Apologies for taking so long to reply! I've been thinking about this for the past week.
It's incredibly frustrating when an interesting-looking indie game is impossible to play. It's tough to blame the creator for "poor quality control," since they're just one person, but still. There are easy workarounds to common issues.
In the case of this game in particular, it would have been nice if the developer had put the basic game controls on the Itch.io page. Games like this usually use the "x" key or the spacebar as the action button, and it took me more than a minute to figure out that this game uses the "enter" button instead. Also, I think it would have helped if doorways were indicated with a dot or floating triangle to help people who aren't used to this style of graphics.
Thankfully, I've been seeing some recent discussion in indie gamedev circles on Bluesky about this. Now that Itch.io has become slightly more mainstream, you can't just assume a prospective player has 10+ years of experience playing your specific type of game. Amen to that.
For me personally, it's indie FPS games I always end up giving up on. I'm not stupid; I could just use some help navigating the space at the beginning.
Sorry for the long reply, but I wanted to thank you for giving this game a shot based on my post. That's so cool to hear. Seriously, thank you!
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It's incredibly frustrating when an interesting-looking indie game is impossible to play. It's tough to blame the creator for "poor quality control," since they're just one person, but still. There are easy workarounds to common issues.
In the case of this game in particular, it would have been nice if the developer had put the basic game controls on the Itch.io page. Games like this usually use the "x" key or the spacebar as the action button, and it took me more than a minute to figure out that this game uses the "enter" button instead. Also, I think it would have helped if doorways were indicated with a dot or floating triangle to help people who aren't used to this style of graphics.
Thankfully, I've been seeing some recent discussion in indie gamedev circles on Bluesky about this. Now that Itch.io has become slightly more mainstream, you can't just assume a prospective player has 10+ years of experience playing your specific type of game. Amen to that.
For me personally, it's indie FPS games I always end up giving up on. I'm not stupid; I could just use some help navigating the space at the beginning.
Sorry for the long reply, but I wanted to thank you for giving this game a shot based on my post. That's so cool to hear. Seriously, thank you!