Hi everyone!

I'm working on Witch's Shelf, a cozy tidy-up game where you sort a witch's messy collection of potion bottles onto a huge apothecary shelf. It's very early in development, so I'd love some honest feedback before I go much further !

What you'd be testing:

- The core sorting loop: matching bottle shape + pattern + label to the right shelf spot

- Whether the row symbols (flame, drop, leaf, skull, eye, moon, star, snake, feather, crystal) feel intuitive to learn and use instead of plain letters

- Whether the potion names on the labels give you enough of a hint about their category without spelling it out

- General game feel, clarity, and anything that confuses you in the first few minutes

Play in browser here:  https://laustudio.itch.io/witchs-shelf

A few things I'm especially curious about:

1. Did you understand what to do within the first minute, or did it take longer?

2. Were the symbols easy to tell apart, or did any of them look too similar?

3. Anything that felt frustrating, unclear, or just didn't feel good?

Any feedback at all is appreciated, even just a couple of lines. Thanks so much for taking the time to try it out!

The potion-sorting concept sounds relaxing! Are you planning to introduce new bottle types or more complex shelf rules as players progress?

Hi,

Here are some things which I noticed:

- The row symbols are intuitive enough, but I find they would be more so (for myself) if they were also coloured accordingly: Red for flame, blue for drop, green for leaf, white for feather, and so on. Until there is colour differentiation, the feather will probably always look like a leaf. 

On the topic of colour, right now, if a bottle is placed incorrectly, it is colour shifted in some manner to be more red: so yellow bottles become orange, etc.  But red bottles... become more red. It's not clear, without comparison, if the red bottles are in the correct positioned (they are rather small when on the shelf). It would be beneficial if a different colour or method were chosen to represent the incorrectly organised bottles. 

Which of these is sorted correctly? (It's the first bottle only, but I can't be certain of that)

- When moving the sound and music sliders to the lowest position, it doesn't mute them, only making them very quiet. The music is noticeably finite, and this game is expected to take some time: so one would imagine at least some players would do this.

- I have some bottles filling my 'to sort' slots. But I'd like to sort a different bottle, instead, now.  The first bottle in line is sorted automatically onto the shelf: I cannot return it to the pile, sort the second bottle first, or rearrange the order of those 'to sort' bottles. Could I not sort right to left, or in any other way I like; could I not put some bottles back for later and choose fresh ones? You see what I mean. Please include some way to sort the bottles that are to be sorted. As an extension, should bottles correctly sorted be locked in place? Perhaps.

It might trivialise the game a bit if one could arrange the bottles too much, but playing right now feels like being forced to do a very inefficient method of sorting, which makes it a little annoying.

- "No timer pressing you, no way to fail..." Apart from when one presses pause, where it displays a timer. If I were to sort 1990 bottles incorrectly and put the remaining 10 in my 'to sort' slots, it would be so tedious to win that I may as well start over. Perhaps a button that 'removes incorrectly sorted bottles to the main pile' would be a good idea.