Sprytewood

I really had a blast with it I must say.
I've played a bunch of demos especially in the last two years and it shows that you've already put a lot of effort into it. It plays like a game that is serious about what it wants to be. I love the atmosphere you're creating and like I said I'm a fan of the art style. The design of the sprytes is just lovely and I think in general you're very consistent with your art be that in the menus, the environment or the character design. Also loved the humor in the dialogue and that you have a weather system(rain<3). Farming was pretty nice too. Love the feedback sounds and visuals you have and the music in the background. Nothing stood out to me as jarring or anything. I think it really is lovely and cozy so far.

I still have a bit of feedback that I jotted down while playing.
As a disclaimer: I played with mouse cause I don't have a working controller right now and I realize you said controller would be better so I won't go into mouse controls.

1. The font was slightly hard to read for me initially
2. Absolutely in love with the bag interior
3. I closed the game and restarted it after talking to the skull the first time which resulted in the skull being there every day and me being able to restart the conversation and collect an inventory full of skulls.
4. I couldn't find the hostile sprytes the skull was talking about because they were covered by trees. I ran around the entire map searching for them and then saw something orange peek out so I found them.
5. The environment boundaries are a bit hard to read for me as they are the same color as some of the tree trunks.
6. The sprytes are really cute but slightly distracting when farming. It would be cool if they could maybe stray away a bit from you? I don't know what the best solution here would be honestly but they often cover the tile I'm using for farming especially when exploring environments so I can't see if I've put the seeds down for example or what I'm using the scythe on. It also feels slightly scary that they stay close when you chop down trees. I always feel like hurting the the sprytes.
7. I went on a rainy day to discover the deeper woods and the lilac fog that marks the entrance was a lot less visible than on a sunny day. I didn't notice that it was there at all and only knew where to go cause I read what the skull said (which we all should but I bet there's people skipping through)
8. I think I saw somewhere that you'll be doing an overhaul of the combat so I won't say much about it other than when I understood it it was fun and I really liked that you could always run away from the sprytes if you didn't feel like engaging in combat.
9. The way to the other forest felt quite tedious for me personally. The environment is pretty vast so it would be nice if you could port yourself via the crystals or if things were slightly closer together.

I think that was all. I'm really looking forward to seeing this develop further and to of course play it one day. Keep up the amazing work <3

Hey!

I enjoyed the game, the art style is cute, relaxing, and inviting. Monster taming and farming sim is also always a combination that hooks me :D
The combat is very interesting, I really like the potential of the risk-reward of drawing sharbles and am intrigued to see what other strategy / options I will have! My first strategy was to just pull as much as I could, getting closer to the limit but that always backfired. I won the first fight by basically overloading every turn haha.

It took me a while until I understood the UI for overload though. Initially, I thought the number was the indicator and that I wasn't supposed to go over 100. The diamonds are very small and the particles floating around have the same shape and color as the filled overload units so I didn't notice at first that something was changing. I got it eventually, but I would suggest making the bars, which seem to be integral to the combat system, standing out a bit more / easier to read.

Additionally, already having sharbles with different effects might be a bit much to learn at once, in my opinion. Figuring out how the drawing works, overload and damage, that there's a bar for each spryte, is already quite a bit to learn so I think just starting with a bag of basic identical sharbles could help avoid overwhelming new players? Then let the player add additional ones a bit later once they have figured out the basics. 

I'm not sure if I had broken the game somehow but I had a feeling that I did something wrong at some point. There were no other wild sprites or battles beyond the first one. The skull explained to me how the farm and tool works and then nothing else seemed to continue? I'm not sure if that was the end of the alpha already. Also, going back to the skull started the initial dialogue again and I got the skull in my inventory a second time :D

Generally, like the direction and am excited to try more!

This was so fun!!

I was playing on Windows 11 with a screen resolution of 2560 x 1600. 

I was able to plant and sleep and I triggered a battle once but never encountered a battle after that? I also accidentally fled from that first battle so that might have impacted something, haha. 

I really liked how the trees decreased in opacity when you were behind them and I loved seeing my little buddies follow me around. :) 

I noticed that I could see some blue screen underneath the art in the upper right most part of the map, but I know I have a very odd resolution which might be the cause of that. 

I liked your writing! The skull was very funny, heehee. Can't wait to see this game bloom! :D