Welcome to The Merry Fairy! This version contains:

• A beautiful scrapbook journal ready for your thoughts and creativity
  
• Various decorations that you can gather from all kinds of places, such as the Guestbook (but there are hidden decorations, too!)
  
• Two of Fairy's whimsical friends, Jack the Caretaker and Lekkote the Wishtree, ready to
  visit you every half an hour and talk about magic and matters of the heart
  
• A few letters from Fairy
  
• A friendly weather that follows your wishes
  
• Candles, a soothing windchime and a tiny companion

A day at The Merry Fairy lasts 5 real hours. You can receive a visit every 30 minutes, The demo includes two characters, 15 visits, 5 guest book pages, 2 letters from Fairy, one hidden place where you can find more decorations, and a bell feature where you can call the Caretaker and ask for help and more decorations.

• Fairy's second letter ends up straight in the letter basket instead of on the desk
  
• The function to arrange decorations (bring to front/ send to back) has some issues
  
• The journal may not be saved as I continue to improve the game
  
• For sure there are typos, but I just can not see them anymore. If you spot any, please let me know ❤

I left some development shortcuts for those of you that are eager to get visits from Fairy's friends faster. F12 opens a very ugly looking development menu. Use it wisely :)

I look forward for your thoughts and feedback!

Yours,

Fairy

Looks lovely, with lovely music too!

A few issues:
- F12 is Steam's default screenshot key, so now you can't use it to take screenshots without that ugly little menu (I changed screenshots to F9 in Steam's settings, but I'm not confident everyone would find that option)
- Windowed mode is tiny and can't be resized so it's hard to get back to fullscreen, unfortunate for an idle game (as a quick fix, maybe add a hint that F10 can be used as a shortcut, I only found it while looking for an alternative screenshot key...)
- The intro should have subtitles for accessibility
- The short candle on the left makes the guest book and the shelf above it flicker uncomfortably
- Not sure about the threshold for people with photosensitive epilepsy and such, but rainy weather probably shouldn't have surprise lightning? The constant light rain in cloudy and even partially sunny weather is a bit weird too, and it even seems to be raining through the window
- I had Lekkote's intro conversation canceled because I tried to click on the character
- Taking decorations out of the guest book felt a bit wrong o.O Could they just be copied, or at least remain in paler shades?
- Being able to edit my text again after leaving text mode would be very helpful

I could nitpick a bit more, but maybe some other time. Looking forward to more content and/or the full version!

Originally posted by löyly:

Looks lovely, with lovely music too!
A few issues:
...

Thank you so very much for this wonderful and super useful list! Almost everything is already on my todo, except the photosensitivity which is a wonderful point - thank you so much! As per taking decorations from various places, a toned down version instead of a shadow is a great idea and I will experiment with it asap!

I got an award! Whomever you are, kind heart, you absolutely made my day!


Welcome to The Merry Fairy! The updated Demo version (which is number 29) contains:

• Subtitles for the introductory video so its easier to follow. I am considering to do the same for the trailer in the store page!
  
• A little bit of volume control! This is a temporary fix that allows you to choose between 60%, 80% or 100% of the volume in the Main Menu settings. It will be improved!
  
• A mushroom cursor skin
  
• A tutorial dialogue in the form of an automatic conversation with the Caretaker when you start the game. The tutorial can be re-read in the dialogue triggered by the bell, too
  
• You no longer exit the conversation if you click on the character portrait
  
• Dev menu is now accessible using the F5 key, and not F12
  
• Some lightning improvements but there is still some flickering left!
  
• New sounds and improved dialogues

• The Caretaker should no longer pop up for a visit immediately after the tutorial but he does
  
• Typos. Typos everywhere! I can no longer se them so please kindly point them out to me when you spot one ❤

• I love löyly's idea to improve the shadows that remain in the guestbook after you gather all the decorations and I am experimenting with that.
  
