[Project] Monsters and Medicine - Now on Steam; releasing in September
Monsters and Medicine is a puzzle game where you are trying to build your own hospital while diseased patients are knocking at the door.
In Monsters and Medicine, you are playing the role of a hospital administrator, trying to build and grow your hospital quickly and efficiently to deal with the ever increasing number of patients lining up every morning. To do this, you will have to strategically build up your hospital in order to address what you deem to be your most pressing concern. Each morning, patients will queue up outside your hospital and try to find a place inside to be cured. However, if one of them can't find a bed they'll stop and wait, and everyone behind them will have to wait as well. So do you try and optimise your hospital for one type of disease and treat the pesky patient that will hold up your queue yourself? Or do you build your hospital to treat as broad a number of diseases as possible and sacrifice greater capacity and efficiency?
Steam Launch:
We've updated the game a bit since the Humble launch, and it's now on Steam!
Here's a link to the comment about the coming Steam launch: http://makegamessa.com/discussion/comment/48996/#Comment_48996
Play online: http://clockworkacorn.com/games/monsters-and-medicine/flash/
Note that this post has been updated to be more in line with the current build.
In Monsters and Medicine, you are playing the role of a hospital administrator, trying to build and grow your hospital quickly and efficiently to deal with the ever increasing number of patients lining up every morning. To do this, you will have to strategically build up your hospital in order to address what you deem to be your most pressing concern. Each morning, patients will queue up outside your hospital and try to find a place inside to be cured. However, if one of them can't find a bed they'll stop and wait, and everyone behind them will have to wait as well. So do you try and optimise your hospital for one type of disease and treat the pesky patient that will hold up your queue yourself? Or do you build your hospital to treat as broad a number of diseases as possible and sacrifice greater capacity and efficiency?
Steam Launch:
We've updated the game a bit since the Humble launch, and it's now on Steam!
Here's a link to the comment about the coming Steam launch: http://makegamessa.com/discussion/comment/48996/#Comment_48996
Play online: http://clockworkacorn.com/games/monsters-and-medicine/flash/
Note that this post has been updated to be more in line with the current build.
Comments
After a while, I picked a seed that gave me an intermediate level puzzle, and tried to beat my first score. I found this a lot more fun than just playing the random levels. It's actually trickier than it seems to find a good strategy. Just placing rooms randomly gave me a decent score, and then I toyed with various basic strategies - dealing with the first patient in the queue next, preparing for large groups of one colour, maximizing the colours covered by booster squares, etc. It took me about 10 tries to beat the first score I got.
Will feedback :) Coooool :)
1. Right now it's more like a numbers game than a hospital game - the art may have something to do with it.
2. But also, theme doesn't come through the mechanics entirely - like, there's no urgency (patients don't die or get pissed if they wait, etc), there's no budget.
3. It's too easy to just maximise the tile you have the least of and go from there.
4. You can't lose, I think that's a big thing to motivate the player. I understand you can't balance it perfectly yet, but I guess I'm advocating more a hospital sim-esque type game than a strict puzzle game.
5. Seeing all the pieces and having access to any and all of them in one go makes it very easy. I think the surprise of tetris-like deployment may make this more interesting.
6. It has potential! :D
I notice that patients seem to be put into the room closest to the lobby, even if there's a room with a higher cure rate available.
Also, I'd like to see different diseases needing different number of turns to cure, diseases that can get worse if the patient waits too long, patients that continuously arrive throughout the game, and emergencies, where a patient needs to be treated right now or they die. Death is always useful as part of a lose condition.
When you get round to adding graphics, I'd like something to indicate the area of effect of booster rooms when I'm placing them. Also , cure rate and capacity boosters need to be visually different.
Also, your next build needs "new game" and "replay with same seed" buttons when the game ends.
Adding some sense of urgency, either on a per-patient basis or on a per-game basis, should give some sense that the game is more of a hospital game, we will have to try out a few ideas here.
Adding some sense of randomness might also make it much less of a puzzle game, which could be good, but not necessarily so. We will probably play with a few ideas like adding an action to "draw" more tiles, or having a more tetris-like selection.
Currently the patients just go to the room of a matching color that was built first and has an open space. In the future this will definitely be tweaked (just going to the room with the highest cure rate might be sufficient).
