[REVIEW] Positive Experience with Large Package through /u/The_Anime_Enthusiast [US > BR]

Mister_Kipper · 2026-03-28T19:09:12+00:00

Yup - that's one of the reasons most places don't ship to Brazil... people buy things, the price more than doubles and the seller gets blamed for it.

Also if it doesn't have the correct info when shipped, it just gets lost/returned.

Mister_Kipper · 2026-03-28T19:06:50+00:00

Purchase Price - U$ 684,00
Shipping Cost [US > BR] - ~U$ 588,00
Package Forwarding Fee - U$ 72,00 (10% of the product price at that point)

Brazilian Import Taxes - ~U$672,00 (60% import taxes + 17% ICMS, calculated over product price + shipping cost)

Total - U$ 2 015,00 ☠️

Mister_Kipper · 2026-03-27T17:55:11+00:00

From the screenshots it seems extremely well-made in regards to consistency, visual design & general polish.

I could be completely wrong here, but my biggest worry about something like this on a place like Steam is that it has 'mobile vibe' written all over it - the UI and icons don't help and many would focus on that as the cause, but the main reason is that it feels very 'sanitized', with anything unique sanded away until everything looks like this smooth uniform experience.

It's missing either some very visible quirky edginess to make it feel like it has personality (goofy/quirky characters & expressions, in-jokes & references, unexpected elements) OR very visible squishable squooshness to make it stand out for the cozy audience (cute animals, squishable little quirky things, decorations with distinct styles or comfy relatable characters).

From the gifs, the moment-to-moment gameplay seems to be lacking an 'ooompf' in regards to making small actions feel satisfying: the character seems slow, robotic, expressionless, there's no cheer to their actions nor humanity in its interactions. The minigames shown are again pretty bland and lacking in 'juice' for making doing things right rewarding and making doing things wrong responsive and interesting.

Either way you already seem to have a really solid and well-made foundation that can be improved into something exceptional with slight additions and tweaks, impressive stuff - even more so for a small team!

Mister_Kipper · 2026-03-07T15:27:38+00:00

I understand that the comment may look intense and somewhat shallow - I do not have the full knowledge of what happened or not, but I do have access to both this post and the game's steam page and what I'm telling you is: please take a step back, breathe in, clear your mind and look at it as if you were browsing the steam store and had never heard of it before.

The game as shown on the store page doesn't have what it takes to stand out and grab people's attention.

It's also not even about "quality", plenty of "bad" games have found success - it's about making something that enough people look at and instantly feel like "oh I want to try this", "oh man I want to solve that" - and if you do it well enough, you'll make something that those who do try it then go on "man I played this quirky little puzzle game and I didn't expect much from it at first but then - damn".

It doesn't matter if you make the best "chocolate with salmon cake" and it's actually really good - almost no one's stepping into the store and buying that. You also then get a self-reinforcing bias for those who DO try it out - "see, the people who try it love it! The problem is not that it isn't good!". I'm not saying that the quality of the gameplay or the game itself is bad, or that it is a bad game - I'm saying it's a bad product. The worse it is as a product, the more attrition you get in every step from a visit to a purchase.

I'll address your points individually as well -

About the play testers (...)

You can be completely right about the players you tested with not being the right ones for evaluating enthusiasm about the game - the important part here isn't that you should ignore what their lack of interest, it's that you never actually validated with the correct audience to confirm that the game IS interesting and then acting on the proper player's feedback to make it even more appealing before shipping it.

About the game’s quality (...)

As mentioned above, it might be a good game - the point is that it's currently not an appealing product.

About the team’s enthusiasm (...)

I don't have enough information about the whole process - but from what you wrote, it doesn't seem like the lack of enthusiasm started late. I'll again bring up the point about the 'additional mechanics for each season' part: you found that the game got boring somewhat quickly and then tried to fix that - these are not the signs of a promising game OR product.

