Demo feedback

[Sylvine]

Disclaimer : It's going to be only negative feedback (because that's what I want to be changed), so you can consider I liked everything I didn't talked about.

UI

Let's begin with a simple problem, when a building is at the bottom of the screen and you want to hover it to see it's description, the description card is outside of the screen.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3409033109

Speaking of this card description, I think it would be nice to also have a video inside the pop-up showing what the card actually do.

Also in some cases some cards activate in a specific order, this can be important, especially in battles, and unless I've missed something, it's not explained anywhere. It would be useful to have an UI element making this order obvious, something like Into the Breach.

On the same note, while it's clearly explained in the tutorial, the UI could also to make the battle system more clear, more specifically, make units conversions more obvious. In fact, why not simply show the end results (again like ITB), since it's just plain math ?

And again, with the boss, it wasn't very obvious what was going to happen. For example I'm still not sure what triggers the wall to go up (is it just based on turn, or on point, or line completion ? I don't know).

Why am I not able to convert gold into life points before a battle ? It makes no sense, just before clicking on the level I can do it, and then, one click later I can't anymore for no good reason.

Last thing, I don't think the game explains the "reserve" feature. It's not super difficult, but believe it or not, after like 10+ runs, I've just understood what it actually does because I launched the game while typing this message, precisely to be sure I wasn't missing a thing. Before that, I assumed it was a one use joker to discard a tile. Again it's also a UI problem, because when you put a tile in this reserve, the text saying "press F to reserve" is covered, and there's nothing clearly indicating this is still an element you can use.

Gameplay

Not sure it's something that can be reasonably fixed, but often at the very start of a run (like the 4 or 5th tile I play), I screw something up. It's not a big error, I could totally ignore it and be fine, but since at the very beginning I have absolutely no reason to persist with this run and so I immediately restart. Sometimes I end up in a failure loop where I restart the game 5-6 times in row.
I think you should either embrace this, and make restarting a run faster (maybe if you restart on the first level, it just resets the level instead of generating a whole new seed), or find a reason to persist despite a small failure.

I think all the overworld part is not very exciting. You often have very obvious choices (you have a wood oriented deck, so you're going to choose the route with more wood), and nothing feel very impactful or game changing from one run to the other.
So of course a big part of this is because it's just a demo with limited content, but I don't feel like adding 500 cards will make choosing between wood, crops or gold exciting.

Last thing, to me it feels like the resources production and the military parts don't really interact each other, like if it was 2 different games played on the same screen. In fact when I'm playing a non-battle level, if I have too many cards I remove all my military cards to make more room for productions cards, and when in battle I do the opposite.
Maybe if I could in some way pile up units for future fights when in non-battle levels, and immediately convert my resources to gain any military advantage when in battle it would help to close that gap.

Art

I'm going to be vague, because I'm not an artist, and I guess everything in the demo is subject to change, but I'm not a big fan of the look of the game.
I like the idea of using a medieval painting style, but not really the execution. If I want to be VERY specific, I REALLY don't like this stupid sun face emblem.

Generally speaking, everything is a bit dull, it lacks vibrancy and liveness.
For example why using this weird abstract sun pawn on the overworld ? Why not having some kind of cute miniature caravan or knight ? And when it's moving, add an animation with a squire making hooves sounds with a coconut.

Same thing during the level, everything lacks a bit of juice. When you complete a line, add confetti flying around and a troubadour playing a piccolo or something.
And if you want to keep the sun face emblem, at least animate it, so it smiles like the greedy bastard he is when you collect resources, and flinch when it takes damage.


I think that's all for now, keep working hard, you have a very good concept, now make it shine as bright as possible.

[Sleepy Mill Studio]

Hello, thanks for writing this detailed feedback :)

Just as a preface, we’re a very tiny team and this game has been developed by ~3 people on average over the course of 2 years, so we had to make choices to keep the project scope manageable. The art team consists of 2 persons working for a year, and our direction from the start was to evoke a diorama/scale model/board game feeling rather than a lively city-builder (hence the use of pawns, or paper-style vegetation) rather than animated characters. It’s our first game together as a team and there is definitely room for improvement, however with the release date set to April we won’t be able to change much, sorry. If the game’s successful and we can release updates (or even a sequel) we’d definitely love to enhance the atmosphere and push the ambition!

About your other feedbacks:
- you’re right, we’ll add the button to heal after entering the grid preparation menu, it’s an oversight
- the priority order of activation is from the last placed to the first placed, could be interesting to add a number to remind that indeed
- we’ll improve the tutorials, the intention was to not overwhelm players with info and let them learn by doing, but it seems that we went too far in this direction
- the tooltip being cropped at the bottom of the screen was fixed since! we caught it, but too late for the demo
- the overworld part is a bit simple I admit, but it gets more interesting as you unlock new places to visit and more terrains. With playtesting, we realized that it was better to simplify it and sacrificing depth there, because the core gameplay is already mentally draining and players preferred when the map was less of a strategic headache (since they also have to think of their card upgrades)
- your approach to military vs production is the right one I believe, these are meant to provide variations and not play the same round with the same cards every time. The challenge gets trickier in act 2 and 3, because you need resources to upgrade your military to match up with the enemies, so you need to take production buildings with you too! Also, there are more advanced cards beyond the demo that encourage synergies between resources and military.


Thanks for your input and your praise!