Making the diseases more interesting is something we have discussed, but we may want to add another mechanic to make it more interesting. For example, if the patients also generate some dirt (or ambient illness) when cured, then both this and the time to cure can be adjusted; so one disease might take long to cure but not release much dirt, while another might be very quick to cure but release a load of dirt (and potentially clog up the rest of the hospital if not dealt with).
Flash build: http://clockworkacorn.com/games/monsters-and-medicine/flash
There is a help button with a README in the bottom right. Note that sometimes you need to refresh the flash build if the text doesn't show. The windows build is quite unstable. We are looking into this temperamental behaviour.
Also, we have drawn up a few questions we'd like feedback on if possible:
1. Do you have an idea for a title for the game?
2. Do you think we should re-theme the game? Aliens? Archaeology? Process line management? Anything else?
3. What kind of graphic style do you think would fit the game? Top down? Isometric? Fixed-perspective? 3D?
4. Do you feel as if your action meaningfully determine the success of a level? Does the outcome feel predetermined?
5. Do you prefer to have a lot of Booster rooms, or a lot of patient wards? How strong is this preference?
6. Do you ever manually cure patients (click on them)? Do you do it when they are in a room? Or in the queue?
7. Do you often draw tiles? Do you like the way it currently works?
8. Do you feel like you have enough potentially viable decisions every turn?
9. Do you like the current difficulty of the game? Does the difficulty curve within a game make sense?
10. Is there some sort of functionality you feel is missing, or do you have any other general comments?
OK the instinctive "don't-read-anything" me was pretty confused for a while, but I think that's valuable info anyway :P
1. The corridor things weren't obvious that they were corridors or that they could be expanded - I feel like if corridors were to be figured into the game, that it would be better if they were also the same unit as an empty block, so that every build action was the same action. Simplifies things for the uninitiated.
2. Alternately some prompt that those things can be expanded, like dotted lines, or something, where they can be built. Or a "build corridor" button that lights up corridor prompts.
Then after reading:
1. A name will come to you once the mechanics and the feel of the game is down :P
2. Same as above, I guess the theme can go with the mechanic. I was thinking personally of a dungeon theme for this, but that's just common.
3. Anything clear enough to communicate. Isometric could be cool, everyone loves isometric. Though information and clear information is king.
4. The outcomes don't feel predetermined, but I do feel a *bit* like I don't have as much agency in the game as I think I should/could have. It might be the quick flashes between turns that just run through stuff. Maybe if the game time were ticking by in "real time" and you could react to things that would make it feel more like agency. Like... Theme Hospital XD But I'm not saying go copy another game, I'm just wondering... What would make me feel like I'm in control? It's a hard one, I don't feel like I'm making super meaningful choices... Dunno. Maybe it's because the patients move in an almost mysterious way (I know the document explains it, but that's not the point, it's like people just teleport)
5. To maximise the booster rooms you have to have enough wards for them to work out. I noticed that wards placed AFTER a booster goes down also gets the booster bonus, have you considered the bonus to be only when the booster goes down? There's a bit more strategy in that.
6. What??? Didn't know you could do that. Again, didn't read. I read the basics. Does that take a whole turn to manually cure a patient? I did notice that I sometimes have a whole row of 1's outside, and I just go *gah giveup*.
7. There's a risk/reward to redrawing tiles, but it feels a bit haphazard, though I understand that it's needed and it's probably right, it feels like too blunt an instrument... Not sure how to refine it though. Selective mulligan seems redundant cos you should have placed the things you want, so... Dunno.
8. Probably yes. Possibly too many varieties of decisions, but I'm biased against the current corridors :P
9. It feels like you can definitely lose very quickly if you miss something. I've won the game not sure if I did well and lost the game, horribly, without being too sure of why. Not sure if the range of decisions to make is so wide that it's hard to reflect, or if the consequence of your actions are too far down the queue for you to reflect. By you I mean me. Maybe it's just me?
10. Maybe each turn's too "massive" for me to understand the implications of my actions, the game feels like it's less affected by me than I'd like.
Though at the same time I can see the different numbers in the game (each colour tend towards a certain type of disease - fast cure diseases with fewer beds, lots of beds but take forever, etc) and they tend towards an optimum strategy per colour/booster set, and you'd have to react to the patients coming in with specific strategy set to min/max the game to win and win well... But personally that doesn't make me feel particularly excited to work out these combinations.