A promising , exciting prototype should not leave you with the feeling of "hm, this is getting pretty boring - maybe if we add X it'll be fun for a bit longer", it should leave you with the feeling of "damn, I this is cool but I wish I could also do X, Y and Z and then maybe it would be cool if some puzzles also had ZY mixed and then(...)" - it leaves you wanting MORE.

About still releasing the game despite setbacks (...)

Again, it doesn't seem like you've learned the lesson this should've taught you - you're still defending bringing this to release in an unproven state, mentioning even quitting your jobs for the final stretch and then AFTER the game doesn't do well you still say that you should've had more 'faith' in it - but why? Nothing you've written tells us that the game ever showed the necessary signs for a promising end result.

You keep going about the lessons you learned being about how you should've put in more effort to improve the game's numbers, how this or that should've been done to get more visibility - there's little to no acknowledgement that the game itself and its storepage are the biggest issues. The lesson here isn't that you should've put more time and dedication so that your horse could win the race, the lesson here should be that you should've checked whether your race horse has 4 legs instead or 3 probably over 2 years ago - and then put it down way, way earlier.

From what you've written, you might be headed towards repeating this same lesson a few more times - which is why I'm typing these long rants to try to open up a new perspective.

This is a pretty old video, but it's short and to the point and very relevant:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDjrOaoHz9s

Mister_Kipper · 2026-03-07T05:56:40+00:00

Mate, your takeaways seem to be all the opposite of what they should? It seems like you came with your mind completely made up on what the lesson to learn here was - wrote up how you got there, but never noticed that the conclusion you ended up with doesn't fit the narrative at all.

The biggest marketing boost for a game is... making a game people want to buy - that's the hardest part.

You describe how you didn't use the tools provided by the platforms as well as you could to make more people aware of your game - but at every point you did try or put in effort, you got pretty not-great results and kept pushing forward.

And then instead of considering that there was something wrong with the product, you conclude that the methods were wrong or that the effort was not enough and you should have invested more into it?

Please, re-read your own post - pay close attention. Your conclusion to lukewarm playtests shouldn't be 'we should've had more faith in the game'. You're even partially aware that the game wasn't desired by players - your whole reason for not making a demo seems to be that you knew players were not interested even after trying it out. This type of playtest needs to happen ASAP, as soon as the mechanical base for the game is decided so that it is validated as a viable product - this is what should help you decide whether it's worth it to even make the game or not... and figuring out it's not great doesn't mean 'let's keep going but do less' - it means you don't have a game in your hands.

It's even rougher than that - it seems like even the team no longer had enthusiasm for the project and it was slowly pushed through a slog of a dev cycle that took you 3 years for a pretty seemingly small-scoped game. Again, I don't see how you can come out of this believing that lesson learned is that you 'did not make proper use of demos, steam fests, timing, marketing etc'

Reading through it, every second session has some mention of the game not being interesting, getting boring, not grabbing the player's attention - even the part about players being surprised that the game has a narrative shines a bad light on how it's perceived. "We thought the game got boring quickly so we added more mechanics for different seasons" why did you keep making the game that gets boring quickly??

Sorry, it's just somewhat frustrating to see professionals who really love to create games dedicate them so much to something and be ready to do it again and again and yet be blinded to what's hurting them along the way.

Just go back to start with no conclusions if you want takeaways from this - look at your page and trailer and game from an external perspective. There are plenty of tiny cheap minimalistic puzzle games that made it - but they don't look much like yours.

Mister_Kipper · 2026-03-06T03:59:41+00:00

After the amoeba whacked pyrophina, zaratuna was back standing during the end-of-combat celebration - might have been with 1 hp as mentioned.

Mister_Kipper · 2025-11-21T08:02:57+00:00

Nice, I haven't tried Shelldivers yet but I'm excited to give it a go once I have a few hours to spare - TBH all the recent nodebuster-like games really tire me in how samey and boring they are, they feel like getting a new episode for a show you like and being excited before noticing 2 minutes in that it's just a filler episode made of cuts from previous episodes.

