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We got to play your game over the weekend! We LOVE this game! The art and graphics are so good. The demo left us wanting more! The game seems pretty polished already.  Below are some specific feedbacks:

* The graphics were beautiful!

* The grass/weeds in the foreground were lovely! Nice touch making them sway as you walk by.

* The main character is super cute, and the sounds they make are perfect :-D

* The game gets very laggy in some sections, usually when the camera zooms out really far.  It seems to happy more near the color painting areas (where you walk through the colors and it smears on the background).  The FPS drops to like 5 FPS (playing this on a very good PC with NV Turing card, so I don't think it's that).

* We love how the treasures are positive messages.  This was a really great touch!

Looking forward to the full game so much! Take care

We had the chance to play your game! Awesome work!

We liked the minimalism of the aesthetics, and the Zen music worked very nicely.  We enjoyed the whole playthrough of the demo and found ourselves kind of competing against each other to see who could solve it first :-D

It might be nice to have the level names displayed on the level.  There was one time we wanted to replay a level but it was difficult to find.  Also maybe there should be a "Back" button that goes to previous level instead of menu?

Great work, great game!

Ahh okay!  Yea we will need to keep playing, we weren't able to finish the whole chapter.  Although that may be partially due to me wanting to go through the long drop near the beginning over and over to try to catch all the gems :-P I really enjoyed trying to optimize and fine-tune my moves!

We will give a try again in the future to see more of the content!

Love this game! We found ourselves playing for a long time, cursing at the screen every time we died, only to jump back in determined to save the Avocado and her baby!  

The concept of this game is prefect.  The art style of the game, the music, and the whole package were really good and super enjoyable.  The Avocado and her baby are cute and we really felt for her every time she got sliced up :-P

We played the game both on PC (the longest) as well as our Android phone.  A couple comments below:

* The controls on the PC felt a little "floaty", like maybe too much sliding at end of pressing arrow keys.  BUT, this isn't necessarily a critique since I could see this as being part of the game (especially to make the game more difficult), so just mentioning in case you were thinking of reducing the avocado sliding after arrow buttons released.

* The mobile controls were SUPER HARD.  I couldn't tell if this was part of design (i.e. if controls were intended to be difficult).  Maybe one thing to try would be to have a fixed virtual joystick at the bottom middle or something, instead of the free-form "floating" joystick anywhere player touches on screen.  But if you were going for super hard controls, then it is fine :-D But they were quite a bit more difficult to grasp than the PC version.

* We found the UI for the "Level Complete" screen was actually clipping out of the viewport on the PC version, screenshot below:

Other than that, not much to say.  The game was super enjoyable, and we can't wait to play more levels in the future ;-)

Thanks !!

Hi! We had a chance to play your game over the weekend!  The concept of this game is really cool - resource management on a train!  The music was amazing and beautiful and fit the mood of the game perfectly.

We know this is an early version, but are looking forward to more!  We have left some detailed comments below about things we found that might be good to implement or do at some point:

* Music at the beginning is amazing.

* It would be good to have UI indicating how many resources the player has.  We weren't sure how many resources we had while we were playing and didn't know if we could build something or not.

* I think when speeding up time, after a task completes it would be good if time slowed back down to 1x while the dialogue is going.

* It was difficult to get a grasp of the progression in the beginning because we weren't sure how everything was supposed to fit together and were overwhelmed by choices.  One idea here is that during the Tutorial sections, only allow building the component that is required for the tutorial.   This way the player doesn't get confused on what they are supposed to press.  As the tutorial continues, more and more things will be unlocked to build, and eventually the player will have all things to build after all tutorials are finished.  Would be good to have some UI elements for tutorials to show player where to click and stuff in the beginning.

* Save game needed! We accidentally clicked out of browser while building a super long train

* Maybe make a way to skip intro/dialogues (forget if this option was there)

* Would be good to have a way to know when player is about to die from heat or cold.  We died without warning, and didn't realize we were too cold.

Overall we love the direction of this game and think it has a lot of great potential.  We found ourselves trying to build the longest train we could :-D  The music fit the mood perfectly.  We can't wait to play more in the future,

Thanks for letting us test out your game!!

We got a chance to play this weekend, it was super fun!  We played with a controller and the game felt really good.  Thank you for saving the "mini games" and not making us re-get the gems when we die, and the checkpoints throughout the game were very well placed !