• The ability to edit text entries in the journal
  
• A bit more content
  
• Tweak the Windowed mode
  
• Improve in game settings
  
• Fix All The Typos (tm)

I aim to have an new update in about a month. Your feedback and suggestions are So So So valuable so please keep them coming! I would also love to see the art of your journal if you would like to show it! ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤

Yours,

Fairy

Originally posted by aneoid:

Actually, I don't like how many comments I left, so if you let me know when you have read them and copied anything you wanted, I'll delete them.

Thanks!

You could just edit your first comment and copy & paste the text from your other comments into it?

I only now just noticed this - and I cannot thank you enough, both aneoid and löyly! I do have a Discord server where I am a bit quicker to react and I am noting down all errors reported (they are so so useful!).

The mouse pointer disappearing does have an attempted fix, but if it still happens in version 29, I would very much like to know.

Once again, thank you so so so so much! I work alone 90% of the time and sometimes testing bug fixes and especially reading the dialogues over and over again seems to hinder rather than help me so I cannot stress just how much this helps me!

Hey! Nope, we do not have that here. Well, I think we do have hornets - do you have such things where you live? I have not thought of that! Please don't hug a poisonous tree <3

Hi! the game looks lovely so far. I'm listing issues and some suggestion I've got.
The version I'm playing is version 29.

- There's a bug where if you click on the pen in the scrapbook, then click on the outside of the page before click on the page to type anything, it will close the scrapbook but the cursor will disappeared, you can still move and click things but no cursor shown on screen. Similar thing happens if you presses ESC before click on the page to write something, it will close the scrapbook but in this case the cursor will be the pen instead.

- The pop-up when obtain items for scrapbook could be more tidy up instead of floating items on the screen, since some of them could blended with the background or be obstructive. Maybe make the pop-up window like the letters, so that player can clearly see the items and know what happens on the screen, with that it would be cohesive and also make the player know right away that these items are in the scrapbook too. (not that it's the problem of player knowing where they're or not, but I think it would go well with the narrative of the game) (I don't know if this is already in dev's to-do list, if so, I'm glad.)

- Having more tools on editing page would be wonderful, like grouping and multi-select tool.

- Having Bring to Foremost and Bring to Back-most would be nice too, but I think that's already on dev's to-do List.

- Tool to view layers of objects would be handy too since it could be confusing when you have many objects on the pages and try to arrange it. It could cause many click to Bring to Front to bring an object through the layers of other objects. I also curious if you click add text but cancel instead of type anything, would that ended up adding invisible layers on the page and cause problem with the sorting, because that would lead you to click too many time than the number of the layers visible.

- It would be wonderful if the game could remember your font choice after you closed the game. English is not my first language so I find it hard to read the cursive fonts. I'm not sure if it's already on dev's to-do list, but I'll listed it here.

I hope that these would be helpful. Wish the dev best of luck with the game! :D

Thank you so much, Elemra - it is truly very useful feedback!

I noticed that if you pick thunderstorm weather and then switch back to sunny (without closing out the demo) it will brighten but rain keeps falling and you hear the occasional thunders (but no rain sound).

Not sure if suggestions should go here or in another thread, but considering this seems to be half bugs and half suggestions I'll add them here.

First off, this is such a lovely little demo. I often use rainymood to help me focus on tasks and this has a great soundscape to it that may do the same. Plus having occasional visits would help me take breaks. The art is gorgeous and love the vibe of it all. Also some of the conversations legit made me a bit misty eyed. So kudos. I am definitely going to keep an eye on this.

Some thoughts I had while poking about.

So far really enjoy the music choices in this. Although would love it if there was a way to pick a specific song or skip to the next one as I accidentally clicked out earlier from a song I wanted to hear more from. Maybe a tiny radio or magical tiny harp on the desk.

I secretly hope there will be more interactable items on the desk eventually. Because I do love clicking all the things. :P Especially the drawer and the candy pot keep making me click them to see if THIS time maybe they'll respond.

