itch.io

So, I've been trying to get all the stamps and such and one thing bothered me: The mimic isn't very well designed, and by that I mean I do not feel incentivized to play its game most of the time. The idea of collecting gold at the risk of increasing its damage output is good on paper, but in practice it makes battling it a slog since it doesn't produce real gold often enough for it to get enough power from greed. Not to mention that I think it should never appear as the final boss because it makes the gold gimmick moot.

Spent a couple of hours. The new synergies are amazing! I feel like there are more options available in terms of viable characters now, but I haven't gotten super deep yet. I see what you did with the results screen there, but I still feel like it should show the base value for clarity's sake. It's now more obvious they're bonuses added to a base, but it still looks off with the animation and sounds. The new bosses are cool, too! I like the Treant boss that hates his woodpecker. The fact that he's a reverse Ent where stalling is a valid strategy is a neat touch.

That's totally fair! My criticism was focused around one of your stated goals based around introducing and teaching players about the birds in the lagoon, so I would feel that the player should be rewarded for learning by having it be solvable. I love animals and learning all about them so that's the angle I'm looking at this from.

Neat game! Unfortunately, I found that many cases are reliant on blind guessing since the profiles do not point to the culprit very well. Some cases are reliant on you already knowing about the animal in question (in fairness, everyone knows about the Flamingo) which means it's impossible to solve the case using the in-game information, which is the entire point, isn't it? Like, I can guess one case on personality, but then there are others (like the shiny object) where I'm still baffled as to how I was supposed to figure that out.

Ultimately, though, I don't know how well you could communicate with people outside the team to avoid the common pitfall of thinking a puzzle works not realizing it's because you already know the solution. Someone outside of the team should've tried each puzzle to see if it was possible to connect the dots without that prior knowledge.

Wondering how development is going. I've been playing the game for 9 hours apparently (Wow) and I've noticed that there isn't enough variety in synergies for a good chunk of characters to be viable. I understand the game is in an early, very incomplete state but as it is certain characters function better than others. Also, the "Gained $X" display is confusing because the bonuses are already added to the base but the base itself is never shown, so it looks like you got more money than you actually did.