Wow, this is a really nice game. First timer or not. Super enjoyed both my little (I’ll get on to why they were little) play-through s.
Some ideas for improvements / general thoughts.
-The health bar was tiny and hidden away in the corner. I found that when I needed to know what my health was, I had to look away from what I was doing to the health bar to read it. It might be a case of it needing a background to be shown up against but there’s nothing wrong with making it just a bit bigger. In fact the same goes for the rest of the gui. Ultimately this is why I dies both times, not realizing how little health I had. I’ll continue this thought later.
-The (what I first assumed to be) enemies don’t seem to do much. You can either (SPOILERZZZ) kill them or switch places with them but I couldn’t find a use for either. I have no doubt I’m missing something but they just seemed to be annoying atm.
-I think you should be using sound slightly differently.
–Clearly define what you can and can’t do. Example: trying to dig whilst in the air or ice impulsing a second time in the air. A misfire type particle effect wouldn’t go amiss either. When you press something and nothing happens, it is disconcerting.
–Less sounds telling you when you’ve jumped (because you already know that) more sounds telling you when you’ve been hurt (because as above, sometimes you (I) don’t notice)
–Maybe a little ambient music? Might be nice. You get these areas where you’re jumping all over the place and there’s loads of sound then these areas where you’re just walking and it’s eerily silent. Not the ambiance you’re going for I think.
–You could do a really cool sound effect for the (SPOILERZZZ) terraforming kind of thing that happens when you take a tablet.
–In short there are lots of opportunities with sound.
-It would be nice if the plants looked a little different both to differentiate them from each other and to make them a bit more interesting. They are sort of the focus of the entire game and yet they’re a bit boring to look at.
-Last thing was that when I was messing around in the options (as you do) I clicked on the English flag just to see what would happen and the game crashed/shut down. I don’t know because there was no error message and no error log and I couldn’t recreate the error. At a guess I’d say a poorly initialized options file. But I’m just guessing.
Thank you for a lovely game. I know I spammed this post with what I think is so awful about it but it really isn’t much. It is a good game. Even more so considering it’s your first. I know I’ll be playing it again.
