I’ve been playing for a bit over 10 hours now and I think you’re on your way to a great game! As a software developer with 11+ years of experience, it’s amazing to me to see what a two person team can do. Congratulations! I have various feedback below, and while it is rambling a bit, I tried to organize it to make it easier to parse through.
Farming / Food / Seasons
- This is fantastic. Winters are appropriately hard to where they feel like a big deal.
- It’d be helpful to know how much Water Wells boost production in game.
- The tech is labeled Irrigation, but there’s no actual irrigation. Rather than try to work actual irrigation in to the game, which I don’t think fits the setting, probably just a different name for the tech.
- It’s hard to tell how much food your colony needs for a season for planning purposes. Is it something like 4 days per season, 1 meal per colonist per day?
- Tool tips on the season icons at the top would alleviate some confusion for newcomers.
- Notches on the season bar could indicate each individual day.
Forestry / Resources
- Is tree growth tied to the seasons?
- Mentioned in another thread but coloring the icons on the resource row would greatly help with differentiating between them. It takes a few guesses for some of the resources.
Soldier / Fighting
- As others have noted, a rallying point or alarm bell would be helpful. An alarm bell could be an item that is built. Though selecting which citizens would respond to it would be nice.
- I was considering if it made sense to have Soldier as a profession given the setting. Certainly not early game as too many other things are more important. Ultimately, I landed on “yes”, but it lead me to think, is there value in switching a colonist’s job to Soldier specifically for a fight? If not, maybe jobs should give a small boost to their tasks. That is, a Forester gets more resources from cutting a tree than a citizen with a different or no job. A Soldier does more damage than a citizen with a different job.
Doctor
- It’d be nice to be able to adjust what Doctors can do. I want them to give food, make Illness Medicine, but I don’t want them giving one of my few Healing Potions when I know that some sleep will be sufficient.
- It should be in the Doctor’s job to cultivate the Healing Plants.
Scholar / Research
- The techs named with numbers just need different names. Why were those items grouped in that tech, rather than the previous version of it? Is there some unifying theme to the features of that tech?
- Since the Scholar can also mine crystals, they gain experience in mining, but you have to remember to switch their job to Miner in order to see that experience and give them a promotion. This isn’t obvious.
Colonists
- Casting a bit of a vision, but I can see this getting up to 30-80 colonists… if colonists could be put in to families. I think it’d fit the setting to denote a family as a farming family, each taking to the various tasks as needed. Similarly with crafting, one member of the family makes tools, another is a tailor…
- It’d be helpful to adjust where migrants arrive. Perhaps by being able to build a dock. (Which could lead to fishing.)
- With female colonists, as an admittedly biased person, I think the value of having new jobs outweighs devaluing gender roles, provided that all of the jobs have merit. It’s okay to make it so only males are foresters if it opens up an opportunity for females to be an archer, seamstress, gatherer, baker, teacher, or someone who can cheer people up whenever they’re really down (not implying anything, but it’d be really helpful)
Buildings
- I think it’d be good to be able to have different types of rooms other than bedroom, and the requirements for each would be a bit different. Clicking on the floor of the room could show what type of room it is and its beauty.
- A meeting room or living room with Tables, Chairs, and food.
- A barracks with a weapons rack and forge.
- A community kitchen with a… Kitchen.
- A garden. Despite being outside, it could be part of the house, designated with a fence.
- I think the idea of building a better house, moving up the senior-most citizens, and everyone moves up is a touch flawed. More typical would be picking out an area of the town where the farmers live. I don’t want to move my farmers to the other side of town to get to a nicer house. Expanding an existing house seems to be what players have in mind based on other threads in the forum.
Since it’s so much, I’ll be answering in short bullet points:
