Version 0.0.2 Is Live!

I've been getting some great feedback from the players, and I've decided to hotfix a few common points brought up in that feedback. There are certainly other updates that I plan to make during the alpha's lifespan, but these updates were both easy to implement and high-impact, when it comes to player experience.

Balance Updates

The original costs were way too high, and the player's income was growing far too slowly. So, to do something about that, I fixed a bug where the player's income wasn't properly doubling when buying upgrades. This certainly helped, but it wasn't the whole solution. Cuts for upgrade costs across the board were in order. Most species had all upgrades specific to that species reduced in base cost. I think the scaling itself was OK - the base was just starting out too high.

Time reduction upgrades were also reworked. Interns not clicking fast enough was a big problem, and I suspect the way that they were scaling was the main issue. They were scaling linearly, effectively clicking .2 seconds faster every time you buy an upgrade. This might have worked if the upgrade growth rate was shallow enough, but it just wasn't working out. So, instead, I made it work more like the the growth curve for price upgrades. Now, each upgrade cuts the time between clicks in half. This should front-load some of the time reductions, and make the early game go a lot faster.

I also decided to go back and apply a similar logic to upgrades on incubation and breeding times. They don't scale as quickly, only reducing the wait time by about 30% per upgrade. But, it was definitely necessary to make things feel better to play.

One upgrade that really helped make the early game a lot less tedious was the click bonus upgrade. Moving the "double your clicks" effect back from $500 to $200 really helped delay the inevitable slowdown, and will hopefully help somewhat with the intern problem as well.

I think, numbers-wise, this is a decent place to be. As time goes on, I'm probably going to make more subtle adjustments, but completely re-writing growth curves is not something that I anticipate doing going forward.

Mobile-Friendliness Updates

I was pleasantly surprised at the number of people playing on mobile, but unpleasantly surprised that they all had similar issues. So, to help them out, I made a few changes to the UI that will hopefully make things a bit easier for them.

At the forefront was a bump in text size. A lot of the text, I was able to bump up to 16 pt. or more without causing visual issues. The major offender here are the upgrade buttons, but I think as time goes on, I'll be able to bump that size up again. At this point, it's a bit of a verbosity problem, not necessarily a design problem. Most of the problem upgrades are species-specific, and have the species name in the name of the upgrade. But, as I start giving upgrades individualized names, I think the amount of text will be smaller, and I can bump the size up again at that time.

Unfortunately, some of these updates were supposed to be mobile-specific, but the game cannot properly detect the OS of the device it's being played on. I suspect this might be due to the game being played in the browser. Maybe itch.io runs it in an environment that simulates a desktop?

One of these changes was to make the scroll bar bigger. And, while that change is most likely not being implemented properly, it is now possible to scroll using a swipe gesture. I found out that some of the buttons weren't configured properly, and they were stopping any kind of swipe gestures. I have found it kind of annoying that scrolling seems to take priority, so sometimes buttons don't want to click properly.

However, I think the "swipe to scroll" is a more intuitive way to navigate the menu on mobile, and I hope the mobile users would agree.

Misc.

I added an easier way to view the version number after the intro screen. I figure it might be wise to assume the player doesn't immediately write the version number down after viewing the title screen. So, asking for the version number in the feedback/bug report form should be a much more reasonable request, now that you can view it any time from the options menu.

I've also fixed a few miscellaneous bugs that I noticed during testing. People didn't point them out, but I figured they were low-effort and impactful enough that it was worth putting them in the build.

Future Changes

I did want to address some of the remaining issues with the build. I want to add a filter to the upgrades menu. Some players have expressed that they don't find breeding to be particularly useful, as it doesn't do anything to make you progress faster (yet). So, I wanted to let the player toggle which upgrades that they want to focus on, so hopefully that'll reduce the need for scrolling as much.

But, with the scrolling issue fixed, I felt that this change could wait, and the number rebalance needed to be out the door ASAP.

I also want to move the text size changes to the options menu, if I can't get the code to work that's supposed to detect mobile devices. That way, at least players who are on smaller devices have an option they can turn on if the text is still too small.

I'm not sure exactly when I'll get around to those features, because I am mainly focused on art assets while I collect more feedback, so hopefully that's taken care of the "game-breaking" issues for the time being.

Additionally, I just wanted to say thank you to anyone who played and left feedback. I hope the initial experience wasn't too rough, and I hope you stick around to see where this goes!