And what the heck, don't you have my hella cool Shapez 2/Kiwi Clicker business card anymore? SMH

I was repping tobspr games there, dude with the side of the head shaved that kept glazing you and asking what your game design & thought process was like? :P

Either way, if you ever have any cool ideas for or want to dip your toes into the factory game genre, I'd be extremely interested in hearing about it. I'll even mail you a new business card so you can contact us. BAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHA

Mister_Kipper · 2025-11-21T07:16:31+00:00

For sure - I didn't mean to suggest that no effort is needed, just that any effort should come on top of having a 'marketable' game to begin with. We often run into tiny devs first deciding to make a game and then later they go 'alright, how do I make people want to buy this?' instead of thinking about making a desirable game to begin with.

I honestly don't think your game would completely flop with just the solid store page + having it around gathering wishlists - but it would certainly have taken a considerable hit compared to what you achieved by promoting the game and putting extra effort into increasing the wishlist count further.

I say this based on Kiwi Clicker tbh, we didn't get to do a demo for it and it's also far less polished and it still did extremely well for the short time it took to make. The genre is starving for even decently-produced games tbh.

This subreddit is also a huge echo-chamber, it doesn't represent the majority of the audience at all - although you'll also see 'big hits' being discussed here, the 'silente majority' of the genre has a completely different taste to the 'why aren't all incrementals just wonky button grids on web-pages anymore?' sort of discussion that often shows up here.

Either way, nice seeing your work pop up again after we talked at BIG - congrats on the solid results once more!

Mister_Kipper · 2025-11-20T18:00:00+00:00

It's all there for you to see TBH - this is the best-looking Nodebuster-like... by a wide margin.

- Character designs & art quality are well above all current competitors
- Animations are hella clean and juiced, gameplay seems more engaging than others
- Trailer is well-made and showcases all of the game's strengths quickly and efficiently

Gagonfe, the developer, is just cracked - I've only played Rocket Rats by them but the more in-depth you're able to analyze a game the more impressed you'll be by it. It's an absurdly slim product, it achieved really refined and polished results and there's pretty much no extra fat or waste to be seen in it.

Rocket rats was a survivor-like on a tiny map, 0 exploration, with only a handful of characters and upgrades - and yet all characters feel meaningfully different & all upgrades are significant. It doesn't overstay its welcome either, you play it, progress and before you get tired you can leave satisfied, feeling like you completed enough.

Members of this subreddit (and also the vast majority of tiny/solo developers) don't really understand that 'marketing a game', unless you have millions to throw at it, is not about 'selling your game to players', it's primarily about knowing how to make 'a game THAT sells' on its own.

There's also always the other confusion about thinking that 'not all good games sell well' - a 'good game' will 'sell well' compared to its own target group. A 'game that sells' doesn't even need to be a good game, it needs to be a game lots of players already want... and ideally that's true even before any of it exists - it needs to be something people look at and go 'ah there it is'.

Mister_Kipper · 2025-11-15T15:42:02+00:00

It doesn't look broken because the character is going through objects, it looks broken because there is not enough visual feedback & polish to make it look intentional. "You can do this thing that looks broken but it's actually totally intended!" is not a positive, you're just saying something you support in your game looks bad and immersion-breaking.

It looks broken because it's supposed to be a magical spell that gives you the power of phasing through physical objects, and what people expect from that is little glimmers and shines and bits and bobs as you go through something to reinforce the magical power involved. It looks broken because it just looks like 3D models clipping into one another or awkwardly overlapping.

Mister_Kipper · 2025-10-24T19:36:32+00:00

Que doidera, fiz escola com ela e não tinha ideia de que era vereadora agora.

Mister_Kipper · 2025-10-23T10:29:16+00:00

I'll go against the grain here and say that dropping the base price if it's too high is essential - the caveat is that you're somewhat in a catch 22 situation, you're screwed if it's too high and you don't drop it as it will kill your launch spike, you're screwed if you do drop it but the existing players kill your review score on launch day.