Love the tiny creature in the box, would love to be able to pet it though. Or if it would perhaps relocate in to other areas on the desk every now and then so you have a tiny game of hide and seek and just some variation in scenery. Or more tiny fairy creatures showing up at random days/times.

Speaking of things to pet, I know it may not be in the plans. But I'd love to have a cat in the scene. Either in a set spot and if you "pet" it it could turn on cat purring background noise. Or maybe it could also move to other locations every now and then. Sit in front of the window, sleeping on the desk, things like that.

And maybe it could be fun to have the occasional butterfly or bumblebee fly past the window if the weather is put to nice. Or seasons might be fun too. :)

I would also really love it if I could look around a bit. Maybe if the room was say 360. Even if a simple scene I think it could feel more like an actual place if it's an entire room. But even just getting to move a bit up down left and right would already feel more solid. Also maybe the option to "lean" out of the window and see a bit more of the scenery. Because I kept feeling the urge to click the window to zoom in and see more. Or alternatively let us open both windows. (And if more of the room would be visible you could add more soundscapes like say a crackling fireplace, or rustling of books near a magical bookcase)

And lastly. I'm not sure if there is a specific reason for having the stickers be limited to one use, in which case feel free to disregard. But I'd love it if we could use multiple of the same one. Both to make more designs, but also because I struggle to use a sticker if I know it's one time use. Often not using it at all in case I come to regret it. And yes I know I could move it to another page at any point in time, but if I enjoyed a previous design I'd feel reluctant to remove it there even if I really wanted to use it on another page too.

It would also be fun to let us choose between a few different colours for the notebook pages. Almost as if it's made out of pressed handmade paper. It could really elevate designs if there were say a soft pastel pink or green to use behind the flower stickers. Or even some basic colours for the text.

Obviously I'm not a dev or even much of an artist these days, so feel free to ignore any and all of this as I have no idea how hard any of them would be to implement. It's just some musings I had while sitting with the game for a while.

Either way you made something truly lovely. Hope to someday see the finished version. :)

Hi Evenox! Thank you so so much for your comment. And I am not sure how you did this, but almost everything you mentioned as suggestions is actually on my ToDo list! Well...

- You will most definitely be able to skip a song and have more control over music in general. You can actually kinda do this, but its just a trick - if you click on the Fairy painting/ dance scene, and get back to main scene, you will hear the next song in the queue. But for now, they are randomly played so you may get the same song as before

- there will Most Certainly be more items you can click on and yes, one day, (maybe soon!) you may well click on the Soul Candy and get a ... soul candy! Or click on the drawer and see what you can store there

- the tiny creature loves you, too! But they may love their box more. We will see about the petting. However! I posted a desk artwork on the Steam community where you can clearly see yet another tiny creature that may visit you....

- however #2: you only get visits from two characters now, but I can disclose there will be another one. He is called Skuggan, he is dark as the night, has super soft fur and sometimes, maybe, if he lets you, you may pet him. And talk to him about mice, boundaries, friendship, how to really rest (of which we know next to nothing about, compared to him) and more!

- regarding more effects like butterflies and more exploring in the 3D scene(s), those are certainty big wishes of mine. But they are not currently in the plan, as I cannot truly afford to add them now. I do very much home The Merry Fairy will do well enough to allow me to update it for years to come, because there is So Much I want to do!

- as per the stickers, this I can disclose right now: right now, I am enchanting all the items that hold stickers so you can gather as many of each as you wish! I just need to make sure I enable some tools to prevent unwanted hoarding, as it may not be fun to browse the sticker pages in the journal if you have hundreds of stickers there and no way to search or sort them. I do expect this change to come quite soon for the demo, too!

- and the ability to customize your journal, including more fonts and colours for the freeform text, is also coming soon!

Once again, thank you so much!