First: Thanks for playing the demo! It means a lot to me to see people playing my game!
That said, I got a bit of feedback and while I have not managed to get it all in, I tried improving a few things - also using the telemetry data that some players thankfully shared with me. More about that at the end of the post.
The game has tooltips now for several elements in the game:
When hovering the odd numbers on top, it is also now much more informative what it all means:
Hopefully that will help players to get started.
I noticed in the telemetry that most players stopped playing at the end of chapter 1. However, there are a few levels in chapter 2 that can be played in the Demo as well! So here is now a chapter finished celebration that leads the player to the next chapter:
Most players (who have shared statistics) have a fairly good performance of well over 50fps. But some player PCs are struggling and got me looking into potential optimizations and also benchmarking. When the game performs badly, it will ask now if it should do a benchmark that can be sent to my telemetry server. Here is how the test is looking like
Spoilered above, but that is another thing I started working out last week: Adding sheep to the game. I want to use them in puzzles for solving tasks; bringing or herding sheep to different places or shearing them. I think these would make a fine addition to the game in terms of cuteness:
As mentioned above, I have now a few statistics. Around 40 players shared their stats (Thank you :)) and it shows that the first chapter is taking players around between 40 and 80 minutes to solve. This is quite a bit more than I expected and I guess I have to keep the puzzles more simple for a longer time. This remains the greatest challenge for me so far: Estimating how difficult a level is for a player.
So that sums up this quite active week - thank you everyone who played my game, I am really happy to see people enjoying something I have built. I will keep updating the demo with improvements, but I will also continue building the content and levels for the release version. And maybe there will be one or two extras added to the demo, so stay around :)