New update, nice!
The game still has issues but it is a great improvement over the first version.
- The notice to go to the lab when you have no unit is great! It still lets you explore the other menus and doesn't hold your hand, but it's a solid reminder for what to do first.
- In the Lab, the Breast and Type have active arrows and reset other settings despite their value not changing. It would be nice if arrows would get disabled at their min/max value.
- Creating the first unit feels complex. There are lots of stats to pay for and the player can afford all of it, it leads to questions about how to manage your money. Should you make 2 maxed-out Small-breast Blueberry? Or should you make 6 or 4 with lower stats? The player does not yet know what stats they need to pay for.
* I like how the Blueberry is the only available juice at the start. I think it would be more friendly if most stats were locked at first and would unlock after you are familiar with what they are used for. And a locked stat does not need to be at its minimum! Milk Production could be locked at 4 and unlocking it lets you reduce it to pay less!
- I like the removal of the Requests. There is not enough Trainer features to make it interesting.
- I like the removal of the 365 days to repay a debt. There's not enough content for the game to last that long yet.
- Once you have your units, the gameplay quickly becomes stale:
- - Milking units is not rewarding. You get 1 of 50 possible items requested in Contracts. If you get a matching contract you get 1 Client's worth of money for 2 days worth of milking, in the best case I noticed.
- - Serving Clients is not engaging. You choose which unit serves the client, but that decision only impacts which units are milked and which spend energy fucking. Energy management is rarely an issue since units can fuck 3 times per day at maximum and you get the full reward as soon as you cross the 50% threshold.
- * Serving Clients will naturally become more engaging when Experience is used for something, when you might want to spend more energy on a client to get more experience.
- * having different effects based on the chosen unit would make serving Clients more engaging. One unit could increase the reward, another could produce low quality Juice when fucking, another could recharge Milk when serving a client instead of every day.
- - Contracts are not rewarding once you start upgrading the lab. The initial contracts for Blueberry 1-2 star are satisfying but as soon as you you upgrade the lab and get more Juice types, the contracts start asking for more concurrent juices it requires more investments to have high and low qualities of enough juices to have a chance to complete a contract. At the same time the contracts become less rewarding per unit sold.
- - The only things you can do with money are buying upgrades, paying for STDs and creating new units. Creating a base unit takes ~7 Clients worth of money, creating a good unit takes ~30, creating the best unit takes ~70.
- * The player needs goals they can work towards. A good unit after grinding ~30 clients is too slow.
- STDs are not interresting, they just steal your money. Either you lose money at unit creation to prevent them, or you take the chance to have the unit taken hostage until you pay a ransom to roll a dice and maybe get the unit back. If you are too poor to pay the unit dies, effectively stealing the unit's cost from you. In other games STDs usually offer a choice: do you want to pay money to get rid of it, or do you accept a temporary reduced stat / disabled team member / inability to do certain actions. In some game the STD is not fixeable, but you have options for what to do while your unit is disabled. Here as they are now they just punish you for being poor and unlucky / not knowing the value of STD Resistance / not knowing how much reserves to keep, it is strictly punishing for new players learn this hidden cost.
Suggestions:
- Lock most of the attributes in the Lab initially, so the starting unit is appropriate to carry the player trough the learning process.
- Make a separate Upgrade menu for the Lab that uses Juice instead of money
* this creates natural goals for the player to work towards
* this gives new uses for Juice
* this streamline the progression of the player: you can only make 4-milk 1-star Blueberry Bunnies until you make your first Blueberry juice, You need a Peach unit to unlock Grapes and Apple, you need some 2-star Juice to unlock 3-star units...
- Use Experience for something. A simple feature would be a list of perks you can buy once each that increases the unit's stats.
- Disable STDs. They are not fun and there are other systems to improve/put in place before fixing STDs.
I think the post that prompted this reaction was trying to make a joke about the game title and failed hard.
Currently the game is free and has a Patreon and coffee icons in the start menu. It is not asking for patronship, gating content for non-Patron or even delaying public release. It is minimalist, it's accessible for people that would look for them and dismissable for people who are not. It is not a cause for calling you greedy, they are just wrong.
I feel like you are giving them too much credit by overreacting? Lets ignore the trolls.