Honestly I'm not sure why. Maybe it's not my kind of game, but I really like the idea and the mechanic. I know I sound contradictory but that's what I can think of >_<
Funnily enough getting a good name is one of the things I'm the most unsure about at the moment as well as a theme :P. So far I'm thinking the theme will stick (or just change slightly).
We considered something close to boosters benefiting rooms only when it goes down, but have not really experimented much with it.
I hope the usability stuff solves your "contradictory" ;) opinion, since we predict a lot of things now. For example, patients that will move into your hospital on the next turn bounce up and down in joy :D.
Edit: ":D" looks so lame next to the new smileys now...
11. What do you think of the tutorial? Did it explain the game well?
So we’ve updated the build to include a tutorial that should explain the rules fairly well, as well as a large number of UI improvements. Links follow and the links in the first post have been updated:
Play online: http://clockworkacorn.com/games/monsters-and-medicine/flash
We look forward to hearing your comments and we hope you enjoy!
We don’t know how much interest there still is in our game (replies to this thread have been a bit low), but we thought it prudent to update everyone on our new public build. We’ve added a bunch of new rooms and a larger variety of patients. We’ve also played around with balance a bit, we think there should be more viable strategies now. Lastly we’ve also now got an actual level set you can go and play through.
Play online: http://clockworkacorn.com/games/hospital/flash/
We plan to focus on art, sound, level design, and general polish for the next week, and we will be showing our progress at the CT meetup next week! As alway we would welcome any feedback/insight from the community.
Feedback on the questions:
1. Title? Maybe it will be easier once you get the graphics and feel right first...
2. Theme? I think the game is starting to fit the hospital theme much better.
3. Graphic style? My instinct says top-down, but anything could work if it's done properly.
4. Meaningful choices? In the original prototype, I didn't feel my choices had any impact on the outcome of the game. Now I feel that planning room placements to take advantage of the booster rooms is essential for curing all of the patients.
5. Booster rooms to ward ratio? I think it depends on the level, but in general I feel a 60/40 split of wards to boosters would be ideal. But then again, with a 50/50 split, I found I was using the booster rooms I needed, and then discarding the rest. I think this involves more strategy.
6. Manual cure? I used it in the tutorial, but I never remember it when I need it. I do worry that it seems like a bit of a "magicky gimmick" added to solve a design problem, and doesn't really fit the theme of the game.
7. Drawing tiles? Yes, when my hand is just boosters that aren't suited to my current room arrangement, I discard and draw to get better boosters and more rooms. I think the mechanic works OK, but I'm not sure if giving a new tile each time a tile is used may be better in some respects. It might take away some of the strategic gameplay and replace it with more luck, so I'm not so sure.
8. Enough decisions? Sometimes I feel I'm forced to make a move I don't want to make (like adding a new corridor for the long-term benefits, and letting someone die, when I could have placed a room to save them). I don't think this is a bad thing. In fact, I'd say it makes the game better.
9. Difficulty? With the wins/losses counters, I think the difficulty can be easily tweaked if need be. This would be one of the last things to sort out before release. I think the learning curve of the level set is good, dealing with one disease at first, and then increasing the number of diseases works reasonably well.
10. General comments? Like @Tuism mentioned, I feel the corridor mechanic was a little confusing. The tutorial does an excellent job of introducing it, but I like the suggestion of having a "Build Corridors" button which highlights the places where corridors can be built. That said, I love the idea of having to spend turns building corridors, because of my answer to 8.
11. Tutorial? The tutorial was great for introducing concepts. Sometimes I felt I had no choice in the tutorial, which bothers me slightly, but I suppose that's kind of the whole point. (I mean I didn't like being forced to pass turns, when in the actual game I will almost always place another room if I can).
I agree that our tutorial needs work. I think we'll probably end up making a few tutorial levels, in which different things are explained. For example, at the moment we just assume people will 'get' the UI. Something like a UI + goal of the game tutorial -> mechanics + building a hospital tutorial -> advanced things like replacing rooms and curing patients manually when it matters. I haven't really discussed this with @francoisvn and @Riocide yet though.
Maybe emphasizing a bit on manual curing would help to remind you of being able to use it. It might be a bit magicky, but so far I like the kind of things you can do with it to manipulate the queue.
On the build corridors button: It sounds reasonable, but since we want to release this on mobile as well, we need to think about fitting things in on the UI and such. My first mockup for making it work on phones (tablets are less of an issue) did not have any room for buttons... Thinking of making it a tap+hold (or menu button if your phone has one) for buttons thing. I was thinking that it won't be too bad since draw+discard and pass turn actions happen so rarely, but including corridors in there might be a bit different.
