Great game! Some criticisms I have after finishing

[Sunlis]

Spoilers ahead! If you don't want to know about some tools and mechanics that you will gain access to during the game, stop reading!


I very much enjoyed this game. I'm going to be somewhat critical in this post and I want to emphasize that this is a delightful little game and I am being quite nitpicky. But I do think there are some small issues that are preventing this game from being truly fantastic.

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Recontamination

As implemented, it feels quite bad to clean a zone just to have it slowly get worse. Add to this the fact that the game is quite short (I hit credits after just shy of 4 hours) and so there really isn't ever a reason to go back to and old zone and clean it up again.

I wish the rate at which a zone recontaminated was related to the cleanliness of neighbouring zones. That way you could start the player on one corner/edge of the map and have them sweep across the zones, leaving a nice clean ocean behind them.

Or if the loddles could help resist recontamination, then there would be a good reason (aside from them just being cute) to repopulate zones as you clean them. Different species could resist different types of mess to encourage the player to raise different varieties of loddle.

Inventory

The player's base inventory isn't large enough to deal with the item diversity that you start running into fairly soon into the game. This leaves the player with a few unenjoyable options: scoot back to home base (or the nearest fast travel point), empty out inventory, then scoot back. Given the fairly limited speed/boost, this is tedious.

I discovered after a couple of zones that you can actually just go into your inventory and drop everything, then continue cleaning since dropped trash doesn't count against the zone's cleanliness. Then once the zone hits 100% and you get your fast travel, you fill up your inventory (and dump any excess into the ship) to go home and process everything. This stinks and it feels bad that I could just leave that bundled trash laying around in a "100% clean" zone.

I found myself wishing there was some type of "trash bag" deployable that I could use to dump excess items into while cleaning, then tow back to home base when I was done to process all the trash. I would happily take a speed penalty for the benefit of dragging around more junk with me at once.

Also, the Scrap Vac having a separate, hidden (although thank goodness upgradeable) inventory is quite annoying. You have no way of checking to see how close you are to full, and you just have to try sucking up some microplastics to see whether or not it works. It is also quite confusing that the Scrap Vac has an inventory that fills up as you clean, but the Puddle Scrubber does not. I suppose the Puddle Scrubber lines up with using your Bubble Gun to clean gunk (as in, it just gets vaporized), but I still kept expecting it to stop working at some point, complaining about some hidden inventory.

I would have much preferred for the Scrap Vac to spit out plastic bits periodically as you suck up microplastics, so at least I only have 1 inventory to deal with.

Oxygen

The oxygen mechanic becomes irrelevant very quickly. As soon as you can afford a oxygen ring, you never need to worry about oxygen again. Just bring a ring with you to your new zone, plop it down in a convenient spot, and refill whenever your oxygen gets down too low. Being able to pick the rings up means the only thing stopping you from just plopping one down whenever you need a refill is the time it takes for it to deploy (and even then it's only 10-20 seconds?).

Many of the plants (and a few other objects) that you can clean will also release bubbles that refill a decent portion of your oxygen, but this isn't explained to the player and could be very easy to miss.

Given that there are no other threats in the game and no other constraining factors (aside from inventories), the presence of this player-killer seems quite out of place. It's not clear to me what this is supposed to motivate the player to do. Set up a network of oxygen rings? You can only build 10. Trek back to home base regularly? This just feels like tedium for tedium's sake.

If you want a reason for the player to return home, you already have inventory pressure. If you want a resource that "runs out", it seems to me that something more like "boost fuel" would fit the bill much nicer.

The In-Betweens

There is a lot of map that you are sort of encouraged to just ignore. The spaces in between the areas that the main quest specifically asks you to clean. At first I was cleaning trash as I went to and fro my quest objectives, but inventory struggles meant that I quickly started ignoring anything outside of my designated cleaning zone. I thought I would maybe have to venture into some of these areas in order to pick up some extra materials to do some upgrades, but I was able to fully upgrade my character and still have a TON of bits to spare without doing any extra cleaning.

I really wish there was more reason to care about these unnamed areas. I was genuinely surprised when I was allowed to leave the planet when I had hardly touched those areas. This combined with the recontamination mechanic left me feeling quite sad, because I know that even the zones that I had (if briefly) cleaned to 100% are going to quickly degrade to a point that the loddles cannot survive anymore.

