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Aurel300

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Timestamp	Since previous	Game		Aurel300's comment
Jan 10 11:41:38		Squirrelativity	♥ 1	Very nice game! I enjoy this type of puzzle: is this based on an existing pen-and-paper ruleset you know of, or is it original? (It feels like the latter!) The levels were all quite nice and the difficulty was balanced well enough. It would have been nice to have the usual bells and whistles for this kind of game, for example to be able to mark which tiles must definitely be red or blue, even if the exact tree shape is not yet clear. The graphics and animations were cute. I also experienced the tiny spritesheet glitch: it feels like maybe a piece of the adjacent sprite is being shown, in which case just spacing out the sprites on the spritesheet could help? It was fun to try to get as many squirrels moving on the screen at once, e.g. in level 9 where I could make three start moving with a single new branch. I realised after a couple of levels that I don't have to wait for the squirrel animations (only the branch ones) before I can make my next move, which is nice especially for the easier levels. It was fun, I won't tell anyone the secret 🤐
Jan 10 13:51:00	2h 09m	Grow Golf	♥ 2	This game reminded me of Autoball, then I saw it was from you as well :) Interesting mix of farming and golf, of all things. The gameplay is easy to get and there is some strategy to it. But I still find the dirt loss to be extremely punishing! Losing the mud balls when they don't hit a gap is quite discouraging but I suppose it makes important. It's quite satisfying to reach a large number of golf balls where things become almost automatic.
Jan 10 18:56:09	5h 05m	Homunculus	♥ 2	Nice point 'n click game! I expected the ending to happen when it did (would be very surprised to see such polish otherwise!) but it was still a shame that there wasn't more of a game before: more twists or tasks to solve before the homunculus is woken. I enjoyed the audio, both the ambiance and the "speech", which was a nice touch. Graphically the game was quite pretty and consistent, though I would have liked to see more animations, even if they were not strictly necessary, e.g. for pouring the potions into the vial, or for moving about the room (maybe too cliche but still a staple of point 'n clicks for me!). In terms of gameplay there wasn't all that much and if my previous games are any indication I get the feeling that you spent a long time setting up the "system" for dialogues, items, etc rather than using it. A possible improvement to make would be to highlight interactible items. There wasn't really a point where I was pixel hunting, but I could see how the "lever" could be easily missed, for example. One thing I wished I could do was to create the other potions in the alchemy book. The game allowed me to pour the ingredients into the vial, but then I couldn't light the torch -- of course I had to "reset" the potion by adding another incorrect ingredient and only make the correct one. Good job!
Jan 10 23:54:22	4h 58m	Agent 001	♥ 3	The idea is interesting but also a bit awkward! I can see there being interesting way to use the central mechanic but as it is, there is little reason to not simply put as many shoot/harvest blocks in a row as I can, depending on what I am currently facing. This is a kind of puzzle gameplay element, which would (maybe) work better if the game was split into separate levels, where I get to see what I will be facing and can choose my gun sequence but then cannot modify it as I am playing the level. Also, since the gun sequence executes so fast and the enemies aren't really all that aggressive, I can just snipe them from afar without getting hurt very much. (Nitpick: the sound effect for harvest had some kind of very high frequency whine in it which was a bit annoying to listen to on earphones.)
Jan 11 00:07:07	12m 45s	just do your job	♥ 1	Neat game. I like the idea of telling a story by gameplay and actions rather than scrolling through text, though I think in this game that story could be conveyed more "efficiently", i.e. with fewer levels/less filler content. Given that the "gameplay" itself is just about drawing lines, it might have been nice to have more of a puzzle aspect to the levels, e.g. to figure out the correct sequence of hitting targets or something similar.
Jan 11 00:23:44	16m 37s	Harvestigator: An IRS Tax Auditing Game	♥ 1	Fun little "Papers-like". The voiceovers and the variety of characters were very fun and increasingly absurd. I was a little disappointed that purposefully failing the audits did not make the farmers happy, so there was no ethical dilemma :D
Jan 11 00:31:57	8m 13s	"Neighborly Love"	♥ 1	Very fun! The intro was very cute. When I started playing I initially thought it's an interesting way to combine a racing game with a farming theme… Then the enemy CPU happily crossed over to my field and started harvesting my crops! D: That was a very fun moment. I am sure this game would be more fun still when playing against a friend, but I was glad to see that the CPU actually feels quite smart (but still quite easy to beat, unfortunately). Maybe it was just cut off on my screen, but there is no indication of my current score, is there? Anyway, very well polished, fun game!
