ClickOnce was my mistake also, and I cannot understand why ms can’t provide more simpler packaging system. (ie. just zip everything needed and nothing more9

I do all images with bitmaps and it’s very fast. I use SDL_image to load images to memory and then just blit to screen. That way I can use very modern image manipulating tools like GIMP among many others.

About help-system. I have think that way too. I like one helpscreen, because player can skip it very easily if he already knows how to play the game (also player doens’t need to check everything that if help says something meaningful, all help is just in one screen or bunch of them)

Just to mention, I liked very much Greedy Bankers tutorial/help which was made with few screens which shows visually how to play the game.

*) ClickOnce: ok, never again. It is just so convenient for the developer… :-)
*) Gameplay: I presumed, that could be the case… sad
*) Gfx: is it really *that* bad?! Oops. Yes, the background… it´s drawn by lowlevel “DrawLine”, etc… totally ignored that. Maybe a shadow-bitmap for the fridge and some simple blur-shader for the background would have helped.
*) Help-System: it really is sub-optimal. Maybe an extra screen with a short description would have been better.

I promise to make it better next time :-)

I tired WonderFridge and I would like to share my few points here:

Please, don’t use ClickOnce-packaging, because it forces user to install a program, and extension is kinda wierd .application. Besides that, you can get plain .exe from Release-directory on your project folder.

And the about gameplay:

It sucks, I didn’t find nearly anything addicting and only thing I found even as a game was discovering new items. Well, that didn’t turn out to be funny, at least for me and I really quit after few tries.

Even if basic idea would be good, then UI comes a play. When you put items to fridge, there is a huge list (40 discoverable items and 2 stock) where I can see like 7 -10, but the most annoying thing is that mouse’s scroll doesn’t work there. You must scroll that list using buttons, which scrolls item by one at the time. I found that VERY frustrating.

I usually don’t like to complaint about graphics, because these games are prototypes, and more likely with very fast-made graphics, but oh-lord when I first opened that game…

Also I didn’t like the inside-help system at all, beause it make a huge tooltip with a lot of text. I firstly thought that this is very compex game, cause a lot of text, but after a while it turned a pretty simple.

After all, even first game IMO sucks, I still love to see new guys here (like I am myself, see few posts earlier).

Keep good work up! :)