itch.io

I'd like to apologize for replying on an old game, but I cannot let this little gem go unreviewed.

Quite a shame that this game has been abandoned. It's one of the rare Android games to be ported to desktop, is *quite* long and can take up a lot of time. There was a lot of effort put into development by the team and if this was their first game, I wish them success in their career.

In spite of the tags, this is neither an idle game nor an incremental game; it plays fully offline (which is great) but does not go automatic and requires player input. The game design document (available from the developers) explains the mechanics in detail, but the tutorial itself is more than enough to get the hang of it.

The player earns money by creating magical pets in a laboratory with elemental essences (which are upgradable to 300 each in the current endgame) and selling them to customers who come into the shop once every 20-30 seconds. They level up by unlocking new creature tiers (there is a total of six for each element) and from the third tier, additional materials are required to create pets, which can be obtained from expeditions. The player will need a team of up to six pets, and it is recommended to bring in legendary creatures as those cannot die.

The gameplay is addictive but can be quite stressful if you try to fulfill all requests. It's relatively easy to earn money; however, getting an entire team of legendaries for your packs is no small feat and you'll generally want to progress slowly and stock up on materials so you don't end up playing and selling all day.

The lack of a warning when you sell high rarity items can be a problem as accidents can easily happen (fortunately, you are warned when creatures are required to make another one). The game makes it unclear how much attack power is required to be successful at an expedition, though it does give a rough idea with emotes - green emotes meaning a guaranteed success, yellow emotes meaning a low chance and red emotes meaning an almost guaranteed failure.

Game balance could be improved with some more testing, but it is pretty much playable, especially as you make more and more creatures of the same kind and the essence and material costs are reduced (including the removal of a sacrifice for higher tiers).

A few bugs and glitches:

- The display only shows three digits when showing attack power (e.g. 480 instead of 4800).

- Two events triggering at the same time (unlocking a new discount/improvement for a creature and getting a rare one) will only show up the first one.

- Refusing to sell a creature will usually cause customers to ask for it over and over again, even if you can't craft it yet.

- Getting a full list of artifacts will hide the name of the bottom ones.

I would still recommend this little game to both aspiring developers and players as it is a nice way to spend time and will keep you busy for quite a while.

Thanks a lot for your quick reply and your hard work!

Just tested a few different backups and a fresh new game to compare RAM usage and it is indeed much better now - 185MB, which is perfectly reasonable. CPU usage seems to have improved quite a bit as well.

Feel free to let me know if there is anything else you'd like me to test or provide feedback on, I'd be very glad to help!

Very nice incremental game, please keep up the great work!

The sprites are nicely done and the cross-platform experience is much appreciated! I'll quickly review my desktop experience here with version 1.4.3 as well as list some of the glitches (minor, major and game-breaking) I found. Hope it helps!

Review, critics and suggestions:

- The tutorial is pretty straightforward even for someone who has never played an incremental game before. Automatic locale detection can be slightly puzzling but the language change icon is easy to find.

- The autoclicker definitely is a must-have for any incremental game, good job! Carpal and cubital tunnel syndrome are no joke and a lot of hardware needlessly dies from overclicking as well. The only downside is it doesn't register the clicks while the process is not run, forcing the player to keep the application running. (From a clean start, RAM usage was 500MB; with full endgame setup, it was about 1.2GB. CPU usage was also quite high.)

- Importing, exporting, rolling back and even using Base64 for exports are all very appreciated! You might want to include this to the startup menu for cases where the game freezes on boot due to a hardlock (a workaround is to go to the local data storage and remove the global save files so the player can boot up a fresh game and still access their saves).

- Projected time until production/completion would be a very nice addition (it also makes testing things easier!) to the existing game features. This would allow players to optimize their setups but also help them notice if something could go horribly wrong (such as with farm upgrades).

