Hey guys! I was hoping to get some playtesting and feedback on my game Botany Earth.
I’ve been working on it on and off for almost two years now, and I’d really love to hear what people think. The game isn’t finished, so once you reach the second level, you’ll quickly realize there isn’t really anything to do yet. It’s a pretty large space, but it’s essentially the end of the current build.
I’d love feedback on the journey up to that point, it should take around 10–15 minutes to play through.
If anyone has the time to give it a try and share some feedback, I’d really appreciate it. Thanks so much!
Hi there! I just played a bit. Here are some of the good and bad parts in my opinion.
Really good:
Nice and soft music.
Nice particle effects and ambient.
Nice visuals (pixel graphics and shaders).
Everything visual feels really nice in a way that it looks professional and really raises my interest.
Nice idle animations.
Very nice pop-up letters on interactable objects.
Very nice that the game starts with text and thus introduces story from the start, that raised a lot of interest in progressing.
Can be improved:
Music volume bar in settings not lowering volume.
Music playing even when tabbing out of the game’s web version (is that an itch-io setting?)
For a game that doesn’t use the mouse pointer, I would hide it permanently as default.
Jumping is hard when not used to the controls, very hard for me to even jump up the first rocks (very hard, I tried a lot).
Jumping feels very clunky and hard to master.
Dying is too easy and sets me back too far (I would like to not have to run through the same region over and over again).
Interactable UI a bit small if one doesn’t have a huge monitor at home.
Same with the overall game screen: most of what I see on the screen is not important to me and it makes smaller than it needs to be. Stuff could be bigger and the advantage would be that it could reach people with small screens.
Unexpected death traps set me back far (falling through the ground). Hard to realize where holes in the ground are, because it is all just black.
Default sound effects seem a bit too loud for the default music loudness.
The first three things I would improve in this order:
Make jumping feel comfy and rewarding.
Respawn not outside of cave, but immediately within proximity of danger, so that I can just have another go immediately. (I know you have new texts on death, but there could be still a life system where you only get the full death every 5 failed tries or so).
Work on general level design: introduce one concept at a time (first jumps, then floating platforms, then moving bricks. then deadly crevices, then slimes, then puzzles based on those things). Design your levels based on what the player would experience, not like creating something beautiful, like a painting, but like a puzzle or a story. Use your reset points to aid the level design.
I pushed the brick to the wrong direction here (see image below), but I was a bit tired running into the cave for the 10th time and jumping was very hard for me. So that was when I stopped, but I would really love to play more of this game once it improves – as seen with my humble opinion of course.
Thank you so much Alex! This is very valuable to me, you brought up very important points. I will implement these changes and let you know! I agree on pretty much everything you said and I’ll work on improving the intro part of the level to have a more “tutorial section” to it, and re-work the respawn point so it’s not too far away. I really like the jump but it is new and can be hard to ‘get’ but regardless I do want it to feel responsive and intuitive (comfy and rewarding). I feel if I can efffectively teach the jump in the intro part of the game then it can click the rest of the way! Honestly, thank you!
Tips: think to azerty users like me, because your controls aren’t matching correctly for such users. Arrows are also not working to move the character (I’m on a Macbook Air M1).
Also, I, J and K keys aren’t working for us and we don’t know which keys to use instead
Adapt your screen to smaller screens could also be something good I think. As a 13,3" user on the MBA, all the screen of your game can’t be displayed even if my resolution is 2560x1600 pixels (screenshot attached to give you an idea of what I see, the bottom is cropped). That’s probably can be easily changed on the itch’s setup page for the game I think
Thanks for letting me know! Man, I don’t think I even know their was such a thing as azerty or qwerty keyboard layouts. Did you try using a controller by chance? I have it setup to work with controller too but sometimes on the Web version it doesn’t work properly.
I think if you hit the ‘full screen button’ on that screenshot you would see the full game on your screen. But you’re right, it looks gigantic, I can adjust that on the itch setup page. Thank you for taking the time to leave a comment!