Jan 12 12:11:05	35h 39m	Harvest Heist	♥ 3	Cute game! I appreciated the polish, like the menu screen, the different "voices" for the characters, or the rotoscoped farmer-punch. Graphically the game was nice, although maybe a bit bland. Some extra decor or "bonus" veggies could have been nice. The music and audio overall was great. Gameplay-wise it all felt pretty good with minor exceptions. (One of them was my fault, playing on a low-end machine, but the arrow sequences started feeling unresponsive; the game wasn't actually laggy, it just had more, inconsistent input delay.) I found it a bit annoying that I couldn't pull any more veggies when the farmer was coming, I think this could make for a nice high risk/high reward situation (maybe with bonus points?). I thought it would be nice to visually distinguish a hidden robber from a regular vegetable, although maybe remembering where they were is part of the challenge -- but if so, once again it would be nice to have a more distinctive look to the places in the map other than the fences and a general feeling of direction. Oh and I thought it a bit weird when I hid all 3 of my robbers that the game just sort of... faded out.
Jan 12 12:53:51	42m 46s	Crop Rotation	♥ 2	Cute game. I think this really needs a tutorial or a guided explanation. I probably got the gist of it but didn't ever feel really in control or like I was making much of a difference to the bottom line, before being presented with another choice of another set of crops that I haven't seen before.
Jan 12 13:56:11	1h 02m	Typefarmer	♥ 1	Very addictive! 3rd place for now but I think I'll return! "tzardom" was a fun word to type for the first time in my life. The game is clean and polished. The looks are nice and the music is great, it doesn't get old too quick. Gameplay-wise I think I agree that zooming out might be nice, although I do also like the "strategy" of remembering words so that you can ping-pong for max distance bonuses. Still, you could do this by consciously choosing words that are far from each other when you can still see them :) It does suck a bit that you cannot see words which are filling up your overgrowth bar, maybe you could just control the farmer to move that way? The score popups that show whenever you harvest a word are nice but occasionally they get in the way of other words that I would like to see. Likewise I think words which were already typed (yellow) could be made smaller to reduce visual noise. Oh, another thing that I think should be changed: if I already typed the first letter of a word, then type that same letter again, it cancels the progress on that word completely. So, I have to type that first letter for a third time, then continue writing the rest of the word. This is especially annoying when I "accidentally" start writing a word because it starts with the same letter as the last letter of the previous word. Since I am still typing that last word in auto-pilot I don't really want to think of the shared letter(s) as I am selcting the next word to type on screen.
Jan 14 13:43:13	47h 47m	Adelie - Water Under the Bridge	♥ 1	I'll stop for now, but I'll have to return :) Screen Shot 2023-01-14 at 14.37.30.png It's a nice little puzzle game with some chess-ish elements. The random level generation is good for replayability and the score variance is not too bad. Very rarely I feel it gives a somewhat unfair level start (e.g. two betafish and not many crates nearby). Discovering the rules by introducing the different species one at a time was nice, and most of them telegraph what they will do nicely, such as the jellyfish with its two turns of "targeting". I was a bit worried when I saw a new species in a rather late level since I was aiming for a good score, but it was easy to see that the greenish fish simply moves like a chess king. What I wouldn't do for a "pass move" button :)
Jan 14 14:31:23	48m 10s	Nesting	♥ 1	Cute. Got 55, didn't realise in the first run that hurting takes away one of the collected pieces (for ever). Gameplay was alright and the encumbrance system made sense, although even so I felt the controls were a bit too twitchy: very easy to fly/fall into some spikes in a split second. Maybe giving the bird a bit more inertia overall could work?
Jan 14 14:38:03	6m 40s	I am not your type, harvester	♥ 0	Cool idea, but of course the game is not finished :) There should be more of a tutorial, but it was nice to figure out that you need to usually have `lef` or `righ` in the buffer, allowing you to toggle movement by pressing `t` or deleting it again, and inserting `up` in between. The spike hitbox was a bit too wide on the left I think? (By the way, don't forget to link to this LD page from itch.io as well.)