Papa Mazai

Neat concept! I included it in my compilation video series of all of the GM48 games, if you’d like to take a look. :) https://youtu.be/Lt8bNQTICns

I think I spent more time in the help text than in the game itself :/

I think you wanted to throw in way too many things. All was confusing at first. Especially since the instructions are long and are several pages. Consider trying to be as simple as possible. If you want to add story to it, maybe don't mix it with the instruction manual, it acts as noise when you read. It's rather discouraging to need to need as much text just to play :T

The other isssue is the pace, way too slow. It takes a moment to absorb an animal and the rate of fire is way too low to be enjoyable. It also seems that it requires lots of ressources to keep the animals occupied, while they don't respawn that much and are, again, so slow to collect. (because of the fire rate)

Don't be too ambitious, especially in a game jam. When I saw all the text I needed to read, I just didn't want to read it and just played the game. But then I felt lost, so I read everything fast. Then I didn't get everything, so I forced myself to read everything anyway...

Remember, Less is More.

Fun if a little confusing. The graphics and animation were my favorite part. The shooting and gathering game play was pretty easy, I felt like I would live forever. But the cage management I never figured out. the animals fought and I guess I didn't have enough resources. Worth a second play.

I think you should try focusing on a few core elements rather that throwing in every idea you can think of. At the very least the mechanics should be introduced gradually to the player rather than having a huge text dump at the start of the game. The large amount of text made it really difficult to absorb anything and I ended only having a limited understanding of what to do. I will say that I thought having to manage you energy along with the animals you collected was a pretty neat idea, even if I didn't fully understand how it all worked.

I spent some time with this game trying to reach a "godlike" level of power :)

After collecting enough dogs you can oneshot the resources and everything becomes more satisfying.

I didn't understand what the most expensive toys are for. It seems they do not give any advantage over the others.

Next time find some time to add some sound, they add a lot to the game feel.

You overcomplicated things way too much, and I think good game design is done mostly by keeping things simple but effective, it was an actual job to read the wall of text that is the tutorial of this game and the payoff wasn't even that great since the gameplay is pretty repetitive, next time try to make a simpler concept and polish it more instead of adding less polished content.