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I love this game so far!

The gameplay mechanics in the "Study" wouldn't have been enough to hold my interest for long, but then you unlocked the *Laboratory,* which gave the mana purpose. I very much enjoyed using your hints to discover all of the recipes. Very nicely done!

The user interface is gorgeous. You've done a really good job with the atmosphere and the descriptions. The hints were perfect.

One tiny way to improve the game: if you click on the three dots in the top right corner, and open "Statistics," "Achievements," or "Arcane Insights," those pages pop up with a light background. The titles are also very light, which makes the titles tricky to read.

From a gameplay perspective: on the first life, there isn't much to do while waiting to unlock the familiars. I ended up playing another game while the mana slowly accumulated.

Now that I've unlocked the Homunculus, it looks like I have another long wait ahead of me before I can try the Expeditions. If there were something that the players could do during this slow part, then you could keep them from wandering off!

Anyway, I hope this feedback is helpful! The game has been *excellent* so far, and I'm excited to see where it goes.

Minor hint:

There are FIVE clues like this hidden around the room. If you've found fewer than five clues, you're not ready to solve this puzzle yet. Keep searching.

Minor hint:

In one of the clues, the numbers are written below the line segments. This is significant.

Very nice! It took a few minutes to solve without any hints. I thought all of the puzzles were very nice. Just FYI: The puzzle with the two dark leafy branches, and the one white leafy branch, can appear to convey a different solution than the one intended.

Whew. I finished it with no hints!

I thought it was a wonderful little game. Thank you!

I just wanted to say that I love these tiny worlds that you create. They draw you in--and it's magical! I love interacting with the world, figuring out the puzzles to go deeper and deeper. I love everything about it: the art, the bonus secrets, the puzzles, the little gleaming highlights that prevent you from getting stuck if you don't notice something right away--it's all good. Some people disagree, but I *also* like the fact that the inventory can only contain one item. The simplicity is nice! Anyway. Thank you for building these games. They are wonderful.

If you want to figure out the solution for yourself, here's the reasoning process:

When you click on any one of the seven rabbit holes, a certain set of rabbits flips their state. Write out those seven possible patterns. Then consider the top-left rabbit: There are only two ways to get this rabbit to emerge. Likewise, consider the bottom-right rabbit: there are only two ways to get this rabbit to emerge, as well.

If you stare at the seven patterns for a second, you should be able to see the solution. There are only four possibilities to consider, and one of them works.

Here's the solution, in case anyone needs it:

Cerff gur gbc yrsg enoovg, cerff gur obggbz evtug enoovg, naq cerff gur enoovg gung vf gjb ubyrf yrsg bs gur obggbz evtug enoovg.

(You can use a rot13 decoder to read the solution.)

Yes. It was beary good.

Something will happen when all of the rabbits are out of their holes.

As a hint to others: You need *three* clues before you can solve the tiger puzzle. If you've found fewer clues, then you're not ready to solve it yet. Keep looking!

This game is off to a great start. It's fun and playable, even in its early alpha state. I hope it does very well!

Here are a few notes, in hopes that they're helpful?

I was confused by this navigation:

I was expecting the navigation menu to work more like this:

...or this:

...with a single contrasting style to indicate what is selected.

...whereas the navigation menu in the game has a variety of seemingly-random color states, which I found to be endlessly confusing (especially in the beginning).

In reality, the menu is super simple: it's just a row of tabs, with a context-dependent submenu below. But it's difficult or impossible to work this out from the visual presentation *alone*: you really have to play around with it to figure out how it works. I think the structure / behavior could be made obvious at a glance with just a few minor visual changes: little things like an increased amount of whitespace between the menus to separate them, and a clear visual style for the selected tab. That would have helped me a lot!

The second biggest issue, in my opinion, was in the Forge tab, in the Equipment panel: Each item in your inventory appears to have a maximum level, and those maximum levels appear to be different. When an item reaches its maximum level, it would have been helpful for me if the word "MAX" had appeared somewhere near the item level.

(Also, the item level starts at "0". I would have preferred to see the first level displayed as "1", instead of "0": That way, a level "3" item would have had 3x the base stats. I would have found that a lot more intuitive!)

The biggest *gameplay* issue is that the optimal strategy seems to involve very short runs that start and end within sixty seconds, where you almost immediately earn around 10 phoenix feathers. You can quickly purchase all but the most expensive upgrades that way.

To unlock all of the jobs, you need about two longer runs--but that's it. Everything else can be very rapid short runs. It doesn't take *too* long to beat the game that way.