We still need to look at a lot of things in terms of UI, especially for mobile.
We just wanted to thank everyone who gave us feedback at last nights meetup on Monsters and Medicine, we appreciate the input. We got a couple of people requesting the build we showed, so here you go.
Play online: http://clockworkacorn.com/games/monsters-and-medicine/flash/
With this build we’ve started to incorporate actual graphics into the game, and we think its starting to look much better. We’ve also changed the name of the game to Monsters and Medicine.
As always, we look forward to more feedback.
Otherwise enjoy playing!
- Nooooooo! Don't make me kill the little monster when I can see I could build the right colour room to save him.
- Pass turn is the wrong word. Sounds like I'm too stupid to figure out what to do, rather than something like "Advance" or next or something
- Why do I have to build corridors? Seems like a mechanical hindrance. I would rather just be able to place rooms adjacently. If you're worried about the cost of a turn being cheaper, then you could always add to the cost of a room in some way. Eg you need money or something.
- Discard and draw is weird. I'd rather just have it auto fill, and a discard option that costs me a turn.
The monster. Man, they are your stars. I want to care about these and make them better!
I'm supposed to be working now. I'll (maybe) try again at some point and give you some more feedback on the actual game.
My main critique would be that the "variety" of the game space felt limited after doing a bunch of levels. Beyond the colour permutations and the seeding of your deck to force certain ideas (like flooding it with heal accelerators or whatever), it felt like the levels became a bit samey after stage 10 or so.
Do you have plans to give all of the monster colours some distinguishing trait? Those exaggerations in the ones that DO have special stats make things really interesting for me and it's a shame that so many colours appear to just be "average". I can think of a few more avenues to make changes. What about a monster type that's fairly healthy and easy to heal, but drains adjacent critters in the waiting queue? Or a particular monster type which pushes its way to the front? Or a colour-neutral monster that takes up two beds instead of one. Do want.
I also like it when the floor plan is restricted to make you build in interesting ways, those were the most memorable levels for me. What about more levels where you have a partially-built hospital already, one where you're either allowed to demolish / replace existing structures or maybe even AREN'T? (so you can have one or two super-healers in inconvenient places, or something). It would mean that from level to level you have vastly different early-game phases.
It will definitely be a challenge for us to create enough levels with distinct puzzle space to explore, but we feel fairly confident we can manage it. We also have a number of new mechanics+rooms we have been keeping in reserve which we can tap if needed. We don't currently have such plans, but this would definitely be one way to add more interesting puzzle space to explore. The only potential issue with making them that distinct will be to communicate the mechanics to the player. We're currently only planning on looking at making the monsters more unique once we are a lot further along and only if we think we need more space to explore, but perhaps we should reconsider this. I'll have to think about it a bit... Definitely. I also really like the levels with obstructions, and we feel like we can probably create a similar feeling with combinations of the other mechanics too (not really shown in the current levels). We also plan to include a number of optional strict-puzzle-like levels (similar to what DD has) that basically require the player to find the perfect sequence of a few moves.
This week we are mostly focussing on improving the UI, adding buckets of juice, and generally polishing a number of things, like the tutorial and graphics. The reason for our bit of silence is so that we can focus on making some of the bigger changes. Without committing to too much, we plan to finish by the end of April, and at the moment we're still on track (better be ready to follow through on our wager @Raxter ;) ), so the next few weeks should see some fairly large visual improvements. Stay tuned! :D
We’re getting very close to where we want to start try and release this onto some platforms, so we thought we’d show you our latest public build. We’ve just finished doing a UI and tutorial overhaul. We’ve also started adding sound and music, as well as pre-built levels. We hope you guys like it and we look forward to any feedback or commentary.
Build links:
Play online: http://clockworkacorn.com/games/monsters-and-medicine/flash/
Some other thoughts:
- I like how you took out a whole lot of the text, but I feel like (at least for anything running on a pc) you've been a bit more extreme about it than is necessary.
- I preferred the numbers instead of empty hearts for health and I feel like the numbers for how many monsters need to be healed/can die before you win/lose needs to be given more screen space, it's pretty hard to see at a glance how close you are to winning or losing and the meaning of the bars/numbers isn't obvious at first.
