For sure, I'd rather get actionable feedback we can use to improve the game than empty praise. Especially since we still have time to fix things!

But that has its downsides. I'm grateful for the Iron Pineapple feature, it was good feedback that put a lot of eyes on the project. But it's a bummer seeing a content creator you respect not having a great time with your game because you played it too safe. Got some things to reflect on, I suppose.

Ultimately you can theory craft whether or not a design will work until the cows come home, but you're not gonna know until you put it in front of players to watch what they do.
We tried to make Mouseward a bit easier to market than our last project, and thankfully the wishlists reflect that so far.

I always default to making stuff I'd want to play because that's just the lens through which I view game design, haha.
It's a bit trickier when you're trying to make a living off of indie dev though, gotta meet your audience somewhere in the middle.

I've noticed that people seem to understand what Mouseward is going for pretty immediately, whereas Void Sols could take a bit of playtime to finally click.
However, Mouseward is also a bit more by the book in terms of game design at times. I'd like to inject a bit more weirdness into it as we go 😆

Casual compared to Dark Souls anyway, it'll still be challenging 😆

While we fully intend to let the speedrunners have their fun, our demographic definitely leans a bit more on the casual side, haha.
I think there's some light touch changes we can make that will add up to more than the sum of their parts.

Good news everyone! The entire game is now a Beaver Bother-like!

I'm putting my foot down on obnoxious timed minigames though. Collectathons can keep that one, I don't want it 😆

We can definitely replace a few of our more combat/ambush centric encounters with some light platforming/puzzle solving as a palette cleanser. I'd also like to add in more ways to interact with the environment using the bow, just haven't gotten to it yet in the early alpha demo.

Not just as a means to an end either, being genuinely interested in other people is a more fulfilling way to live imo.

Being an active listener will get you anywhere. People wanna feel heard.

Seriously though, you guys absolutely killed it. Banger game @lukathemouse.bsky.social @alexstrook.bsky.social

This bulb in the east district was my white whale though, lmao. I shoulda known that being a Good Videogame, there would've been a hint system for cleanup later on. But my dumbass ran around in circles for like an hour before giving up and coming back later 🙃

Me with the base stats of Pokemon (which isn't even useful information because you still have to do a bunch of weird math to get numbers that communicate anything other than vibes)