Hey folks, I made this indie game with a few friends to test some game design ideas. It would be great to get your feedback
Note - game is best played on Chrome, IE or Safari.

www.versus-software.com/rosebud

no on FF or old IE (7?).

General feedback I got is that HTML5 on Firefox isn't ideal yet. I tried myself and the game takes ages to load (as opposed to seconds on Chrome and IE).

I haven't tried on old IE yet, but feel free to give it a shot and let me know of your experience =)

• Needs progress bar
• Scrolling should be faster - navigation probably shouldnt be an obstacle itself
• Maybe put high emphasis on how many floors there currently are (since that was what I was interpreting as the 'challenge level')
• The game felt kind of annoying since it was basically "Systematically scan through every row, and then panic in the end when you realize you missed one", maybe try to change the design to make systematic scanning of the rooms not be a reasonable strategy. And also, there should be multiple strategies you need (maybe more the further you progress) to make it not so repetitive.

I suggest the following changes to the game mechanics:

-Make it about finding a single, unique (or 2, or 3, but keep it low) item instead of clicking each of the 35 bookshelves. This moves the focus from searching to memorizing. However, this also means there should be fewer such unique items, or you cant memorize them properly.

-So maybe have lots of uninteresting furniture, and the few unique items either visible in the rooms or hidden in a box or something (the game should show you any hidden unique items when the room is spawned, but beyond that you rely on your memory)

-Limit the rate at which you can search by ingame mechanisms to remove it as a factor (to focus more on the memorization) - eg you have to click a closet to look inside (if you remember the desired item was there), or turn lights on in the room to properly see (with a time, and maybe resource cost).

-To make the game world more dynamic, perhaps some items can be/be carried by people or animals, who can travel between rooms and floors. So you might have to memorize what a person looks like, to find the unique item they were shown to be carrying when the person spawned AND you have to somehow figure out their current location (maybe the person has places they prefer to hang out in)

-You could then go and add some tools for the player to help them memorize locations, or find locations/dynamic entities.

*If the unique item was a cat, maybe the player can use catfood to lure the cat to a specific location (assuming you cant find the cat just by looking - eg theres a cost to looking into a room or turning lights on in a room). Maybe the player can pre-emptively lock the doors to prevent the cat from changing rooms. Maybe the player can place markers/labels in the world ("fat orange cat is usually here") to aid their memory.

*Theres so many possible tools you can come up with, that they themselves might become things to memorize.

You could also do something like giving the player a character, so they actually have to traverse the building. Even if it doesnt affect the core mechanics in any way, it probably makes the game more fun to play. Of course, you could make the building a bit difficult to traverse to add more challenge. Maybe the items you need to find must be brought to a certain place (ground floor?), so you can do things like make some items so heavy you need to remember where the wheelbarrow item was... Or maybe the door is locked and you need to first go get the axe (so while you only need a single item to complete the task, you actually need more than one item to actually access and move the item)

Since all this adds quite a lot of complexity, it would be a good idea to allow occasional failure.

Great feedback Waterlimon! One question, regarding your second bullet point. When you said the scrollign needs to be faster, did you mean when using the mouse wheel or when hovering with the mouse over the bottom and top edges of the screen?