- Prestige formula includes all population and not just the threshold, which can make things quite difficult if players reset before getting their very first prestige point (especially if they also earned prestige from tasks before getting to the 3 population mark). It also has a severe bug which will be listed further below (apologies for the very long comment!) but should only really affect the most insane patient players. ;)

- Getting the workforce back is a very nice feature and helps a lot with testing and debugging. However, it might be a good idea to allow players to undo upgrades as well, as will be mentioned once more further down - another gamebreaking bug (that only affects farms).

- Because of the nature of incremental games, there is a danger associated with hitting the architecture arithmetic cap (the maximum a double can handle is roughly e308, which will then result in infinity and NaN combined and game crashes). It should take fairly long before anyone gets there but it's still possible, especially if they make clever use of prestige points (even with the current prestige overflow bug). I'd say it's a rather low priority one, though prestige overflow may be more concerning (it is actually possible with an optimized first run and a lot of population prestige rewards from tasks).

- The game should keep people busy and willing to go deeper and deeper for quite a while as it is quite a long stroll until a player finally gets to skyscrapers. It's also appreciated that idea points carry over (many games tend to sacrifice the excess points instead of using them properly). And it's even better to see it still being updated with new features after the Ludum Dare!

Bugs (and how to reproduce them!)

- Prestige overflow: I suspect prestige uses a signed 32-bit integer as it will overflow from over 2^31-1 prestige, causing prestige to go negative and also breaking the 10x-based point selector as well (which will eventually become x0, forcing the player to exit and restart the game to fix it). With normal gameplay, this should occur on the first run with a lot of population bonuses (allowing the player to get over 2B prestige from, if memory serves right, about e21 current population). Population over e38 (might take quite a while to reach) will also cause a crash before calculating prestige. This causes restarting to either become completely impossible (if there are unassignable excess points from rewards) or immediately reset the game regardless of accumulated prestige (if the prestige is negative or zero).

- Farm upgrade hell: For advanced farms (sunflower, lavender, pumpkin, sugarcane and the apiary and lemon trees to some extent), as upgrading farms to their next tier also slows them down in a drastic way, this will cause them to almost completely stop production (with the projected production hitting exponential orders of magnitude upon checking the upgrade icon). It may take several heat deaths of the universe to get even one cycle done at this rate ;) A one-crop workaround - to check the issue - is to upgrade to max while the farm is harvesting, which will result in an astronomical amount produced and sent to the basket once before stopping dead while the animations still play. Allowing the players to roll back upgrades will also help alleviate this little annoyance that breaks some of the farms (much) later on. A better workaround is to focus on workforce speed increase and only upgrade the early ones to max once entering the e110 or higher stages, then only upgrade to a tier that gives an acceptable speed reduction for the above farms. This comes with the tradeoff of making some tasks much slower to complete (by several orders or magnitude) if the chain of production directly involves the farm without any multiplier beside prestige (such as cats, which could also be used to fix this). This bug will cause production-related tasks to become impossible.

- Grocery store hell: Cascading bug from excessive farm upgrades. Tasks related to the stored goods may become impossible to complete while still accounting for them in the "Have X item" requirements. Being able to return the products to the associated basket (either automatically or using the cart transporter) may help with this.

- Crashing task generation: The game will freeze if it attempts to roll a task that would cause an overflow, a division by zero, or any other arithmetic error. It may also freeze if it is unable to find a suitable task. Unless the task persists, this only requires restarting the game; if it does persist, it becomes a hardlock and requires removing the global savedata in order to reload a save. (As a reminder to everyone, backup often, save often!)

- Bank overflow: Will only happen if the player already is in the very late ranges and cause the bank to display Inf(inity)undefined or NaNundefined. This would cause a restarting player to either crash immediately or crash upon the first calculation involving coins. The Library does not have this issue as idea generation is capped and cannot possibly reach a gamebreaking amount naturally even in the most advanced stages of the game.

I will make sure to come back and edit if I find more or forgot some!

In closing, a scientific notation toggle for the early stages as well would be appreciated for clarity if that can be done as it seems some players also like the "wordy" notation while some of us tend to focus on the numbers for efficiency and optimization.

Apologies again for this very long comment and thank you very much for your passionate work! Please be safe, you have my support!