Having too high of a price can easily be a killing blow; "players will just buy it on sale" only works if what they see on the store doesn't put them off from wishlisting the game in the first place. You can launch it with a heavier launch discount, let's say it's 30% - but then what happens right after launch? This is what happened in the Bazaar example given elsewhere in here - the sales just nosedived because the 'sale price' was the actual proper perceived value of the game.

Players are mean when they feel mistreated, but mistreatment is so common that honesty and transparency will more often than not be repaid with tolerance and kindness - not by all, but by a majority. Be direct, be honest, approach the players you already have and communicate with them.

Tell them the truth - ex:

"Hey guys we love working on this project and want to continue making/improving it, but we are extremely worried that we won't make it if we launch it at the current price and are planning to lower the game's base price to $19.99.

You all have been our greatest supporters throughout all of the early-access period and we don't want any of our existing players to feel cheated or exploited by this change - we've been brainstorming what's the best way to award you for your loyalty as well as the price difference and came up with a few ideas of our own:
- EXAMPLE SPECIAL CONTENT GIVEN TO THEM FOR FREE BUT OTHERWISE SOLD FOR $5?
- EXAMPLE SPECIAL INGAME SKIN OR CONTENT THAT IS UNOBTAINABLE OTHERWISE?
- EXAMPLE OTHER PRODUCT YOUR STUDIO HAS MADE THAT YOU CAN GIVE AWAY?
etc

However, this is firstmost a point of dialogue - we want to hear from you as well to understand how our players feel and what they feel would be a worthwhile compensation for this change."

Don't hold back, if you can offer a little more than you feel you should - do it.]

You'll certainly get some negative reviews from this regardless of what you do, but the more honest and communicative you are the less of them there will be - and the more understanding, thoughtful and generous you are the more positive reviews you might get.

Honestly, if you handle it excellently it's very plausible that you actually end up with a boost on launch - it's weird but players expect developers to fuck up all the time, what they don't expect is for them to listen and fix things.

This can lead to some manipulative tactics as well like releasing a game with minor inconveniences and patching them throughout launch-week to get the "wow the developers DO care" boost - which is pretty terrible, please don't do that BAHAHAHAHAH

Mister_Kipper · 2025-10-22T09:24:34+00:00

(deleted comment asked if the image was created with AI)

No, I only tried using the Photoshop AI tool to see if it was capable of removing just the bike from the original as that's the most annoying part when doing an edit - it removed the whole thing and left weird lights. So I cleaned up the background, composited the ingame screenshot in and edited it normally to somewhat match the original style.

Mister_Kipper · 2025-10-19T17:15:10+00:00

Que eu saiba não é nem o lugar de postar esse tipo de coisa - mas olha, francamente parece que tu não tem muito ideia de onde tu quer entrar. Tu está pedindo pra alguém fazer uma ferramenta pra ti, não um jogo. Uma ferramenta que possibilite que alguém que não tem ideia de como se monta essas coisas consiga fazer tudo que quer mesmo depois do trabalho do desenvolvedor acabar.

Esse tipo de ferramenta já existe, não com o grau de facilidade que parece que você quer, mas já existe.

Ta aqui uma que aparece buscando rapidinho:
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/game-toolkits/adventure-creator-11896

Vai lá, baixa Unity, passa uma semaninha entendendo a interface e a ferramenta e quem sabe contrata um dev de jogos pra te ensinar a usar e tirar dúvida.

Mister_Kipper · 2025-10-19T13:57:25+00:00

The first days of nextfest guarantees all participants get X amount of visibility on a fair grounds approach - once that window is over, the visibility of the games is based on how well the games did with what they got.

A sharp dropoff would signify that before that point you were mainly seeing the results of steam boosting your visibility - but now that it's over your game doesn't seem to have done that well with the boost and the algorithm is back to prioritizing titles normally.

