itch.io

That's normal. Basically they do their thing every time you move and gave them orders. The woodcutters don't cut down a whole forest in one go, they need a few days of work (but also that means you get more wood out of it).

There is also one thing in there that i like. Basically you encounter new contracts from patrons, but no bird you have is ready to deliver them. This does not hurt you. It does however challenge you to think of a "bird setup" that could handle these contracts. So then you start to plan and think, play around with different upgrades in you head. You "build" a bird to fit the new requirement.

I think i find this more interesting that being able to prepare the right bird ahead of time. You can still do this on a second play though, as you say.

I also do not want you to stock up on birds early and then finish the game with your once established team. I'd like for people to buy a few birds over time, with each patron maybe. Potentially also retiring some birds. But that's more of a feature for a full game :D

Yes, itch version is a week of work from a game jam, steam is 3 years of work. Way more content, better graphics, music, sound.

Thank you! We made it into a full game since :)

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1637320/Dome_Keeper/

That makes sense, it should be explained somewhere.
It does depends on the highest rank in the group. I don't remember it exactly, but B or A should be able to take 4 people, and S 5 people.

Excellent feedback, thank you so much!
I fully agree on all points, and we'll tackle that if we can get around to working on this again.
The only point i'm still thinking about is the last one. There is only one thing that i do kind of like about how it is now, which is that you really need to check if an upgrade is useful or not. You can train a raven a lot, but if it has bad stats from the start, you might be better off to consider other options. In other words, it leaves more room to make mistakes, which is not by default a bad thing.
Streamlining this could still be better in the end.

Thank you! Yes, though i can't say if and when it will release. We'll work on it, but then need to see if we are happy with what is emerging. It's just a 3 day game jam so far, and usually i'd like to expand it both in graphics and systems for a full game.

Thank you! We love the game too :D

I looked into this and started a savegame feature, but it got clear quickly that it is a lot of work and i can't make time for it at the moment. But we are very interested in making a full version of this. But we got other projects going on at the moment, so we have to wait and wrap up these first.

We are hiring someone right now, but we are a german speaking studio, so that puts quite some limits to who we can hire ;)

haha, it takes a lot of time and effort to get out of it. I think i felt like that for the first 10 years :D

yes, but i've made games way longer as a hobby than as a main activity :)

Love it, felt really well designed and the poking never got old. I got heavy lemmings vibes, which is lovely.

Majesty is one of the inspirations for this, such a cool game!

Did you play it in browser or the downloadable version? Did you sell any birds? Any more info as to when the crash appears, what actions you were taking or what was happening would be helpful.

I played for an hour today and could not reproduce a crash. I am sure there must be at least one big issue around, but i need to reproduce it to fix it.

I also looked into adding a save system. The short of it is that it would take a big rework, at least the kind of save system i had in mind. There might be another way to save the game that i'll investigate eventually. But really i'd also like to fix the crash bug(s), that is more important even.

Very sorry for that! The game has some bugs left, but we didn't get around to making a patch. It was just a jam game and never intended to have a playtime of 2 hours, so it's a bit problematic. I hope we can get around to adding a save system eventually.

Thank you, that's cool to hear! Yeah it was just a game jam game, no updates planned. I still like the idea of it as it is something that is lost in modern games, but not that many people played it or liked it a lot.

You can get new creatures by squshing plants with a fruit. Sometimes your creatures evolve into "dead ends", which is when you need to squish them.

Then you cabbage is a catalyst for arm evolution, speeding that up. If you want to evolve the arms quickly, you can squish the other food or even the complete plants. For example, you might want to squish all the faceberry plants once you got the different heads.

i love it :D

Thank you so much, wow! It is rare to get this extensive feedback, i appreciate it. The save function is dearly missing, i agree. We love Ravenhaul and would like to continue with it and improve it, but right now we don't have the time to do it. Just too many games on our plate. We do this for a living, and we take the freedom to make a jam game for a week 2-3 times a year, but we can't put in much more time because they are free games and we can't work extended periods for free. So, i can empathize with devs needing to move on to their next game. We have 18 games on itch and 2 more on steam, and even if i love them all, we can't keep working on them all.

To the feedback: don't worry, without a save and some bugs around the later stages can be a bit straining to reach. I'd love for you to be around if we eventually can continue working on the game (making it into a full release). My hope is that we can do that next year, but plans change a lot over time.

I really like the suggestion of not having a numeric value for the distance. That would make it a lot more accessible i think, easier to understand, while providing the same challenge. It is a direction question too, whether it is a more hardcore management game or more on the cozy friendly side. 

I do like that you met some challenge with finding or training the right bird - this is exactly what i wanted from the patrons, to pose a challenge to your birds. Some later patrons have long ranges or big parcels as delivery, which you need the herons for.

Ah, now i understand the logic behind it. The installer will probably choose the first entry in the list that matches your OS. The jam build was older than the post jam (which makes sense), but it was listed as the first build. I fixed that, thank you for the info! That should make many player experiences better.

Thank you so much for the extensive feedback! Just so i can understand the feedback correctly: Which version did you play? browser or downloadable? Post jam or jam submission?
We made the game in 3 days and then took a few days of that week to balance, polish some things and fix some bugs. From the description it does sound a bit like you played the jam submission.

Sadly Firefox does not support the way our engine handles browser games. It works in chrome though, or you can just download the game.

Polish is insane, really on another level! I loved the setup and the mechanics, as well as the humor with stage 3, both narratively and visually. I am not sure what it was, but i juried stage three 4 times and never had an opening to solve it. On the 5th i got cards with which it felt trivial (dictator). Not sure if that was intentional. I assumed the idea was to block out the bench quickly so you'd not get a third horse, but the cards did not allow it until my 5th run.

In any case a lovely game, congrats! Would be a game that made a jam team proud, crazy for one person in 48 hours.

We do not have plans to continue with this in the foreseeable future. It's great to hear you enjoyed it! We just got too many projects we like to work on, and Home Raider is one the least asked for. Just check how many people are asking for a save system on ravenhaul xD

ah, it might run without a frame limit, i'm not sure (has been so long!). I don't even remember if it is supported ingame, but if you activate vsync it should be fine.

thanks :)

Sorry to hear that, but it might not work at all.

You are listing games that were made as commercial products by big teams for hundreds of thousands of dollars, each sold for actual money. You compare that to a completely free game made in 3 days in a game jam, by people using their free time to do it ;)

Thank you, appreciated! Sorry about the buggy state, i wish we had the time to do a bug hunting round. But we got our hands more than full right now. My hopes are the same though, that we'll be able to expand this and make it a full game :)

Nice writeup! Do you think that removing the constraint of having to follow the grid when building would be an interesting change?

It's out on steam :D

http://domekeepergame.com/

I see you're really getting serious with that pixel art, awesome :D

Because this is a game jam game ;)
Implementing a save is way beyond scope of that and takes some days to do.

haha, i will <3

this is added now, thanks for the suggestion!

all fixed, thanks :)

yeah that was a bug with contracts that had multiple units of delivery. They should only appear when the are done.

Thanks, should be all good now.

Ah yes, thank you! Should be fixed now :)

ah yes, linked the page, thank you :)

I fell into a pit when i was supposed to learn how to use the RMB ability. Is there a way out of it? I didn't quite catch how to use the ability, as the tutorial vanished too quickly. It seems i shoot it with RMB and activate it with a second RMB hit, but i'm not sure what it does. Is this the way to get out of the pit?
I enjoyed the style and mood!