Some comments:

* Sound on menu - We felt this was a bit too high pitched and we had to turn down the sound because it kind of hurt our ears a bit :-P 

* We spent a lot of time going back up the tunnel and trying to get all the gems (didn't realize the "exit" brought us to the top :-P).  I think then we missed some text about our new abilities.  It might be good to indicate somewhere in the UI that a new ability has been unlocked or available rather than the in-game positional text (was easy to miss).

* In the mini-games (the three doors at the bottom of the level), the light flickering was a bit distracting (maybe tone down the flicker?)

* Not sure if this is a bug or not - but we found that if you run on a ceiling, then fall, you can do a second jump before you land.  This is before we got the double jump ability.

BTW I really liked the controller - it worked perfectly.  

We know this an early version, but we are really looking forward to new updates and playing more!  Thanks for sharing with us :-D

We had a chance to play with 4 of us last night.  We played for a couple hours
and HAD A BLAST!  We had played the previous alpha, but our two friends had not and were fresh eyes, and they really enjoyed this game. I've noted down a bunch of observations and feedback!

First of all, I really like the new stacking mechanism.  Last time we played, I
think you had to throw something up in the air and wait for it to fall on to
the very top - now when you pick up, it's instantly added to the stack.  I
think this makes perfect sense and really tightens the controls alot!

We tried the 3 multiplayer modes available:
* Free for all - This is where we spent the most time, had a ton of fun.  Our
  friends picked up the game really quick, and we were all yelling at each
  other throughout the game :-)  The controls were pretty intuitive. 

   Compared to single player experience, this was so different! So much    harder to get  stacks to the van.  Small stacks easier because you are faster    and can run  from other people, larger stacks you are going slower and very    risky because other people can knock you down.  This was a great balance   mechanic.

  We played this mode probably the most.

  Also - it seems we were really competitive at stealing each other's
  gorillas and policemen :-) 

  Suggestion:
  -- Maybe add longer invincibility after knock-out time so one player can't
     just keep harassing, or maybe make it so that same player can't knock another
     person down immediately.

* Teams - This was super fun!  I think there are still a few bugs to be worked
  out, but overall we enjoyed this mode.  We were quickly trying to develop
  strats, such as guarding our teammate from knock downs while they stack
  items.  It was still super hard though :-P  I think this mode has some great
  potential, the dynamic for teaming up and working together was a nice change
  of pace.

  A suggestion:
  Would be nice if it were harder to knock your own teammate down - but maybe
  this is a balancing thing that you might have to experiment around with.  Or
  maybe this is a good feature - not sure yet, will take more playthroughs :-)

* Knock-out - This was interesting! We played a couple times, I think there
  were some issues where some players could get knocked out easily, but other
  players just wouldn't get knocked down even though we were going directly at
  them.  It seems this player was doing this: using right arrow keys to move
  around, then just spamming "shift" while running, and basically he was
  invincible.  Overall this is a fun game mode.

  Suggestions:
  * I think getting in the van was disabled in this mode, but there is still a UI to press
    space to get in the van when getting close.  Might want to remove.

  * Maybe when a player gets knocked down they can be re-spawned at van? That
    way they have some breathing room until they get back into the action.
    Otherwise it was kind of a dash spam fest :-)
  

Okay, overall it was great and I'm looking forward to playing this at more of our game nights!!!

Here are some high-level observations and suggestions:
* Being able to stack multiple gadgets/power-ups of the same type is a bit OP.
  For example, you could stack all earthquakes - then at the end of the game
  just spam earthquake for a while preventing players from reaching the van,
  since each gadget slot has its own cool-down timer.  If you have enough
  money, you can just keep spamming for a long time which kind of ruins it for
  the other players because they are constantly getting earthquaked :-)

* There is kind of a game-breaking infinite money glitch one player discovered.
  If they stack 4 "statue" gadgets, then in the game, they just wait for players
  to leave then spawn 4 statues near van. They stack them up, then turn them
  in.  They get multipliers in money for stacking, which turns out to be MORE
  than it costs to purchase a new statue powerups.  So they could keep doing
  this basically increasing their money over and over without having
  to do much :-P  Kind of an infinite money glitch.

* Might be cool to have an option where you can't see how much money each
  person is making.  Maybe some server options for this type of thing, similar
  to Among Us server options, where you can tweak rules of the game.

Okay, we found some bugs, listing below!