- While I like how you have the tutorial split the new ideas up over a couple levels, I feel like you could make it a bit more condensed, there was one tutorial level (not at the beginning) where I basically just placed a single tile and won. I'm sure you could incorporate that into another level?
- Also please let me skip tutorials or turn off the tutorial messages >_<
Thanks again for the feedback, every comment helps
The plan is to do a more dedicated media push a bit later - we're not far away from launching on desktop (Windows/Mac/Linux), and we'll finish our porting for mobile (Android/iOS) soon thereafter.
The music is lovely, works well with the theme :)
I have a few niggles with the visuals - like, the hallways don't look like hallways. The hospital don't have walls on the outside? I guess you're still working on it, but just saying it doesn't quite look right yet :)
The monsters are super cute! The visual language though - I was wondering if they could be made more consistent? When a monster is about to get healed they glow, while all other visual devices are icons, so that doesn't read very well. Oh and a healed monster gets sucked into the green bar. THAT isn't quite cool :P They should leave somewhere. Like a magic door or just a leisurely stroll out the front. Getting sucked into your score bar... Nooooo, you cured them! My goal for visual communication is as far as possible I'd like people to understand the game without the tutorial (but of course they should still play the tutorial). Also the plus signs floating off the monster makes sense, but the minus sign that floats off makes very little sense. Mayyyybe the signs should be housed in a circle to tie them together and make the minus look like a minus.
The heart health meter thing is a bit tough to decipher - intuitively it should be either a straight up and down "bar" type thing, or a circular clock fill type thing. Right now... It confused me for a while.
I like the length of the queue - at first I was utterly mortified by the impossible-to-see back of the queue and how many monsters there were, then I realised I didn't have to cure them all, then I wondered if I was losing because I wasn't seeing far ahead enough (when I first started I felt like I didn't know what was coming and that was why I was losing) but I guess that wasn't it if the queue is THAT long. It may just be a slight visibility tweak?
Oh, and never was there ever tiled floors with 2x1 tiles :P at least I've never ever seen them. They should be square?
Well done guys :)
Thanks again for the feedback :)
On that, people playing your game wouldn't consider if the visuals are "good enough" despite you're "not an artist". They don't know and they don't care, and rightly so. I think you did a great job, and I think what's not there isn't a lack of ability but a lack of consideration in what's in the soup, rather than the skill of cooking the soup, if that makes sense...
At the end of the day it's down to whether you think further time spent will be worth more to players. I don't have an answer for you...
I would argue that most things with a largely creative aspect, like visuals, can often be improved ad infinitum (although not necessarily across a representative population). So the reason I was asking about "good enough" was because almost all of our feedback on the visuals (in general, excluding smaller things like the visual language, which we're working on) has been very positive, and I was trying to determine where on the spectrum of "prototype art" to "polished game art" you felt ours is, irrespective of your valuable advice to improve it.
So thanks again, your feedback is much appreciated, and even if I didn't communicate my questions properly I believe I got the information I was looking for :)
Here's my stream of consciousness as I was looking at the screenshot above.
In direct order of thought:
-Green is too loud for being unimportant pixels.
-Frame edge of screen to capture/contain eye on the game
-No doors or walls makes the corridors look like walls
-Value seperation between important game elements is not clear.
-Inconsistent game dimension, buildings have depth, corridors are top down.
-Overall lack of colour harmony/ all colours demand same amount of attention.
-Highest contrast on the floors grabs too much attention for being an element that should a 3rd read.
-Big Red X's aren’t appealing, and seems odd because they a building like structure without being on the foundations made by corridors.
-Construction buildings don’t read as buttons/clickable. They aren’t visually different to the non clickable buildings operating game.
-Mixing of ingame UI and screen space UI
-Menu button too close to other clickables specially on touch devices you need touch breathing space/padding.
-Shape language is obstructed by other elements ontop
-Eye drawn too heavily to the bottom right corner
-Dark death skull isn't attention grabbing.
Here's two images on how I would suggest going about fixing some of these issues:
Issues:
-not sure how to make doors on the diagonal.
-didn't like the mixture of quantity graphics vs numbers I think that the numbers would be better and can scale up nicely.
-still feel the blue and red rooms share too similar a value, but I think is overcome by the shape language on the buildings wallpaper.
-lost a whole row of play space at the top of the game board.
