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This demo is promising. The progression is fun and doesn’t feel too slow. I think the idea of having upgrades you choose per run is pretty neat. It gives a bit of a roguelike aspect to the game, which makes it more fun to play than the standard “do the same thing over and over again with minor improvements.”

Some suggestions I have, though, are that some of the buildings seem to have a limit on how many you can get. This in itself isn’t terrible since you need to have some game balance, but roguelike games thrive on the fact that you can make stupid, broken builds if you get lucky enough. This game doesn’t have something like that because the buildings you can get are capped at really low levels.

This isn’t a huge problem, but honestly, if you want to make this more fun, I would highly recommend allowing much higher building caps. Perhaps lock upgrading the card caps of some cards behind legacy upgrades. It would make the game much more fun and engaging if you could actually try and go for a broken build and get a large leap in progress because of it. For instance, being able to get a build that has a 5% gold spawn chance and a 20,000% gold value increase with an 80-90% instant respawn chance would be busted and really fun for the player to get due to how much luck is required to get all the right buildings.

I think the game would do well to have more of the legacy upgrades interact more directly with the rogue-like element of the game. Most of the upgrades you get currently are simply passive buffs, which are great, but some legacy upgrades that enhance specific cards, or which change your odds of seeing certain cards, would be nice too.

Overall, this game has a lot of potential to really strike a good balance between the rogue-like and idle genres. I feel like, currently, the rogue-like aspect could be developed a lot more. This, of course, will take heavy rebalancing of the idle side in order to make it so that both idle and active strategies will be viable, but I think with the right upgrades, this game could do it quite well.

This is a great game, and I really liked it! I would love to see this concept expanded if you can. If you do end up expanding this, I have a few ideas. I think something cool to incorporate would be to have Harper and Ollie meet more people and also have some of them start writing to you. We could then get a bunch of different perspectives that could allow for cool puzzles. 

I also think it would be cool if some of your friends occasionally wrote to you asking for info on monsters. You would have to use the letters to put together the relevant information and then write them back with answers. I think this would make it feel more like a back-and-forth conversation instead of people just talking at you. It could also be really fun to actually use the information you learn for something.

It might also be fun to have a map you have to fill in. I liked how you had to fill in the alignment chart and thought that was cool. I feel like a similar thing could be done with the world map. You have to deduce the different regions of the world and note down their locations.

All in all, I think some more monsters, perhaps a few new alignments and habitats, and some more moves would really flesh out the game and allow it to become even better than it already is!

I agree that we definitely shouldn't auto-translate Travosin words into English in the documents. That would take away far too much from the game. I do, however, think that a large improvement for the game would be the dictionary idea you talked about. A couple of suggestions I have for it would be, most importantly, to have the hover tooltip of your translation guess be a toggleable option. For someone who wants to learn Trevosan better, having the hover pop up could spoil the experience a bit if they end up accidentally hovering over a word or start to rely on it too heavily. If it is a toggleable option that will allow you to turn it off and be forced to cross-reference your own notes more. 

Additionally, I am not sure if you plan to have the dictionary lock in words like how portraits do; however, I would recommend one of two things: either have them simply serve as a more organized version of the current notes page with no confirmation, or only lock them in if you have 5 or so right. I know 5 seems like a lot, but I believe that a lot of the fun of the game is making guesses for what the words mean and then continually refining them as you get more examples of the words being used. If they are locked in too easily, then that part is taken away.

If dates were to be added to all the documents, some of the puzzles might have to be rebalanced, but I feel like thematically it would make sense to have dates attached to each document. After all, we are supposed to be going through a document archive, and those kinds of archives usually would be quite thorough in making sure dates are attached to important documents. However, this would also allow for an interesting puzzle where you get some documents whose date is either unknown, missing, or damaged. You would have to find out a rough date for the document before you could fully use it, and it could lead to some interesting puzzles.

Since the documents are currently sorted by date, this would mean that the documents without a date would have to be put in a separate section or smth until you enter it's aproxamate date, at which point it could be put in its proper place in the sort order.

5/5 Stars

A great and fun little puzzle game. It had interesting mechanics and always introduced new ones just before things got repetitive. The visuals were great, and I had a fun time playing. I would love to see an extended version of this game. Perhaps you could connect with different kinds of plants and gain different abilities based on which plant you connect with, allowing for even more variety in puzzle design and complexity. I believe this game has mush-room to grow. (I will not apologize.)

Good news it works now! My old saves are no longer bricked and the fail safe seems to be functioning properly. Glad I got to see the failsafe as well. Thanks for getting it fixed so quickly. 

Update it seems the save destroying error previously mentioned happens if you try and enter the largest size while being in an unexplored area. This was very consistent in a save where I had already moved myself into an unexplored area, then tried to reload the save and switch to the biggest size. 

Also, I believe the reason my first save is bricked is because, despite the fact that I am currently in an explored area, I previously, in that save, triggered the glitch and entered an unexplored area but was able to walk out of it back into an explored one and continue playing. I forgot that I had done that when I wrote the last comment, so to correct myself, the save was made after I had glitched into an unexplored area, not before I encountered it. Since I glitched into an unexplored area previously in the game upon reloading the save, anytime I try to switch to the biggest size, I get the error message despite being currently in an explored area.

Really fun game and cool puzzle mechanics. The game is also very easy to break irreparably though. I completely bricked my 44-minute-long autosave and 37-minute-long manual save. But I have done some testing so I am pretty sure of the cause. Basically, if you go into a town and press X, you get an error message telling you to go to the middle size to use it like you should, but if you, instead of dismissing it, press W, you go into the largest size and get teleported into unexplored areas. Sometimes you can escape from that state by walking from an unexplored area back into the world map, and the game continues as normal. But if you continually switch between the biggest size and the middle size in that state, some really strange behavior happens. On one of my saves, this completely broke it and made it so an error message appeared anytime I tried to switch to the biggest size, even though the save was made before I encountered the bug. I tried doing the same thing on a second save, though, and didn't get the error message like the first time, so it might be caused by something slightly different. I am going to keep experimenting a bit to see if I can reproduce it again, and will let you know if I can and what I did to get it to happen. The picture is of the error that bricked my first save. If you need anything else to pinpoint the source of the bug let me know and I will see what I can do.

Thank you!

I am still stuck on 8. I'm not sure if I just don't get it but the hint seems pretty unhelpful as you would realize that isn't a solution as soon as you tried it and green gets stuck in an unsaveable position. I would appreciate some further explanation in addition, because currently that hint doesn't help too much.