I'll give you my brutally honest review.

I have played it a few times but was wholly unimpressed. You have the potential for an interesting game, but I found the execution to be flawed.

My main complaint is that there's barely 2 minutes of gameplay and zero replayability. 1 free level is never going to be enough to draw people in.

Why do the NPCs exist? They add nothing to the gameplay or challenge. The game would play the exact same if they weren't there to begin with. Give them some meaning. For example, maybe they need to move from town to town so that they can survive. Like trading or something. Maybe even have resource spots the NPCs go to for food or supplies.

I feel the game needs more variation in how it plays out. Something to add strategy so that each time you play is never the same solution. Longer levels and waves that progressively get worse would be one option.

Here's one random idea that popped into my head:

• At the highest point of the map is an altar. You start with just 3 or so villagers that immediately populate the towns. Every town you hold gains 1 more population every 5-30 seconds or so. You can keep the villagers in the town, or choose to abandon it, which causes all the villagers to move to the next closest town. If the villagers have no town to go to, then they head to the altar where they ascend.

• The waves start out small, but grow in size each time they happen. Each wave causes the sea to rise. By the end of the game, only the altar at the top of the mountain will remain.

• The goal would be pretty straightforward. Keep your villages alive as long as possible to gain as much population as possible. Evacuate towns before they get wiped out to avoid losing villagers. Get as many villagers to the altar to get the maximum score you can.

My suggestion: make a solid game first before you start asking people for money. Have a free level pack that offers something like a solid 30 minutes to an hour of gameplay.

I would suggest looking at the game enclose.horse for some ideas at how to make a solid web game starting from just a simple concept.

It's not particularly mobile friendly, but I'll keep trying. I'll give it a shot when I get home to a real computer too. Fun concept.

Would be good to explain the controls on the site, found myself randomly clicking before coming back here to read your post in full.

I think you have a fun concept and you made it easy to get started. Here's some constructive criticism because I think you're smart enough to use it.

Pay wall hits too early and too much imo. As a player I just get the feeling you're stingy or think too highly of your game.

There is also no gap between "Play the game this way" big golden arrows and when the paywall hits. So the play experience is "Do what I'm telling you. Ok now pay me."

I agree with this being an interesting concept but I was so confused at first. It's not intuitive. I didn't realize I had to pick up the sand. And what are these hearths. It's like there is a backstory that I know nothing about but it's relevant to the game. If you want a game to be successful you need to be able to jump in quickly. Especially with the short attention span nowadays

It doesn't even feel like a game. The answer is given to me for both levels and then I need to pay.

It would be nice to know if you are currently holding something with an indicator because many times I thought I was holding sand it just took the sand away.

The UI also needs work. Many walls of text like stats that might benefit from icons and bullets.

@How_do_I_computah@lemmy.world (your comment never reached our instance, so here): Fair, and well put. The free part ends exactly where the arrows end, so it plays as "do what I say, now pay". The next build moves the gate later: real free play on the island after the guided part, before any price shows up.

In which game engine is this?

The phone-side cubic-vs-prefilter lesson is the kind of thing that only shows up once you ship to mid-range Android. Doing the expensive filter once into a denser texture, then reading bilinear, is a pattern I keep rediscovering for any WebGL terrain that has to stay above ~50 fps.

Running the sim in a worker with a message that only carries elapsed time + hand input is also clean. Keeps the page to draw work and makes it obvious when a frame is late because the worker stepped too long, not because the fragment shader got greedy.

Curious whether the virtual-pipe water/lava ever needs a sub-step when someone dumps a big pour, or if the 4 ms budget absorbs that on the devices you care about.

Interesting game but would be cool if I could play more than one island without out signing up for emails