itch.io

I like the idea presented for the game, and kudos on actually getting things going. I know criticism can come across as someone is upset, so I want to make it clear that I'm presenting the negatives to highlight areas of improvement as I see them.

First, I'll describe my experience thus far. I was intrigued by the idea of the game, and so I opened it to see how it was implemented. By the time I had identified my character and how to move, I ran into the end of currently available content. I thought, surely there's more to this, maybe they just haven't put in the explanation of the controls yet. I'll press every key and see what they do. Nothing. Ok, maybe I need to walk to another area and come back to check out the orb, sort of Metroidvania-style. A bit early to do that, but it's early days for the game. Jumped the gap into a pit, had to reset the game. Had to sit through the slow intro again to find nothing did anything. Left comment to see if I was missing something.

Secondly, feedback as I understand it. As I said, I like that something has been made, but I feel it's been posted far too soon. The experience I had left a bad first impression, as it's little more than a starting template you might expect Unity or whomever to provide. Generally, when working on a project, it's important to release work in deliverable increments. If the audience can't experience whatever feature you have, it doesn't appear to exist for them, and asking them to just know the context you have is unreasonable. They can only know what is presented to them in game. Communication with the user is also vital, and it needs to be in-game. Expecting everyone to get confused and stumble around until they eventually look elsewhere for info, like the dev logs, is too far when you don't have people invested yet. Dev logs and external resources are only useful if you have people interested and they know the importance of them, two things that haven't been established by the game yet.

I would recommend that the initial release have something for the player to do. If there's nothing to play, there's nothing for them to playtest.