itch.io

Hello, thoroughly enjoyed your demo. Thanks a lot.

Even though you haven't done so with your previous works, I hope that you'll consider releasing the full title here, on Itch.io too, once it's completed (or anywhere else for that matter,  like GOG, your own website, etc).

I (shamefully) didn't read all the available text and wasn't carefully looking for inconsistencies/errors, but in your demo I did notice one spelling mistake: 'corrider' instead of 'corridor'.

Without belabouring you too much with insufferable pedantry, for your consideration:

You may wish to be consistent with which spelling of 'grandad' you use: you used both 'Grand-dad' and 'Granddad'. Personally, I would choose 'Grandad' for your setting, but as you wish. 

Also, there was one instance of no spaces between an ellipsis and the following word when each other instance did do so (viz. 'like...this' instead of 'like... this').

Keep up the good work.

Hi PocketPixel, is this offer still available?

From the point of view of a customer rather than a developer, I am not surprised by the sentiments in the responses thus far. I have two main concerns that reduce my inclination to spending money on Itch.io: Finding games I want to buy is too tedious; and many developers either seldom put their games on sale or don't match their sales with other platforms adequately -- let's be honest, most people only buy games when they are (sufficiently) discounted. 

Even if I weren't a skinflint, I have to often be consciously willing spend more money for less (if I choose a different, cheaper game elsewhere instead) or the same product, just to throw the developers or platform a bone.  

More than that, you guys have to compete for my time and attention with every other platform. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I'm just not trawling through the 1.5 million other games just to dig out and play the (possibly amateur) game you worked really hard on. The likely outcome is that I take the path of least resistance and increased consistency/security in spending and avoid the associated risk with purchasing an independent developer's passion project. In other words, I'm far more likely to buy the new hot game or the cheap 20 year old masterpiece than the uncertainty of yours. Don't get me wrong, I found some great games on Itch.io, but I had to put so much time into finding them.

And you have to out-do that. It's pretty rough; I don't envy your position. Unfortunately, if you want to be able to make a living on Itch.io in its current state, you already need to be able to make a living elsewhere: to grab my attention from that place and draw me back here. And the excessive effort in both time and money required in cultivating that... I doubt it's worth your while.

When you think that the script for your demo/game is finalised, please have, if possible, a native English speaker make serious corrections and adjustments to the spelling, grammar, and sentence structure. It reads like it was written by a novice rather than a professional, which is probably true because you gents only recently became developers. but still. 

Perhaps some players would enjoy the aesthetic, but it just reminds me of old flash games from the early 2000s: meaning that they don't appear rustic and charming, but rudimentary and amateurish. Throw them out and start over.

Aside from that, just keep improving your craft. The systems, physics, etc that are still in their first, stiff iterations will improve as you do, after you continually adjust them or rewrite and reimplement them.

I hope that wasn't too mean-spirited. Those are my initial dislikes without the usual filter of politeness. Bye!

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.

Terrific little game; thanks so much! If I had any friends, I'd recommend it to them.

Hi there, this is a fun little game that you've made, so thanks a lot!

Itch.io are welcome to sell whatever they wish at their discretion, as is their prerogative. Personally, I don't purchase NSFW (porn style) games, but it doesn't matter if I like them or not: adults should still be able to purchase them without judgement if they see fit - to enjoy them in the privacy of their own home without having to resort into going to some sordid and potentially dangerous corner of the internet to obtain something perfectly legal, a work of pure fiction at that. Someone, somewhere, should be allowed to sell these titles. Having payment processors push everyone around is a net negative for all us consumers. I think it would do the opposite of aid us in the long run, in fact.

Others have mentioned problems with parenting and circumventing age verification. Having made a purchase, Itch.io is a DRM-free store. Using this site or others like it, such as GOG, grant parents complete control already. All they must do is vet, purchase, and install appropriate games, then remove internet access. The procedure is no different than when games were distributed physically. Parents just need to take accountability for their own actions. Granting young children unfettered access to the internet is a very foolish thing to do that, in my opinion, parents should be much more considerate over.

Requesting governments or corporations to do this instead of parents having the sense and individual liberty to do so just brings what we are already seeing: widespread censorship. These agencies are being allowed to control what we see, what we purchase; what we think.

I don't do anything immoral or illegal, but I don't really want other people knowing what I do in private. We all deserve that right to privacy. Let me know what you think!

