Project Advance

I played this for 50 minutes. The start menu is clearly just a placeholder and has no graphics. The first thing I noticed is that the help question mark in the corner doesn't work, so I was on my own from the start, figuring out the controls. When you hover over the question mark, it says How to, but clicking on it does nothing. Here are the controls that I figured out: ASDW are used for moving. I opens inventory. J opens skills, which only has spears skill. B is build. You can build houses and chests. E is supposed to open containers but it's really hard to be in the correct spot to trigger it. It should trigger from in front of the chest.

You can collect apples, stone, wood and water by clicking on them. It says in the lower right corner when you collect a resource, but it's very close to the edge of the screen. When you stand on water and drink, the water keeps respawning so you're not actually losing any from your inventory. Probably because being on the water triggers harvesting it. It took me a really long time to find the water. The game could benefit from a compass that points where home is, where water is and maybe which way you're supposed to go for quests. I was never able to figure out how to craft spears. When you click on a male villager, there are buttons to teach and spears but they are partially on top of each other. Since my skill is 0, I can't teach. I was able to reproduce with a female villager but she didn't give birth before I encountered a goblin that kept following me (he runs really fast) and eventually killed me. The goblin does 20 damage in one hit, while I wasn't able to hit him back. I tried clicking on him but nothing happened. Or if I did 20 damage to the goblin, it was unclear who was dealing damage to whom. I also tried hitting chickens but again, it's unclear if I'm dealing damage to them or they to me. Also in the beginning, I lost 20 health seemingly at random.

You can go to negative thirst and not die. Also when you eat apples, they first fill the red bar, then the orange bar. The eating/drinking mechanic is clunky, because you have to drag them to a box and it can be a long way if they are on the other side of the inventory grid.

The biggest flaw was that when you die, the popups prevent selecting a character to respawn as, so you can't actually respawn, so all you can do is restart or quit. It would be interesting to know how to craft spears. I tried dragging wood and stone into the weapon slot and also onto each other, but it just reordered them. Also you can't teach the female villager, just reproduce.

The level design has a lot of open areas. The area is bordered by steep hills, so if you go on the stony area, you eventually slide down. There's also a path to follow, which leads you to the goblin. After that, the goblin can find you anywhere and ambush you while you're for example drinking. The game could benefit from more help texts and maybe also a minimap, as well as that compass I mentioned earlier. Also the graphics could use some work. The camera is a bit weird and sometimes tree foliage blocks visibility.

More resources would also be good. But definitely the biggest flaw was not figuring out how to get/make a spear and not being able to fight the goblin unarmed, or if I was doing damage to it, it was unclear.