Hi there, Caz! I've been playing the game for about an hour and a half. Massive fun, and thanks for the link to the tutorial. For an alpha, the gameplay is all there and solid without bugs. Congrats to you all! I just have some comments.
Love the opening theme
I want to hear more of that music throughout the game!
When you start a New Game, I thought it could do with some speeding up to get to the pink border, then the intro text.
I enjoy all the puns and tons of atmosphere in the intro text, although I thought it a bit jumbled with some cleaning up needed. I did get the gist that it involves a dragon and... why do I have a girl sprite for a main character? Or is that a boy? Gah. I thought I was playing a dragon for a moment there ;D I am sure I will understand once there's text and I can understand the connection between the dragon and my character who is apparently a chef.
Black Forest (LOL)
At first I was a little lost and kept trying to harvest from those tasty looking trees. And then I realised I could only harvest from certain things, and yay, the game kicked off. Avoiding those cupcake things was fun and easy, although I'm a bit frustrated by the relatively low drop rate of flour (those blue sack things?) compared to, darn, I don't even know what that jug thing is. A jug of cream? I tested and noticed that that for every four ingredients I harvested from that Hill of Cream, I get on average only one flour, the rest cream.
I'm curious what those green gem things are. They don't look like strawberries at all. Grapes? I also found it weird to harvest frosting from the same resource as the green gems ;D
I wonder if you plan to expand this game and include more resources and more Cupkrakens to dodge
Bakery
Ahk, baking. I do not have the coordination for this minigame! Ten minutes later.. Ooh, I'm getting good at this.
I want a close-up of the tasty goodies! I love the creativity of the names, and since I enjoy baking, this game appeals to me in particular. The baking part reminds me of Cake Mania, and the tending of the shop sequence reminds me of Diner Dash.
I feel the windows displaying the Hygiene Rating and Gold take up too much space in the screen. I want to see
more of the shop, so those large windows make the screen seem cramped to me.
It's nice to have a Day and Night system in this world. I thought it a nice touch to see the shadow of the windows in the bakery kitchen at night. At this stage, I can't tell if you plan to do more with it. Like, introducing a mechanic where your character has to sleep to gain back energy to bake, harvest goods and run the shop. If you don't plan to have that mechanic, I'm not sure what other gameplay use you could have for it. Unless you intend to make nights really dark in the black forest? Now that would make harvesting and avoiding those Cupkrakens interesting!
It is a bit difficult to tell which baked good you are selecting from the menu because the boxes are so pale, but I got used to it.
Shop
I want an assistant! Darn those evil litterbugs.
Why can't I dash? Must.. clean... mess.
Is the trash supposed to randomly spawn even though there are no customers around?
I'm curious as to whether you plan to have another standard other than "too much" and "that's cheap". Like a "Just right"?
The 'child' sprite doesn't look like a child to me because of his pale hair.
You might have mentioned this already, but do all the customers accept baked goods at the same price? For instance, all of them seem to be willing to pay the same sweet-spot price for a Tirawrmisu at 79 coins.
I love how you can see the different baked goods on the shelves.
I find it funny when a customer refuses to buy a Burndt cake at 600 gold ("It's too much!") and then ends up declaring it's cheap at 599 gold
To test, I decided to let the evil mess be. To my surprise, only two bits of trash spawn. I was half expecting to fill the whole shop with rubbish, hee hee. Perhaps if the rubbish gets too much, like 5+, customers will offer less money for baked goods, or less customers come in? After all, I am not sure why I had to spend so much effort cleaning up the rubbish when there are only going to be two bits of trash. Also, rarely am I able to serve a customer in a completely clean shop - the trash spawns too fast.
Even with the shop messed up (two bits of trash), the customers seem to accept the same prices anyway as when I kept the place clean?
After about 100 minutes of play, to my dismay I see I only have 172 hygiene points collected. The cheapest shop shelf I can get is 500 hygiene points?? Bah. I want a dragon to burn the evil mess away!
I hope this doesn't come off as too harsh. The above are just nitpicks in a brilliant game. Good work, Marimo and Caz. Everyone should definitely try out the alpha!