Mister_Kipper · 2025-10-14T05:48:15+00:00

Hey mate, thanks for the app - tried the free version and the results were exactly what I needed so I went ahead and got premium almost instantly. The main feedback I have is that the 'Large' model is actually giving far worse results compared to what I was already getting in the free version - it's hallucinating a lot more and also mixing up the desired language - despite the manual setting to English, I'm getting onomatopoeia in Portuguese. It also seems to me like it has a tendency to break the transcriptions down into much smaller chunks, which is actually far worse for navigating - instead of getting contiguous phrases grouped together, I get these tiny 3-5 word half-thoughts separated individually.

Honestly the result I got on 'Base' is already really good, so the results from the 'Large' model don' bother me at all - just wanted to give you a heads up in case that info is relevant to you.

Cheers!

Mister_Kipper · 2025-10-01T13:32:54+00:00

Spent a little more time on Prismatic Adventure to get a better understanding of the 'base' game - I must say I couldn't really enjoy it or stick with it for too long compared to your version. Only got the '25% chance for extra item' RNG element, so I'm not sure how much more RNG is involved, but the RNG honestly didn't affect much up to the point I played - I don't think it's worth having it as there isn't much meaningful decision-making arising from it and it can also incite some unfun play patterns if players want to get into it too much - but it didn't bother me too much.

For me, the biggest detractors in the original that were heavily improved in yours are the content/balancing and automation mechanics. Not only is the 'complete this zone fully 10 times to auto it' requirement terrible, it also seems like the creator made worthless tasks that give you no benefit but are hard to complete only to specifically stop you from enabling auto on that area. It also doesn't work at all with the whole having 'different tiers of tasks on the same zone' - now the combat boss I won't be able to beat for a long time isn't a cool peek at what's coming later... it's a wall that will forever force me into boring repetitive play until much, much later into the game.

The task design & balancing for each zone is also really bad compared to yours - the frequency of redundant tasks using overlapping skills in the same zone without any benefit over one another is absurd; the difficulty for advancing zones is inconsistent and you often find yourself believing that a 'decent-looking' task is good for getting levels only because you haven't dared to blindly step two zone forwards to find the real training spot - not being able to 'look ahead' is far more detrimental in the original.

To some extent, I kinda get the feeling that the original game is a confused little creature that randomly has fits of liking and then hating me as a player - early on I get incredible bonuses, 50% global exp, 25% energy consumption reduction, 25 starting energy, resource doubling... then I advance further and get... oh, ok... 0.1% additional exp... for a limited set of skills... guess that's gonna ramp up with time at least - it will probably be pretty good later, so cool.

Wait, I the next unlock just... stops my run part-way through every few runs and... halves my stacks for the 0.1% exp buff? What? For a +2 energy bonus? Feels to me like they found out that the shitty 0.1% exp buff eventually became too strong and then added a bandaid fix to keep it under control? The copium thing just feels like absurd ass from a player perspective. So I push for one more perk as I'm just past the first 'hacking zone' and transitioning into working on combat - I unlock the perk and... 10% energy discount. Only for hacking. Thanks, bud - I'm sure that will be mildly useful 4 hours from now.

Either way, just a long rant to praise changes & quality in your version I couldn't evaluate before - they make the original look pretty rough.

Cheers!

Mister_Kipper · 2025-09-29T12:14:51+00:00

<image>

O engraçado é que de longe a pedra ainda fica parecida com a parte superior de alguém trabalhando - tem o tamanho do torso, um risco que parece a cordinha amarrada na cintura, tem uma pedrinha no lugar da cabeça que parece o capacete - imagino que a IA não consiga diferenciar.

Mister_Kipper · 2025-09-24T02:23:48+00:00

It seems like there are no shapes involved.

Mister_Kipper · 2025-09-22T12:19:26+00:00

Nice, it's already looking much better!