* After playing a bunch of free-for-all, we started a new team game and the
  colors underneath didn't match the teams (seems like each person still had
  unique colors, couldn't tell which team we were on).  On the next team game
  it seemed like it was fixed.

* Sometimes there was a glitch where we couldn't get into the van.

* Also there was a glitch on one of the games (it may have been teams) where we
  were all in van at the end of the level, but the level didn't end.  Not sure
  what triggered this, I know someone placed revolving windows in the van area
  at the end.

* Sometimes items would drop from the stack even when stacked well.  This
  usually happened when there was a lot of chaos around.  I'm not sure if
  another player was trying to steal or not, so may have been that.

* When one person quits to go to lobby, and then re-enters the
  already-in-progress game, it seems their colors are messed up.  Trying a team
  game then has messed up colors too.

* At one point, one of the players got stuck in the walls and couldn't get out.

* Sometimes it seems that other player's lay down/stand up animations are
  reversed.  They would be sliding all over the floor while walking, and when
  knocked down their character would go into standing position.  They couldn't
  see this from their own view, just from other's views.

* One player could not change gadgets by clicking icons on bottom left while in
  the lobby area.

* Money in lobby seemed to stay in inventory when starting new game.

Bugs are expected since Alpha, so thought I would point out everything we noticed!

Thanks again for inviting us to play, looking forward to next update! This is a great
party game.

tHIS IS A SOLID GAME, GREAT JOB !! wE HAD A TON OF FUN PLAYING THIS, IT WAS HILLARIOUS.  i CAN IMAGINE THIS BEING A GREAT PARTY GAME, IN FACT WE MIGHT PLAY IT AGAIN WITH SOME OF OUR FRIENDS SOON BECAUSE WE LIKED IT SO MUCH.  tHE STACKING MECHANICS TAKE SOME TIME TO GET USED TO , BUT THAT'S WHAT MAKES IT FUN.  oNCE WE GOT USED TO THE MECHANICS, iT ACTUALLY MADE SENSE AND "FELT" RIGHT.  i THINK i'M ALMOST AT PRO LEVEL NOW ;-) 

bEING ABLE TO STACK EVERYTHING, INCLUDING PEOPLE AND CARS, MADE IT EVEN MORE HILLARIOUS.  i LOVE THE AESTHETIC OF THE GAME. 

oNE THING THAT i THOUGHT WOULD MAKE IT SLIGHTLY EASIER TO STACK WOULD BE IF THERE WAS A WAY TO TELL WHERE THE OBJECT WILL LAND ON TOP OF THE STACK.  i FOUND IT A BIT DIFFICULT TO GAUGE WHERE IN 3D SPACE THE TOP OF MY STACK ACTUALLY WAS - NOT SURE HOW TO SOLVE, MAYBE SOME SHADOWS OR DEPTH EFFECTS TO HELP THE PLAYER LINE UP THE TOP OF THE STACK WITH THE FALLING OBJECT?  tHAT IS JUST MY OPINION, TWO OF US PLAYED AND THE OTHER PERSON DID NOT FEEL THE SAME WAY ABOUT MY CRITIQUE - SO MAYBE IT ISN'T A BIG DEAL :-)

iT MIGHT BE GOOD TO HAVE BETTER DESCRIPTIONS OF ITEMS, BECAUSE WE WEREN'T SURE WHAT EACH ITEM WOULD DO. 

a FEW BUGS WE FOUND:

* sOMETIMES GOT STUCK IN A WALL WHEN i HAD STACKS.  tHIS HAPPENED DURING TUTORIAL.

* wHEN YOU THROW THE WOMAN IN THE POOL, SHE TELEPORTS BACK TO OUTSIDE OF THE POOL.

* i TRIED THE LIGHTNING ITEM, AND EXPECTED LIGHTNING, BUT INSTEAD IT DARKENED THE AREA.  mIGHT WANT TO CHANGE SYMBOL TO SOMETHING DIFFERENT TO MAKE IT CLEAR IT WILL TURN OFF LIGHTS AND NOT STRIKE LIGHTNING.

oTHER THAN THE MINOR BUGS, i KNOW THAT YALL ARE LOOKING TO POLISH MORE, AND WE ARE SUPER EXCITED!! lOOKING FORWARD PLAYING THE FINAL VERSION!!!

Hi! We got a chance to play the first demo over the weekend! This early access demo shows promise of a great game, and we are really looking forward to seeing how this game progresses! 

