r/TidyUpGames

Pretty much what the title says. One of my new favorite genres of game as of late are fantasy-inspired tidy-up games. It started with Tidy Up The Arcane Library and it's just kinda gone from there. Some others that I've played and liked are Cellar Keeper, Shelve the Potions, and Shelves and Sorcery if that helps at all.

I've played almost 40 of these tidy up games at this stage, some of them complete, some of them still in progress, some of them abandoned. I won't name any names cause I'm not trying to call out any one game or developer in particular, but most of the games I've abandoned have had the same issues, so I thought I'd try and collate a list of feedback items that I have, and have seen echoed on the sub.

First, items.

- Less is more. It's all well and good to boast that your game has 10,000 items or 15,000 items or 50,000 items, but if each item type has 100 copies, that's an issue. It becomes an exhausting grind, and usually kills motivation cause completion seems impossible. If you're doing a game like Librarian where all the items are the same (books, ducks, spanners, whatever) then 10-15 items per individual title/type/etc is more than enough. If you're doing a grocery store style, then one shelf is again, usually enough unless the items are excessively large/bulky. And if the items are very small, half a shelf may be fine. Half a store being 800 of the same item is bloat, not organisation.

- If your game is all the same item, especially for something like video games or whatever, and the items are sorted by genre, then the genre needs to be immediately obvious. Quite frankly, I don't have any issues with the title explicitly stating the genre/category, but if you don't want to do this, then genre/category needs to be intuitive and obvious. If a game is called "Call of Honour" as a riff on Call of Duty and Medal of Honour, then the game has to be an FPS. If your music album is "Down to Funky town", it has to be funk. Some people may enjoy having to solve 5 different hidden and unexplained puzzles just to place the items, or having to test every shelf in the store, but most people don't.

- Placement and layout matters. Every item does need its own spot, but that should be any shelf within the correct category/genre/whatever. If the rack is for "green items", then I should be able to put frogs on any shelf I want, avocados on any shelf I want, and lettuce on any shelf I want. I don't like being locked into "only shelf 3" or "only the left side of the top shelf". In the same way, layout is really important. If the same category is spread out over multiple locations throughout the store because all the items "didn't fit" in the first and main location, that's an indication that you've got bloated item counts. If the main orange display is in the front right corner, that needs to be it. You can't also have one or two shelves of oranges "in the middle" and half a shelf somewhere in the back left.

- Please, please, for the love of god, prevent items from spawning on shelves. There's nothing worse than going to a shelf with your arms full, only to find you can't place anything because there's some random item blocking the placement on the shelf. This is even worse if you have a "respawn items" options, as this will cause the loose items to respawn on the shelves even if the shelves are already full of correctly placed item. Items should only ever spawn on the floor.

- Auto sorting items in the hand, or having an ability to auto sort the items is a huge QoL for players.

- Ideally, prevent items being placed in the wrong slot altogether. I abandoned a game I was looking forward to after like 20 minutes because the placement system was absolutely awful. Not only could you place items in the "wrong" spot, it was impossible to find the "correct" spot because the ghost never changed colour. I wasn't even able to tell if I'd tried every possible spot because the entire area was available to place in.

Next, progression.

- I'm sorry, but a default item carry capacity of only 1 or 2 is just never okay. 3 is already tight, but 5 is the best. Depending on how many items you have overall, 15-20 max is probably the sweet spot. The fewer items you can carry is what leads to spamming the magnet ability.

- Some of the games I've played have absolutely ridiculous progression economies. Think earning 10cents per item placed, but even the most basic of abilities or upgrades costs $10. The whole point of progression is that you get faster and more efficient at completing the task. So what if you can be fully upgraded with only a 3rd of the items placed? That just means I'm more likely to finish the game, and with less abilities used. As long as I have a good carry capacity and good speed, I typically don't use many, if any, abilities unless I'm down to 1 or 2 missing from the shelf and I just can't find them.

- If your game relies on shelf completion in order to earn skill points (instead of a currency for every placed item), then that's even more reason to limit the number of items required for each shelf. A full shelf's worth of items right at the spawn just to get you started with your first upgrade is a really nice bonus, by the way.

Next, visuals.

- Get rid of the fucking yellow filters! I can't tell you how many games I've opened and the entire game screen is bathed in a piss yellow filter. It's ugly, and makes reading titles difficult, and makes identifying the items difficult. I'm currently playing one where there's a huge window with yellow "sunlight" streaming in. It puts half the room in complete shadow and I can't even see those items, much less identify what they are. I'm leaving them to last when I'll just have to pick up a bunch of random items and then sort from there. I understand that you want to show off your skills, put people are playing these games for a calming and relaxing gameplay loop, not because they expect your game to look like a AAA game with a $500 million budget.

- Ghosts or other glows to indicate correct/incorrect placement are 100% necessary. They need to be bright, obvious and a different colour to all the items and shelving. If you're going for the classic red/yellow/green, it's really worth implementing some sort of basic colourblind options due to the amount of people on this sub and that I've seen in steam reviews saying they're colourblind and struggle with these colours.

Miscellaneous.

- Windowed mode. I have a whole host of visual processing issues. If your game doesn't have windowed mode, I'm not playing it. End of story.

- Bugs. No game is without bugs, but some of the games definitely needed more thorough testing. Polish your baby as much as you can.

- Stop being the fun police. I've seen some posts like this on the sub already. Don't try and control how the players will play your game. Don't go out of your way to disable abilities or functions that people have come to expect as standard. The vast majority of these games are single player. How players play them is their own business and it's not hurting anyone if they choose to play by spamming abilities (which, if you read some of my previous points might happen less with the right items and progression). A positive review saying "I enjoyed it but it was a bit short/quick" is much better than a negative review that says "I refunded the game because progress was so slow".

These are just some of the things I can think of right now, and I'm sure there are others. I'd love to see comments of things I might have missed too.

Just a reminder: I'm not targeting any devs, or any particular game, here. I'm not trying to call anyone out and say "your game sucks" or "why can't you be more like Librarian" or anything. If you feel like your game is being targeted here, it's completely unintentional, but maybe something to think about if your game is hitting a lot of these points. I love this genre, and I really just want all the games to be as successful as possible. I don't enjoy opening a game, seeing ugly yellow everywhere and a bad progression system and then marking it as "it was shit" in my tracker.