-left column of play space is squashed... can fix both of these buy shrinking everything ever so slightly and moving it down.
In terms of shape language I think using the same shape for the monster and building makes it a lot easier to connect them together apart from the colour.
Gameplay wise, I echo what @Nandrew recommended: 2xSized monsters and queue pushing monsters sound awesome.
Good luck guys, I like this game.
We've actually made a few small improvements since the screenshot in the first post, but just forgot to update it. Nonetheless, I really like a lot of the ideas you've shown and almost all of them are still applicable.
So many very useful points! Some of these have been improved slightly in the current build, but most of them are really improved in your mockups. Don't really have much to respond to each point, think you nailed a lot of the problems with the visuals. Gonna have to analyse these points and mockups for quite some time... :)
I think the doorways can maybe just be open, with no doors. Will have to see how this looks. In the new build we tried to stick with quantity gfx, but group them into distinct groups. I think this works quite well. In the current build we have a single faded symbol on the floor, which is much easier to see, and I think that, combined with the wallpaper, it won't be a problem. This is quite a concern for us. At the moment we're restricted by the vertical space, and there's a lot of detail we want to include in that space, so we opted to put most of the interactive UI elements on the side of the play area. I feel like this works well, but your point about giving some padding for touch devices is relevant here. Will see what we can do here. I'm hesitant to say I'll have time to redesign any of the monsters, and finding distinct shapes for all six types won't be trivial. So I'll probably rather focus on trying to make the symbols a bit more obvious. Definitely something to consider if we have the time though.
At the moment we have 6 distinct types of monsters:
- yellow (vanilla)
- red (faster cure rate)
- green (higher health)
- blue (more capacity)
- orange (lower health)
- purple (vampire-like ability)
We considered the queue-pushing monsters, but felt that they won't really add very much that the different healths already do. We really wanted to add something like monsters that use multiple capacity, but the problem is that it starts to complicate the queueing by making it very easy to move monsters into non-optimal positions and potentially frustrating the player. At the moment the player usually doesn't really notice the queueing strategy and it doesn't get in the way of playing, so we don't want to mess with that too much.
Here's a quick updated screenshot of the current build:
Anyways, thanks again for all the feedback and especially the mockups, gonna have to spend quite a bit of time studying them :)
Seriously though, thanks for all the artistic feedback and the effort you put in, we really appreciate it. Hopefully it can push us in a better direction.
@Riocide I'm glad you like it, I had fun doing it.
@Tuism thanks man. I agree, there never seems to be an advantage to passing turns instead of building.
Also francoisvn I like your monster designs, they so cute, so took a stab at rendering them from your icon image.
Gogo clockworkacorn!
*Jumps in the air like a little girl.
I love the logo! You don't want a job do you? :P
We've made quite a few minor improvements, including adding two new music tracks. It would be great to have awesome artwork like @Pomb can make, but that probably won't be happening for this game. As a company we'll probably be doing quite a bit of prototyping for the next while, but more details on that will emerge soon, including some of the prototypes we're working on.
Reminder: you can pre-order the game at: http://monstersandmedicine.com
PS. Are you guys from Stellenbosch too?
EDIT: I see you are. I should visit you guys some time before the end of the year (Then I'm probably out of here!). Are you guys still studying or is this a full time thing?
In addition we've gotten some pretty good reviews from SA press: http://sagamer.co.za/pc/review-monsters-medicine-save-the-creeps, also here: http://www.lazygamer.net/review/monsters-and-medicine-review-cute-and-puzzling/
So yeah, that's a pretty cool thing.
It's been quite a while since we posted anything about Monsters and Medicine on MGSA, and I guess we have a bit of an announcement to make. So let's get straight to the meat of it:
Monsters and Medicine is now on Steam!
It's not available for purchase yet, but the store page is live here, and as such the game can be wishlisted! If you take one look at the page you might also see that the art has been updated, in addition to the music.
The amazing art and trailer was made by Cowabunga Industries, and the cool in-game music (which you can't hear anywhere yet unfortunately) is made by Pieter Smal.
Any feedback is welcome in general, although anything in-game would be less likely to change at this point. In particular we do want to hear what people expect the price point for it would be given what you can see on the Steam page. Bear in mind that the price on Humble was $4.99, and it has been in some sales; but we also feel that the quality of the game has improved quite a bit with the new art, music and features such as achievements.
Looking forward to hearing what you all think, and the impending release in September.