Here is some feedback from our playthrough!

Music: We really liked the music, on the opening title screen, the music matched the mood very well!

Dialogue: We can see there is a lot of depth in the dialogue!  One comment is, in the beginning of the game, it might be good to limit the dialogue to what is needed to simply "hook" the player in. Basically in beginning, dialogue should be clear and to the point about something interesting and relevant to that moment in order to lead into the game.  Once the player plays the game a bit and gets emotionally invested, then longer and more complex dialogue can be introduced; otherwise the player might quickly lose interest at the beginning if the dialogue is too long-winded so soon in the game.

Art: The pixel art was amazing! We love the style and aesthetic you are conveying, and it really adds to overall world building and "mood".  However, much of the beautiful detail and color is lost due to how dark it is.  For parts of scenes without a lantern, I think they should be a bit brighter, and for scenes with lantern maybe the lantern could have a larger radius.  If anything is "clickable", players should be able to see what they click on - for example, when the player clicks on the gates in the distance when the character was in the boat at the beginning, and the character makes an observation, we couldn't really see the gates that she was observing about.  Looking at your screenshots, it doesn't seem that dark, but we tried on two different computers and the areas with no light were pitch black.

The character animations and the horse / deer animations were amazing though, we are pretty impressed by that.

Inventory: We really liked the inventory mechanic!  We hadn't seen this before and think it's an awesome feature for adventure games instead of just a simple slot-based inventory.  It adds to the realism of the game.  I'm guessing maybe in future the bag might fill up and there may be no places for certain items?  Looking forward to seeing more games use this type of inventory system.

Puzzles: The puzzle elements were nice - the invisible ink on the letter was very clever.  

Tutorials: I think the tutorial for the lock picking should remain on the screen longer and accessible while picking the lock, and the tutorial should be a bit clearer with regards to switch to a different pin (it seems that one needs to use multiple keys to do so, but that wasn't clear in the tutorial).  Also the lock picking mechanic was a bit difficult to grasp - maybe start with a simpler picking, to build up the player's "picking skill", and then can use harder locks in the future?

Bugs: We got one crash during the game, while we were doing the first lock picking puzzle (image attached to this post).  I think this happened while we were doing lock picking and pressing ESC at the same time.  The other bug was after heating the letter to reveal the invisible ink message, if we put down the note in the room, we can't pick it up again, and we were stuck in that room (soft lock)

Overall, awesome work!!

Great work on this game, we played the pre-alpha and were loving it! The style of the art/music, the overall smoothness of the UI, and the depth of the different systems is very nice!

Overall I'm really looking forward to playing with some of the more advanced features, like organizing conferences, more developers working in the studio, etc.  We didn't get to play too much, but will be looking forward to playing more in the future and following development.

Here are some feedback from us as we played the game.  Some has to do with UI, maybe you already have plans for this, but just pointing out the top things that stood out to us!

* On the main menu, looks like the decorative symbols at the bottom are not all aligned up

* We love the quirkiness of the intro music and the character select screen dancing :-D

* During play we were a bit confused on what to do next.  Maybe this goes along with the UI / tutorial development? (which we know is not developed yet).  I think at first we didn't realize we could click the character herself to start the research, maybe a little UI indicator pointing to character might help during pre-alpha.

* Maybe some more helpful hints about game mechanics at beginning (I saw the tutorial is still being developed, that's ok!)

* Would be nice to have an idle-auto-train/idle-research mode.  Maybe you could direct the character on the tasks to do and they would automatically continue doing those tasks until the player tells them to stop or changes what they are doing. This way player wouldn't have to manually select each time (maybe something to think about).

* Loved the review system after completion of our first game. Felt like a real review system, and we were impressed by how good the game made us feel for getting some good reviews (our first game was a "porn / idle" game rated Teen lol, got 7.8 stars).

* Maybe text/words on some of the UI could be larger.

* We only got through development of one game, but I'm wondering what kind of new elements  will be added as the studio grows.  Such as more devs in the studio, a larger / better studio, things to decorate studio with, etc; giving the player new things to look at or play with during each game loop will keep it feeling fresh.  Maybe you have this already, we will just need to play some more to get to some of these features :-D

Great work, looking forward to following this more in the future and we will test again as new versions come out! 

We can post some screenshots on our upcoming devlog and will point readers to your itch.io for this game as well as your twitter!