I second the title of this post. Thanks Mr. Carter, it's a great little game, worthy of praise and  paying real money for - to have it free of charge is above generosity. Anecdotally... I was surprised to be moved by the plaintive plea of some poor prisoner, suffering in the depths of some dank dungeon; even though it's just some blip of a cry. There is some careful thought put into this game.

This instalment was much more complex than the previous ones, perhaps in part due to the amount of time you were able to sacrifice on it. Combined with the changing narration and motivations of each protagonist it made this one the best thus far. Whatever the reasons, you still outdid yourself, so bravo. If you opt to bundle the each book into a complete novel to sell on Steam eventually as you have deliberated doing (rather than how it is currently, something that can be played for free, for which the following criticism cannot reasonably be leveied against it) I hope that you will consider cleaning up the occasional oversight or very minor grammatical error that slipped into earlier episodes - which may only exist due to the time constraints imposed upon you, and that you were making it out of the goodness of your heart. Thank you for your diligence otherwise and overall nice work!

Astrea is a delightful and charming experience, all the hard work that has been put into it is plain for all to see. Thank you for both for improving the game over time and for continuing to keep the Itch version up to date since previous comments. When the development from this game ceases, I hope to see more of this quality from Little Leo games in the future.

Hello Leonard, Magicsofa went into some of the intricate details, so perhaps I could apply a more general approach. Professional isn't the term I would use to describe your page. Each paragraph of text is incongruent to the proceeding one, there is no consistent style. I would suggest that you reconsider how it is you wish to present yourself, and rewrite your text from scratch. The first paragraph reads as a company pitching a business, cold, sterile, and plural; the second is more informal and individual; the third bizarre and completely out of place. Different businesses have different marketing approaches to suit their purpose and brand, but your eclectic mix may leave potential customers simply confused.

Magicsofa mentioned this, but just to reiterate, the banner image and the font are both too large. They are so large infact that they detract from the products you are trying to advertise. For instance, the lynx image and body font are so large that they become the main focal point; the headings and images for the games seem dwarfed and insignificant in comparison. If I may be callous, most prospective customers don't care about your name, business name, location, etc; it's often simply necessary marketing nonsense that glossed over and barely processed. People wish for a demonstration of your abilities, and to see or purchase your product. In other words, show us the games! Best of luck to you.

Hello Avocado Smoothie, these sorts of games are always more motivating to play the more there is to unlock. Having said that, given the scope of this initial game and your feedback requests, making suggestions for further additions probably isn't useful. Aside from the wonderful suggestions above, here are some things for your consideration that might help with motivation:-

• Adding some other numerical values: displaying the amount of gold earned (in the location where the coin previously was) when it is collected alongside the jingle; displaying the current and maximum values of the water trough, as well as the increment gained when upgrading or refilling it.
• Adding some additional colours, jingles, etc, to the purchases. I noticed that when eye concentration is intently focused on the field, it removes focus from the shop window. Doing something such as changing the highlighted colour in the players periferals or playing a short sound to show something can now be afforded could be beneficial. A different approach would be to show the amount of coins where the water trough level currently is, and instead show the trough level in the shop window. This would make the more valuable information more prominant. The solutions are numerous, as you wish. 

In fairness sir, this reality is only the case in the location where you happen to keep chickens. Chickens have many natural predators that are all habitat dependant. For example, the two predators you cite don't even exist in my location, but badgers, buzzards, and foxes do. A fox seems to be a very reasonable compromise owing to relative ubiquity and familiarity; the large range it occupies across continents.

Hello, the textbox in the second image is more preferable to those found in the first, and I would suggest altering those found in the former to maintain a simple and consistant appearance. It would greatly increase readability for the user, with text colour providing instant recognisability and differentiating the information being displayed - Orange for the speaker, black for body text, and say white/purple for information on the stat being used. Also, I would suggest doing something that has the effect of making the text box background more consistant so the text is more readable. In the second image, you can see how the varying background decreases the legibility of the orange text in places. Some ideas could simply be increasing the opacity, blurring the portion of the image behind the box, or adjusting the background or character positions to be less meddlesome to the text.

It seems like fun to mess around with the text box background image and fonts, but in my opinion it just ends up overcomplicated something functional that requires simplicity, to be crude, a potentially disruptive mess. As ever, I'll also give my opinion where it wasn't asked for, and kindly request that you put a comma after "All hail Ptolemy." Thanks!

