After 100%ing the game as much as I can...

[antiphon]

I really liked the game, it was a fun adventure - characters were cute, the writing that needed to be there was appropriate and enjoyable, I liked the minimalist gathering/collecting/townbuilding. The graphics were nice and I think the pixel art style fit perfectly. I would overall say this game is good, and you should play it! Totally buy it! With these caveats...

It's a good starting point for someone who has never played a Harvest Moon/Stardew and doesn't want the full stress of having to manage crops/missing objectives. One of the biggest complaints of Stardew for new players is the stress involved with making sure things are done before the end of the day, and while this does have a day/night cycle, it has only a few requests that rely on you doing something before night comes in a few requests. Other requests require that it be night, which is no problem at all, as there is seemingly no penalty for hitting Afterdark. I appreciate the option to lengthen days, but to be honest, there's no reason for a new player to NOT turn this option on at all due to the existence of benches. I would advise just making the default setting the extended day setting and allowing players to sit on benches to force night-time when needed.

I want to just throw out a few ideas I had about improving the game overall, you can take it or leave it, whatever. Just identifying a few pain points I had when beating it. I'll preface this with - I had longer days turned on from the very start of the game because it seemed like something I'd want and it didn't warn me that it'd make my gameplay penalized at all.

Pacing:

When you explore the areas, there are spots that are (at least, to the seasoned video game player) teleport spots. I wanted to use these even from the first week and I felt the pain of having to backtrack to areas when I was done for the day. I understand the idea of not wanting your players to teleport around your world and miss a lot of it after seeing it once, but I think allowing teleports earlier than 10~ hours in would have made the experience better.

To add onto the 10~ hour wall pacing - I was shocked that seeds were teased in the shops and you don't get to use them until nearly 10 or so hours into the game. By that point, planting them and utilizing them is only useful slightly - you get basically the full usefulness out of seeds simply by filling half of the town planting spots with all 4 seeds, gathering them, using them for the few upgrades that require them, and selling the remainder - and at this point, you REALLY don't need money. With a name like Garden Story (and yes, I get that it's subverting the garden game trope), you'd expect to be able to plant at least "fun" plants sooner than halfway through the game. It'd be kinda useful to refill your small bottles with the plants that refill it like, between the 2-10 hour mark. Past that, I'd sooner just chug all 5 charges of my bottle and pay 15 coins, because at that point money has no bearing on the playthrough.



Gameplay:

Shields feel useless, flat out. They take like 2-3 seconds to charge which is where you might as well hit them. They're useful early-game where you need to actually not take the damage from the damage-spitting roots, but other than that, I never used the shield function. To add onto that, you can't instantly pull them up, so the better option in all other cases is to roll.

I like the idea of memories, but the winning strategy seemed to be in this order:
Stamina Cap > Stamina Speed > Hand Speed > Luck > keep HP above 4-5 > whatever else

When managing memories, it was hard to know the impact of what I'd be losing when swapping memories via GUI - I had to make a spreadsheet of my stats to suss this out. It'd be nice to be able to 1) Set the memory to "unset" 2) See the affects of a memory on the stats panel WHILE assigning memories

Umbrella is useful early game when you don't have +2-+3 pick or +2 sickle, but once you get that, it's utterly useless. In addition, due to hand speed optimization, even with range increase, fighting bosses with it is not worth it. The only particular time I thought it was useful was fighting the tentacles for the requests in the Summer town and shell creatures - past that, the sickle does the job. You can get faster hand speed than bosses than what will register - which works in your favor only for sickle usage.

One last important thing: the enemies that are copy/pasted between zones, the slimes that spawn an additional small enemy - these are the bane of my existence. I hate them. I hate them with all of my being. There's no weapon that universally solves for them, you have to figure out a timing to kill the add, which also isn't consistent, no matter what you do - I hate them. Let me "seal" the slimes so that I kill them in 2-3 blows. I don't want to chase down an additional enemy, ever - let alone 200+ times over the course of the game.

Finally, the ugly part I'm sure you have addressed a billion times in the past few weeks:

Graphics:

30 FPS is just bad. I don't care if it's a pixel game, a game that's meant to look like a movie, a game that's graphically intensive - it's all bad. Let me run your game at the framerate I like, or, at very minimum, set the minimum FPS to 60. We are far past being okay with 30 FPS and while, yes, you do get used to 30 FPS, and yes, we can enjoy the game without it, I would be even that much more ready to recommend it at 60FPS.

