately refreshed the game to do the tutorial again. But nope... no mention of the number of actions.

I finally figured out that every repair option except for the home base required 1 hand, and so clearly I would have to repair the home base before doing anything else. The game is adamant enough about this that I think players will be forced to eventually figure this out. But it did take me longer than I think is necessary.

One thing that I think would help is just adding a hover-over effect that showed the name of each resource. This would also make it slightly easier to understand what each building does, as then you could just look at which resource it claimed to produce -- although from reading other comments, it sounds like there is a way to see what the building does in the UI before buying it, which I did not figure out when I played.

The other thing I want to mention is I feel like there were not very many malfunctions in my playthrough. Maybe 2 or 3 buildings broke while I was still using them, but ultimately this was not really a problem and I just breezed through most of the game. (For what it's worth: my final score was 36).

That said, there was an interesting moment early on where I got pretty low on fish because the greenhouse immediately broke. It actually seemed like I would never be able to stockpile fish, because I only had 2 left, it would take 3 to upgrade the greenhouse, and my fish/day was 0 ... but eventually I was able to locate the fishing building as well.

This does mean that the screen-scrolling provides at least one meaningful gameplay element: some sort of exploration. I literally thought I might be fish-soft-locked (?) because the greenhouse broke, but there was a sense of discovery when I located the fishing hole.

One other thing I wanted to mention that I appreciated was the sense of story cohesion in all the buildings. My gameplay experience was broadly: Hmm, I need X resource. What building sounded like it might produce X resource? And then I would repair/upgrade that building, and I was almost always right about which resources it produced. The way that the buildings are drawn and named makes it very intuitive to figure out what resources they produce, and this is a super cool property. It makes it easy to get into the flow of generating the correct resources.

I also think that, due to the relatively small number of malfunctions I experienced, the game feels like it invites optimization. And this makes a lot of sense, because there is a high score. I think the game does a good job of driving the player to potentially trying to leave as quickly as possible, and that fits very well with the story.

Overall, this game made solid use of the theme and created a compelling and intuitive gameplay loop. Good job!

EDIT: One last note, I thought the open/close building sound, and maybe some of the other sounds, were a bit loud compared to the music. I ended up turning the game down just because of how loud the close building sound was, but that made the music pretty hard to hear.

(+2)

Hi Honey Poney, thank you so much for your valuable comment, this is exactly the kind of feedback we are looking for! :D

We are sorry that the first phase of your game was troubled... We thought to have it covered with the tutorial, but obviously we still have to work on the explanation. Your final guess about the actions is correct: they are represented by the hand symbol. In fact, we wanted to use the Research Station as a "toy example" to explain how machines should be repaired, but we hadn't considered the confusion we create with the concept of actions ("why can I repair the base if I have no actions available?"). Thanks for pointing that out!

Regarding the impact of malfunctions in the game: yes, they're not that disruptive at the moment. We preferred not to overdo it to avoid frustration, but perhaps this made the last phases of the game too easy. 

However, the direction in which we wanted to ideally expand the game (...if the GWJ had lasted months) involves many more machines, scattered across the Antarctic wilderness. This idea lines up with what you said about the sense of exploration: if a fish-producing machine breaks down, there's another one that produces the same resource, that I need to discoverIn this scenario, having more malfunctions would not cause soft-locks; instead, it would gently push that sense of exploration. Of course that's far from the actual game, but I'm happy that we still managed to convey a bit of that :)

Commenting your last paragraphs, in our conception the goal is (*should be) to escape from the base, not to build the most powerful production engine. That's the reason why the snowmobile is there from the beginning, and - as you correctly guessed - there's a high score that invites optimization :) Also because, having to include malfunctions in the gameplay, they could be perceived radically differently according to the game genre: a resource-management game in which production pipelines are randomly broken is just frustrating, whereas a survival game in which you cannot rely on your tools is accepted and -somewhat- expected ;)

Again, thank you so much for your comment. We deeply appreciated it and we'll make good use of your suggestions!