Oh, I see what you were going for now that you mention the Gorillaz. Just don't let my remarks be off-putting, it shouldn't prevent you from the attempting to use that style, it's just perhaps more difficult or requires more time than you have to execute. I still believe that will small adjustments to everything the mash of styles could be cohesive. It just may be very time-consuming. Lofty and challenging goals are still praiseworthy, and what you produced was still good. Best of luck.

Hi GrenadeKitten, thank you for the game. I played your game through to ending C, and this is what I have to say regarding your queries:

It depends on your intentions and target demographic exactly, but from my assumptions playing it appears that the difficulty level is probably too hard, but it's not strictly too difficult. The difficulty level is balanced in an unconventional and therefore counterintuitive way to the expectations of most people. In other words, the difficulty is frontloaded very heavily towards the beginning and middle portions, and becomes easier towards the end, rather than the difficulty curve being soft at the beginning, increasing, and tapering off towards the end being the most difficult. This early to middle section where they player feels stymied; without many cards and unable to beat the majority of battles without some difficulty is where I felt the most frustrated and would consider stopping the session. The game appears more difficult than it truly is because of the burden of expectation that is set on the player. They are expected to realise immediately and without guidance the following:

• Not all enemies that can be immediately encountered are capable of being beaten at the player's current strength, so the player must decide battles wisely. Many JRPGs are much more linear, especially at the start. which is what may have been anticipated.
• The player is expected to learn enemies and prepare an appropriate combination of decks and skills in order to defeat them, from beginning to end. Even if numerous ways exist of overcoming a single enemy, the margin for success appears to not be very lenient. So in all, when a player is still becoming familiar with the battle system, they are already facing enemies that expect an intimate knowledge of its workings.
• There is a small potential for players to get completely stuck; making assumptions of what will work, but in fact will not - selling and upgrading cards that don't synergise of function as anticipated. As cards are only really acquired through defeating enemies or by proxy (spending money earned for cards), and they sell for less then they buy, a player can simply softlock himself by buying and selling cards.

As a specific example, there are many abilities accessible both to the player and the enemy that burn cards, removing them from the hand or deck. When a player runs out of cards, they are not reshuffled, so the battle is a forgone conclusion and normally a loss for the player. This I did not realise at first simply due to the first encounters being relatively simple and not requiring my entire deck to overcome. Then having sold my cards in order to upgrade some and maintain a slim and tidy deck, as well as spend my ability points, I encounter a fight that would require stalling with cards to beat at my current level. Suddenly finding myself helpless and out of cards, needless to say I had to return to this fight later.

I should also note that I don't feel as though the system is too complex for the majority of players to comprehend. I just believe that they are "chucked in at the deep end" as it were. If this is a prelude to a larger project as mentioned elsewhere, effectively a test on the system and the world of yours, it may have an adverse effect on players. A main game seems unlikely to be so difficult from the offset, and many players having become interested from the prelude will suddenly have an off putting decrease in its challenge, having been made to spend the time in this short game.

To demonstrate where your game felt much more enjoyable and to consider player expectation and difficulty with it, where adjustments could be considered, let us consider the boss battles. These themed fights against a single opponent were far more fun than having to overcome the general enemies. This is because the former gives the impression far more of a puzzle to solve where the player is able to manoeuvre many pieces. Should they fail, actions are still being performed and the system utilised, and corrections made. The minor enemies that come in packs don't demonstrate this however, it is all too frequent that the player should feel inaction instead. Many fights give the appearance of restricting and tormenting the player rather than allowing for expression, which seems to be because of the overtuned difficulty, ability to immediately face hard opposition, and ruthless action economy. In effect, the player is a single unit against 3-5 enemies; and with a single turn a player must balance all the following (potentially) : rejuvenate health and mana, shield the player, attack the enemies, buff the player, debuff the enemies, and spawn allied units. When most enemies in the game kill the summons in a single turn, often before the summon is even able to act and thereby wasting a very valuable turn, it gives only a sense of exasperated helplessness. The summons act as an alternative to the party which one would find in a standard JRPG, so constantly being denied from even using them can be frustrating. There were numerous level unlockable player abilities that appeared completely useless because of this. Suddenly the divine wind squadron was more appealing.

As a knock on effect, as the player can only handle specific sets of enemies at any given time, it artificially constrains the variety despite it being reasonable. Every enemy kills all my units, so I'm both using using fewer strategies and fighting one type of foe in a row, then being more powerful I can fight the next one type, etc. Having said that, the usefulness of certain cards went underappreciated, making a return in the latter portions for greater expression.