By the time you've unlocked the resource generation, and have begun to forge items, then you are well past the point where you should have leapt into the well: You would have been much better off if you had completely ignored the resources and equipment. The Talent trees are so much more powerful. Furthermore, the Talents persist across runs, whereas the equipment resets, so there's really no point to it. And that is a shame, since the resource generation, resource trading, and equipment forging, were all fun and interesting the first time I encountered them. It's a shame that this part of the game is disincentivized. (This might be different if the resources could be developed more quickly, and if the equipment payoff were greater? Or, from the other point of view, if the shorter runs were made less lucrative somehow?)

There are a few other major balancing issues. You're probably already aware of them, but I'll mention them briefly:

The T1-T2 jobs require some grinding to unlock, but they're not *too* difficult. In contrast, the T3-T4 jobs are excessively difficult to unlock. They only became practical for me after I had purchased nearly the entire Talents tree. (And, at that point, the game was practically over.)

Another minor observation: In the Talent tree, in the Military section, the "Battle-Hardened" talent is *super* powerful, while the similarly-expensive "Precision Strikes" talent has comparatively little effect.

In the Talents tree, there were lots of minor issues: In the Prosperity box, in the "Silver Tongue" talent, the text refers to a "wheat" resource that doesn't exist in the game. In the "Artisant's Touch" talent, there is a typo (it should read "Artisan's Touch") and the completion bonus is "WIP." I won't mention the others like this, since I'm pretty sure you know about them already.

I imagine that you're already planning some big changes to the Talents tree. (Likewise, I imagine you're already planning to replace the placeholder icons in the Equipment section.)

In the Equipment section, here's something that would have been helpful to me: *most* of the equipment items are labeled with the resource that is needed to craft them, but not *all* of the items have this information. (For example, an item might be described as "training" instead of "wooden"). I would have liked to have known which resource was needed to craft the item--so I could boost its level--and this wasn't always apparent from the item. I would have liked a naming convention more like this:

Training Sword
Wooden Set

Anyway! I just wanted to say that I really liked your game. When I first started playing it, I thought it was going to be a basic prototype without too much content. But then things kept unlocking! As it turns out, there is a lot more to it than I thought.

It's a lot of fun. I know this is a super-early alpha version, but you've done a great job already.

Thanks for making it.

Player stats could be interesting, as well. If you're not able to cast a defensive ability in time, you'll get pummeled. But if you reduce your cooldown period just enough, then you'll suddenly become capable of blocking the attack--which could be a game-changer.

So, improved player stats could something worth working towards, even if no new abilities are unlocked.

Another possibility could be equipment items: The abilities could be properties of the equipment you wear, so you'd have to pick and choose what you take, and what you forgo...

Alternatively, casting an ability could cost mana, depleting your mana pool. When you're out of mana, you're unable to use abilities until it has replenished sufficiently. That way, you'd have to be strategic about which abilities you use in combat. You might be able to level up your abilities, making  them more powerful or more mana-efficient. Likewise, you might be able to level up your mana pool, which would allow you to do more, and thereby advance further into the game.

Was designing rotations fun or frustrating?

It definitely wasn't frustrating. It was more interesting. I liked figuring out the rules. It's unclear from the prototype whether it would stay interesting after extended gameplay, but the prototype was good.

Did failures feel fair and understandable?

I actually felt a little cheated, since the game withheld  essential abilities that were required to defeat the first enemy. Understanding how the game worked was not enough: you also had to wait for the game to (arbitrarily, it felt) decide that you were ready to receive an essential ability.

I would have preferred receiving an ability as a reward for defeating a lesser enemy, or after having earned enough experience points to purchase the new ability. That way, I could strategize about what to purchase, and look forward to / enjoy the purchase. The new ability could make the next enemy beatable, or it could accelerate the rate of experience gain, making further purchases possible.

Did you feel encouraged to tweak and retry?

Yes, I did. It's essential to the game.

I only needed the first hint: once I made the first change to my ability sequence, I no longer needed / wanted the tutorial.

However, an explanation of the abilities (both player and enemy) would have been helpful (e.g. the effect and the cooldown period), as well as an explanation of the combat algorithm (e.g. when you have multiple abilities that could be used, which one will the combat algorithm select?).

Would you play a full game built around this system?

Yes. It's unclear from the prototype whether it would eventually get boring, but it's off to a good start! With some additional mechanics, like a skill tree, and monsters with various abilities, it could be quite fun.

Very nice! It has a good vibe to it.

I played the web version (https://itch.io/embed-upload/16150683) in Firefox. I had no issues with the bookshelf.

I was never fast enough to get more than two gems on any of the minigames, and I was never *slow* enough to get *fewer* than two gems. That was true even when I had never seen a minigame before and was still figuring out how to interact with it.

One note: At the very beginning, the Manager says, "Nice job! Hey, i can already see our first visitor." But the first visitor is not visible at this point. After you dismiss the dialog, there a short delay before the first visitor appears outside the building, where they are visible to us, but still not yet visible to the Manager. So I was pretty surprised by the dialog. (Also the "i" should be capitalized in that message.)

