A lot of potential. Good foundation.
QoL improvement: Make it so slider widget dragging doesn't slide other slider widgets. Really frustrating currently when trying to tune the settings and the mouse slips and starts changing a different parameter.
blazedummy
Recent community posts
Interesting concept.
Obviously a prototype, but this needs some usability work. Max speed is quite limited without some way to strategically trigger boosts. And the fighting game has floaty movement and significant delay between hitting a key and triggering an attack. Many times it just seem to fail to trigger anything.
The twist of there being 7 cubs instead of 6 fell flat and confused me because there was a previous bit of exposition that mentioned 7 being paired down to 6. I was doing skim reading, so I can't recall the section that mentioned it, or maybe I misinterpretted that recalled section because of the skim reading, but yeah, unfortunately fell flat for me.
Per the screenshot I attached to the original post, I thought there was supposed to be at least one potion ingredient in the top left. But I guess I misremembered. I guess I was thrown off by all the tubing being already present. When I originally played, there weren't so many ingredients and likewise, not so many tubes. My brain was saying the tubes shouldn't show up until the ingredients do.
The reason the "Go Back" menus feel awkward is because at various points, you start in your room, not the living room. So being eplicit about where it's going would avoid that dissonance.
My other commentary on default menu positions has to do with digital design ergonomics. Basically, the more clicks or mouse movement a user has to make to get to a particular page, the slower and clunkier the UI feels and can actually cause increased repetitive strain injury if the user pushes thru it. So identifying most common menu navigation paths and making those paths have the fewest clicks and/or mouse movement, the overall better the ergonomics will be. In the case of your game, as it currently stands, the most common path would likely be going from the garage to the player's room, or vice versa.
The menuing feels backwards in many ways. The "Go Back" menu taking you to the hallway and then the living room should instead be more explicit. And the default, top menu item should be the most common action you anticipate from the player. Personally, I believe that most common action should be moving the player closer to their room when in the house, or perhaps toward the garage. Either way, if I want to get to "an end" of a space, the menu should ideally keep the path toward that end in the same position so the player can spam click to get there.
Similar thoughts on both counts. With current implementation, eating is just a chore that threatens to lose your unsaved progress if you don't pay attention. In general, it's better to incentivize behavior by giving the player an upside to performing an action. Pure punishment for not doing an action only serves as padding and frustration if there aren't additional factors like action economy and balancing multiple decisions with both upside and downside to consider. At the very least, not eating shouldn't result in gameover, but instead something like loss of growth or poor job performance or something else recoverable.