Interminable complaining is simple enough, but realising how to fix them is more difficult. Even a small rebalance that strengthens the player's summons could make the entire thing trivial. But there are some considerations that could be made; giving the player greater strength early, making them "feel good" as what they figure out can beat the enemy in front of them, then increasing the required precision later on. To supplement this perhaps increase the players or summon’s defensive statistics by level up or by the addition of further early acquired items, which again would be by a small amount overcome by later enemies once the player has discovered strategies, unlocked defensive tools, etc. There are 5 resistance types after all, and guard only reduces one. Early on, most enemies could deal physical damage, or perhaps guard could increase all defences as an example. Another possibility would be to adjust the level design; more linear early, and again broadening later. But this is for you to consider what is best, continuing to adjust many factors by small amounts until the balance you desire has been struck may be all that can be done.

Here are some additional miscellaneous things you may wish to consider altering:

• Increasing the clarity of various descriptions: For instance, dealing "strength +1" damage means little when the player cannot see their strength in battle, and the value of the damage dealt is not displayed. "[value]([formula])" as a format for all may be useful.
• Reducing the ambiguity of various descriptions: For instance, Healing "1/2 of strength and willpower" can mean both 1/2 str + 1/1 wil or 1/2 str + 1/2 wil; "stealing 1/2 mana" has the same issue - current of maximum mana? The previous comment also applies here.
• When altering my current deck or levelling abilities, there is no revert option should I decide against a prospective choice.
• Left click both advances text and attacks, leading to unfortunate mistakes.
• Despite your efforts, it is still possible to instigate the dialogue of Louie to receive multiple 100xp drops. I think after winning a battle his dialogue can be activated again. Saving, quitting, and reloading back in works as expected.
• The in battle camera jumps around a little recklessly. This can be best seen when multiple foes all buff themselves in succession; say five school girls. The camera is set to blink and center on the unit performing its action, which works fine when attacks are being performed; the camera follows this unit forward then returns to the next unit in the action queue. Five stationary units on the same side of the field don't recquire this effect.

The only thing I didn't like is an unfortunate knock-on effect of you working alone and the theme of the project being a Dream-world I should imagine. With the backgrounds being mostly static and having one visual appearance, the humanoid character models another style, the 2d drawings another, the enemies a further, and so on, you run a potential risk of the work appearing incongruous. If you'll forgive me for saying so, these combined factors happen to have connotations shared with a unity model dump game which you may wish to take some additional care to avoid in the future.

That's all I can think of for the moment. My Regards.

As an end-user, I like Itch.io as a platform and have had generally positive experiences - it occupies a useful place in the market that most of the major competitors underutilise. It allows for independent developers to publish and for me to find, titles with more artistic or unique qualities that larger corporations would forcably remain hidden. They just aren't as profitable or cannot be sufficiently expressed when working in a very large team, it can't be helped.So in this way numerous very talented individuals have been able to both get a foothold to move onto higher places or be able to continue their expression alone.In fact, there are numerous things here I have enjoyed here that were both free of charge and had some qualities which in one or more departments were objectively superior than games I paid good money for. 

But it is in the finding where the troubles lies. The majority of posts I have seen typically say something to the effect of "I see lots of this game genre I don't wish to see", there seems to be a many small factors compounding this issue. I don't really have a reasonable solution to the problem, other than that the entire structure of the storefront and such would have to undergo vast, timely, and tedious overhaul for only a small benefit.

Having said that, the platform seems to be under so much strain because:

• The volume of games is becoming greater than it was designed to process
• It has some combination of the following - Low number of sales, low number of reviews (relative to sales), a disproportionate amount of reviews that evaluate too generously, and so on.
• Due to the nature of the platform hosting independent developers, it will always have a inclination to favour the feasible production of visual novels or similar genres, so attracting more users who are interested in them; in the end garnering more attention than elsewhere and appearing higher in search terms.

Very adorable! The light-hearted and whimsical humour that bounces around in a ridiculous and non-sensical manner paired with anthropomorphism is a pleasure that is reminiscent of Japanese or British comedy in an appealing way. Like a Japanese style drawing of a sushi-roll with a smiley face attempting Monty Python. I can't believe I beat this game as a fully grown adult. Well, thanks, bye!