I know that Game Maker Studio doesn't handle 60FPS games well (see Hyper Light Drifter and Undertale). If I were to go to make a game and that was the restriction put on me, that'd be enough to dump the engine entirely. Yes, I love Undertale. Yes, I think Hyper Light Drifter is good. And yes, I think Garden Story is good. But ALL of them could have been better if using a better engine. I also understand opportunity cost - was the cost of moving this to a better engine not worth the cost of losing money while doing so? Totally understand. But it's a limitation of money that limits the art from being its "best self".

Phew, all in all, I think it's a very good game and I have some very specific criticisms of it;. But I think it's very much worth a purchase and I hope everyone else had fun playing too; I'd also like to say good job to the dev for making a game that worked, within 2 game launches, to never crash from start to end and let me beat the game at my pace. I hope that the overall message of this post is positive- I just wanted to post the few annoyances I had with the game while playing, which were miniscule in comparison to the enjoyment I got out of it, and that could provide useful feedback to the developers.

[NocturnalNick]

Coming from the same position, my two cents:

Perks changed quite a bit for me over time, as well as weapon usage. Pretty much wholly disagree with your perk hierarchy, but mainly I think roll damage is far and away the best. Especially with the mini slimes: just roll right after killing the big one. Or, if you can take a couple extra hits, rolling through literally everything works wonderfully.

Definitely agree shields should be tweaked.
Seeds seem poorly implemented.
Beach area is slightly visually cluttered. Some seemingly intentionally, other bits less so.
Library collections + furniture stuff seems kinda like an afterthought.
My biggest gripe, though? When you switch your weapon with the hot bar, you always face down after instead of the same direction you were when you hit the button. I think that's the only thing I actually was annoyed by.

All in all, I loved the game. Have already recommended it to a couple friends. Adorable, relaxed, fun. Nails that gameplay loop timing where I was saying 'One more day...', and then 4 more hours would pass. A narrative that, while not exactly groundbreaking, conveys and engenders more emotion than most any AAA game being released today. Excellent job, Picogram. Was well worth the wait, and the money. I just wish there was more!

[antiphon]

Originally posted by NocturnalNick:

Coming from the same position, my two cents:

Perks changed quite a bit for me over time, as well as weapon usage. Pretty much wholly disagree with your perk hierarchy, but mainly I think roll damage is far and away the best. Especially with the mini slimes: just roll right after killing the big one. Or, if you can take a couple extra hits, rolling through literally everything works wonderfully.

Definitely agree shields should be tweaked.
Seeds seem poorly implemented.
Beach area is slightly visually cluttered. Some seemingly intentionally, other bits less so.
Library collections + furniture stuff seems kinda like an afterthought.
My biggest gripe, though? When you switch your weapon with the hot bar, you always face down after instead of the same direction you were when you hit the button. I think that's the only thing I actually was annoyed by.

All in all, I loved the game. Have already recommended it to a couple friends. Adorable, relaxed, fun. Nails that gameplay loop timing where I was saying 'One more day...', and then 4 more hours would pass. A narrative that, while not exactly groundbreaking, conveys and engenders more emotion than most any AAA game being released today. Excellent job, Picogram. Was well worth the wait, and the money. I just wish there was more!

I only just now unlocked roll damage, so I could definitely see that being very useful.

As far as memories, the optimization always seemed to be to maximize luck and stamina while allowing yourself enough HP to make sense. I was never going to take the tool-specific perks. I'd be interested if you took any memories that were tool-specific.

Now that you bring up the beach area again - Throw a teleport at the top right of that area! It's ridiculous that there's a solitary teleport point in the entire zone.
Just to state - I never wanted to place any decorative lights or anything else involved. It might be nice to get some resources from townsfolk for improving their environment with cosmetic items. This is not out of not caring about cosmetic customization - I definitely love that sort of thing - but this game just simply didn't make it seem worthwhile. Which is sad, cause I really liked the cute little furniture. You're just not going to continually come back to these pieces of furniture which makes you not care to place them.

I definitely feel that unequip directional action. I swap seeds and that makes me swap from a field to my right to a field below me.

Another thing I agree with - Summer area is absolutely cluttered in comparison to other areas. I'm not sure of the potential use of the "grape sign" buildings, but even so, there's way more fake buildings than there needs to be. It's more of a "city" than even the initial spring town.

[Ousel]

Sounds like I'm gonna put it in the "Wait and see" bin. Maybe the patches will smooth some of this out.