I really liked the way you could see the effects of the upgrades in the behavior of the customers. The music was nice. There was very little stress, but it kept you engaged. It was nice. Thank you.

This is a very well-made game: everything is sleek and polished, and the gameplay works very well. I've had zero issues with it, and it's a lot of fun to play! Thank you for making it!

I love insects, too. They're beautiful little creatures.

All right, here are some ideas for improving the game, in order of how much I wanted them. (For the record, I was playing version 0.5.2 on Firefox):

The biggest thing that would have helped me is: a tooltip for every stat! For quite a while, I was confused about things like the subtle differences between Armor, Defense, and Mitigation, or how HP5 differs from regular HP.

Next, I was confused by some of the numbers I was seeing. For example:

Here you can see that my red health orb is at 155, whereas my Max HP is at 150. That seemed impossible to me--and, yet, there it was...

There were other things like this. For example, my HP5 stat was initially at 1, until I ate a carrot with an HP5 value of 1, and then my HP5 stat jumped to 3. Later, when I had eaten both a carrot and a chicken leg, by HP5 stat was also at 3--which seemed impossible to me. I became less confident in the game as a result.

Next, I was not able to find a merchant that would allow me to sell some of my items (e.g. Club 1, Armor 2, or Legs 2). What I really wanted was a "Sell" button below the "Equip Item" button when you examine the item. It was frustrating not to be able to clean up my inventory, and (occasionally) I needed the money and really didn't want to hunt through all of the previous merchants to find the exact one who would take my item. A "Sell" button would have solved all of my problems!

I felt that the duration of the movement animation could have been about 0.5 seconds, whereas it is actually about 5 seconds. If you have to cover any significant distance, you may have to spend some 30 seconds just waiting for all of the movement animations to complete! A shorter movement animation duration would have made moving much easier!

When you're interacting with the Merchants, there is text below the dialog that says "Click here to close". Because this text is not part of the dialog itself, I didn't notice it at first, and actually wound up traveling to a nearby location, and then traveling back, each time I needed to close a dialog. Later, when I realized how you're supposed to do it, I still reflexively searched for a close button, [x], in the top-right corner of the dialog. I kept expecting there to either be a close button, or to be able to click anywhere outside the dialog to close it. Neither of those things work for the merchant dialogs!

Twice, I accidentally bought something that I was intending to sell. This can happen when you enter sell mode, and then quickly switch to another vendor, which puts you in buy mode without your explicit consent. This can have consequences: I lost a fair bit of money both times I unintentionally did this, because it was very early in the game, and it consumed all of the money I had.

When I first entered "Cave 1:1," I was unlucky enough to get seven non-monster encounters in a row. There was absolutely nothing for me to do except wonder why my character kept trying to pick a fight with a rock? It seemed very strange that he considered a stalagmite to be a significant threat, since it is well out of reach and totally inanimate. I had to wait through seven non-monster encounters before I finally got a single monster to fight, and then I got another long string of non-monsters before I found the exit and got the heck out of there.

I noticed some typos in the monster descriptions:

Sporeback: "definetly" => "definitely"

Wolf: "SCRATH" => "SCRATCH"

There may be others, but I figured I would make a note of the ones I found, in case that helps :)

Anyway, thank you for the game! I think it has a lot of potential.

The in-game help shows a right-click mouse button and the words "Cash Out." I think some people took that to mean that you can right-click anywhere to cash out.

In reality, you have to right click on the coin, specifically, which wasn't conveyed.

I second this.

And, for the record, it took me a lot longer than ten minutes before I finally gave up on it. Even if something takes ten minutes on average, then a small number of users will be waiting much, much longer than that.

It is truly a work of art. The scrolling introduction and the various animations--with bounces and fire effects--are very nicely done: There is something about those bug eyes and hair styles that makes me laugh.

Also, I reached the end!

Tada!

I'm sorry you feel this way. That sucks :/

Ah, you're very welcome! I hope it helps :)

Muy creativo. ¡Gracias por hacernoslo!

I understood what was going on pretty quickly--with two exceptions: I never did figure out what upgrading does, and I'm not sure what the Bone and Ectoplasm coins are for?

The main thing I wanted was the ability to auto-summon creatures at a given rate. As it is, I spend most of my time frantically clicking: It would have been nice if the creatures came out on their own (which they technically do, but only very infrequently).

Anyway! I thought it worked pretty well! It was fun to figure out how the towers worked... and then to construct a labyrinthine path to keep the creatures busy.

I took a few screenshots of things that I thought you might like to see:

The text here says "Spirit Lantern Unlock Unlocked."