[Thelios]

I definitely agree with virtually everything you mentioned! Re-contamination and inventory management is easily the weakest part of the game for me. Having to constantly swim back to base, which is sometimes a significant distance away, just to offload inventory or empty your Scrap Vac feels very tedious.

The crafting system feels underutilised. Like you said, the only important structure to craft is oxygen rings. Letting us craft portable recyclers similar to the ones we have in our base would be amazing. It would give us more depth to the crafting system besides just oxygen rings, and it would fix the issue of constantly needing to trek back to base.

Originally posted by Sunlis:

Also, the Scrap Vac having a separate, hidden (although thank goodness upgradeable) inventory is quite annoying. You have no way of checking to see how close you are to full, and you just have to try sucking up some microplastics to see whether or not it works.

There actually is a gauge on the back of the Scrap Vac that displays how full it currently is. It would have been nice if this was mentioned somewhere in-game. I noticed it entirely by accident.

[JayMission]

Strongly agree with all of these critiques. I'm very much enjoying my time with Loddlenaut - I'm naut quite done yet but am in the last area to clean - but I wish it had done more.

One thing that really throws me is that you're... encouraged to not do stuff with the loddles? Like Dave explicitly says they are a distraction from the real job, and that holds true since over time things get dirty again. I wish that the core of the game was more around raising and rehabilitating the loddles. The original Kickstarter talks about having to take them in and raise them before they can be released again, and having to do that - or being more encouraged to do it - over the course of the game may have made the back and forth from cleaning to base work better since when you came back to base you would then raise the loddles up.

[LoddleDev]

Thank you for all of these notes! I've been pasting this message in other threads, so I thought I'd copy + paste it here as well. Below are our current thoughts on re-contamination and the inventory issue:

The goop regeneration rate actually does decrease with each biome you clean, but it's not a very noticeable difference in the current build, so we'll be adjusting that a bit!

We'll also be implementing a "biome protection period" that will start whenever a biome has been 100% cleaned. During this period, no litter or goop will respawn in that biome. We're hoping this will give players more time to explore other biomes without worrying about older locations becoming quickly re-contaminated. This period will reactivate each time a biome is brought to 100% clean.

Our main intent behind the re-contamination was to avoid trivializing the concept of cleaning our own oceans, as we didn't want to portray such an big environmental task as a "one and done" thing. We also wanted to encourage people to revisit biomes, sort of like how you need to clean up a fish tank every once and a while. Lastly, we added litter respawning because otherwise there'd be a chance for someone to accidentally use all of their resources on bombs or loddle toys, effectively locking them out of crucial upgrades required to progress through the game.

That was our intent, but we totally understand how the current balance of things can be frustrating and/or unsatisfying! In addition to the biome protection period, we'll also be making the following changes:

• Litter and goop will have their respawn rates reduced across the board.
• Litter and goop will no longer respawn in the areas outside of biomes.
• Loddles with the cleaning ability will be able to clear the goop off of goopy loddles that are nearby. The same goes for Purifying Bombs and the Water Purifier structure.

Anyway, that was an overly long explanation of the whole re-contamination system, but we see and understand all the comments about its current place in the game, so I just wanted to be fully transparent about our thought process!

Regarding the inventory, we're looking closely at this and seeing what we can do to reduce the amount of early-game litter that appears in late-game areas, so hopefully your inventory won't get clogged up so fast with tiny things like soda cans and glass bottles. Beyond that, we'll be looking at inventory expansions (either as an upgrade or just a baseline increase).

And regarding everything else mentioned in this thread, we've jotted it all down and we'll be looking to improve all of these things in future updates! Thanks again for all of this thoughtful criticism, and for choosing to play Loddlenaut. Regardless of what changes we end up making, threads like this will help us make the overall experience even better for more people <3

[foolexia]

I think there should also be the ability to place enough of the purifiers to keep all the plants in each area clean. As it is 15 is not enough due to distances between plants sometimes. Otherwise there could be the need to be able to increase their range. Maybe also something to clean up litter automatically. It would help decrease issues with maintaining each one. Maybe make the litter cleaners expensive to balance it out.

[radicalbabe]

i have to agree the inventory needs to be increesed i know we have ship storage but when your out on a wonder you can be full pritty quick and have to go all the way back to empty i love the game sofar btw