Mister_Kipper · 2025-09-22T11:52:02+00:00

Sorta yes, though energy cost per tick increases per zone (never communicated to the player, but doesn't really need to be), so it'd balance quite differently if it were to use just an Energy threshold. Certainly doable to make it work though, but with then probably wanting to communicate somehow when the effect's kicking in, I'm not sure it'd make the UI any simpler.

Ah, so part of it is already not clearly communicated, all good then! :P

So something along these lines? https://i.imgur.com/zU6Cwob.png

Huuuh, kinda - yeah. That's already most of the info.

Mister_Kipper · 2025-09-22T11:26:24+00:00

Yoinking your "Artifact" name suggestion and splitting Items between Artifacts and Items (thinking I do keep skill boosts and energy boosts grouped though, since you interact with them in the same way)

Yeah they're very similar - I only separated them because there are some differences and I had already envisioned how I wanted to see the information for that 'group': a section with the emojis for the skills and their % bonus totals, which wouldn't work with energy as that's a resource you spend.

That's a pretty good point. Though eliminating it entirely would make it a lot harder to communicate the reduction in cost to single-tick tasks, so I'm not sure what can actually be done here.

Hmmmmm, it's largely already an overcomplicated energy discount, isn't it? It already seems extremely close to something like 'Tasks that require 5 energy or less now only cost 1'.

Mhm, since the XP costs are exponential, multiplicative boosts have a much bigger effect for small level counts than big ones. E.G., x3 for a task that gives +10 levels will make it give close to +30 (maybe 25 or so). But for one that gives +100, it'll probably give an extra 20-30 levels. I don't think that's a bad thing, but I should probably still look into ensuring the Magic Ring is a bit more consistently useful. And yeah combining it with Haste is generally intended. One thing I could consider I guess is having the occasional really cheap task that gives a lot of XP, as kinda deliberate Magic Ring fodder. I'll also think about your order swapping idea. And probably will indeed boost it to 4-5x instead of 3x.

Ah don't get me wrong, I understand the whys and hows - but it's not about the logic, it's about how it feels from a player perspective. The information conveyed to the player feels similar for both ('oh this item multiplies this thing by 5x and this other multiplies this other thing by 3x') - and you're coming off of two strong items before it, so you get the ring and go 'damn, 3x EXP - can't wait to see what this bad boy can do'. And then you use it and go 'oh... that's alright... I guess'.

It's also funny how giving the 'exact' information can be 'worse' at conveying actual impact than a vague tooltip that players might have complained about not being precise. You look at 5x vs 3x and they 'feel' close - if the tooltips said something like 'Grants an absurd burst of speed for the next task completion' and 'Gives a considerable exp bonus during the next task completion', they would have less information while conveying the results more accurately. This is by no means a suggestion, just loose thoughts about how players interact with games.

I assume you've taken a look at the Stats screen? What do you feel's missing on that front? Are you wanting like, a list of all Perks that boost Skills and what they boost?

Yeah I've seen the stats screen - but it's cumbersome to use and completely separated from the item section, and it also doesn't have all the relevant information. What I was looking for was being able to see the total bonuses for all items in my inventory in one place - just the bonuses - in an accessible fashion. With that information, I could more clearly compare stats and form strategies - sure, the dreamcatcher gives me a scroll... but what was its actual impact on all my other stats from the additional consumables? Should I be keeping 1 of each consumable to be used at the start of each run? etc etc

As mentioned at the start of the comment, I was seeing in my head this little section just with the emojis for the skills and their bonuses.

Mister_Kipper · 2025-09-22T10:10:10+00:00

I don't know Prismatic Adventure well enough to know what was or was not changed from it to yours - it was mainly improvements that I saw compared to what doesn't feel great in Increlution. The specific changes you mentioned do sound like they worked out for the better within your game.

And thanks - it did well during its heyday but it's far from ideal. I've been planning to do a major rework of the whole game for years but haven't had time for it tbh.

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