In this photo, you can see the creatures climbing up without a ladder: You can reproduce this if you summon a huge amount of creatures at once and then move the ladder. (You can also get the creatures to pass through solid towers by placing items on top of them:)

This was also confusing to me:

The text says that there are 6 Furballs, but there are no Furballs anywhere to be seen. The battlefield is completely silent, and has been for a while!

My guess is that when the Furballs do eventually appear, there will be 6 of them. Is that how this works? If so, then this confusion could be eliminated if you added the word "Next: " along with a timer. Ideally, there would also be a tooltip that say you can increase the number of Furballs that autospawn by purchasing the "Upgrade" (assuming that's how it works, of course!)

The one thing that would improve the user interface the most is: Disable the "Necro Tower" button when you don't have enough money to build one (and make the button look different when it's disabled). As it is, you're seemingly able to buy and place the tower--only to have it turn red and disappear at the very end! I think this is the main reason why a lot of people were confused!

Who doesn't want to watch tiny bearded men struggle to carry large amounts of wood? I can't think of anyone.

It's a solid game. Nicely done!

Nice! (And under ten turns, as well.)

Heh heh.

Here was my shopping list:

• 8 Mausoleums
• 2 Blacksmiths
• 2 Farmers
• All the jumbo milks

If you get too strong too quickly, the king comes out and ruins everything. So I had to make every battle a draw--or as close to it as possible--to buy some time so everybody could hit the gym before the group photo.

Hah hah. Very good :)

Nice find!

I should also say that this is one of the best games on itch.io. Very well done!

I'm only just now realizing that you asked us to comment if we win. So, yes, I did win, and I had the full 99 HP and 99 attack:

I didn't use any summoners, so my health is less than perfect, but I felt the summoners were overpowered. I wanted to just barely scrape through the middle rounds.

I just thought you might like to know that, tonight, a five-month-old kitten watched your peaceful animations for about twenty minutes or so... until his eyelids grew heavy, and he fell asleep.

So this can be enjoyed by all animals, not just humans.

"Please select a research from the menu." How?? There. is. no. menu.

I have clicked on the coin, and clicked on the indicated slot. The coin is inserted. But what am I supposed to do *now*?

I have tried removing the coin. I have tried combining everything. Nothing ever works.

Just now, just after fracturing the world, the game froze again. Once again, there was a flood of error messages. But, this time, the error message was different:

"Prod.framework.js.br:4300:36251

MethodAccessException: Attempt to access method 'Reactivity.IReactiveDependency.Unsubscribe' on type '' failed."

When playing the web version (v0.4.0) in Firefox: Everything froze just after I fractured the world. I opened the developer console, and saw a flood of error messages like this one:

"Not implemented: Class::FromIl2CppType Prod.loader.js:1:1294"

...and I just thought you might like to know.

I agree! All of the animation delays really add up. It takes about twenty seconds to get through the opening tutorial battle, and it's the same on every run, so you're just waiting for it to *end* already. There are so many small animations like this, it really slows everything down. That's my biggest gripe with this game.

Otherwise, it's very good! There is a lot of strategy to it, and quite a bit of luck. It's a lot of fun.

Huh. It starts out a *little* slow, but I didn't mind that at all: the pace picks up *very* quickly, since everything is growing exponentially. I thought the game balance was more or less fine until the final quartz stage, where it all falls apart. But that's the *end of the game* (for now), so no one can fault you for that. It's a very well made game! Even the balance felt good. I was seriously impressed.

What a cool game! It's fun to play, the idea is great, and the execution is very nicely done. It's fun choosing upgrade strategies, and then seeing the consequences. It's hard to put down.

At times, I thought things like "well, I'll never need these stone upgrades again," only to discover that you thought of everything, and they do indeed serve a purpose, even in the end game.

I was *pretty sure* that there would be no bugs at all, because it is so polished and well-thought out, but I did manage to find some very minor ones! (Wow!) See the attached screenshot:

There are several things to notice:

First, in the big desert pane (where you can see the drones working in the desert), in the top right corner, under the "Drone Target" menu, "Claystone" is listed twice.

ALSO, in the desert pane, one of the white quartz stones spawned smaller than the other two: This happens when you use the bomb frequently on areas where an animation is in progress. You can freeze the animation in any state, including some scaled-down and translucent states.

Under the Quarry tab, note that the "TOTAL ROCKS" shows a maximum of 10, whereas the "STONE" maximum is 11. Should this be capped at 10?

Another minor point: In the bottom right corner, under the "Rocks" tab, there is no scroll bar to indicate that there is additional content beyond what is visible. I was well into the Stone age before I discovered that you could scroll down--which is necessary to unlock the next stage. Because there was no scroll bar, others might *never* scroll down, and therefore never find those upgrades, and just assume the game is a toy demo version, and leave (as I almost did).

But these are all very minor issues. You have a fantastic game! Thank you for making it.

Nice!