Hey all! Six months ago, I compiled a post that listed what I felt were, at the time, the great, the mildly irritating, and the potentially troublesome features of the game. I thought it would be good to take stock now that things have developed further. As with my prior post, I'm going to stay away from things that are obviously being worked on. My goal is to target things that could potentially make it into the final game unchanged- in other words, where things are potentially a matter of design decisions, not simply bugginess or unfinished features. UI/Controls Something about the size/format of screens feels off. I have a big monitor- 1920*1080- and I can use very text/spreadsheet/information heavy applications and games easily. Despite this, in CE, I always feel slightly claustrophobic, like there are a ton of little boxes I have to fiddle with to scroll to the info I need. I know it sounds dramatic, but things like navigating the work crew screen makes playing the game almost stressful. I strongly suggest using more nested menus; instead of displaying every type of building, display Workshop/House/Factory/Special, and then inside the category display the options. Right click for deselect/don't place module Edge scrolling Autocenter on items selected through popups (i.e. if I click on a notification it should take me to the subject of the alert) Icons need popups to tell me what they represent. I know this is likely planned, but I mention it because sometimes, the popup itself is an icon when you mouse over an object, and you can't put your mouse over the popup without losing it. The icons are really well done but lists of text are often easier. The Kitchen screen, for example, has a 5x6 (or so) block of icons for different types of food, and it would be way easier to use a text-based screen. It'd also be easier to see what you were producing at a glance. For example: FOOD TYPE..............UNITS...........STANDING ORDER Cabbage Stew.............10 +- Pumpkin Stew..............0 +- Lingonberry Jam..........5 +-........................X I also have no idea what resources I have when I'm in the production screen. Take a cue from Dwarf Fortress here; instead of producing Pumpkin Stew or Cabbage Stew, give me the option to produce generic 'Stew' and then once I select that, show how much Pumpkin or Cabbage I have in a submenu and let me choose the resource type I want to use to make the stew (you could restrict the player to using resources he actually has or not, but at least give them the information). This also will declutter the workshop menus. Building System Separate out a 'decoration' screen that comes after the 'blueprint' and 'modules' screen. It's really confusing trying to figure out what I actually need to place and what's purely decorative Like my last suggestion above, instead of 'brick oven' or 'stone oven,' just let me place an 'oven' and then choose what materials to make it out of. When this happens show me what relevant material I have stockpiled when I'm choosing which modules to build. Preserve the rotation of modules when shift+clicking multiple items DRAMATICALLY reduce the amount of (apparently flat) land you can't build on. I know this might require messing with the biome system but it's incredibly frustrating how hard it is to find a space where you can place multiple buildings nearby If you try to drag a building into a non-buildable area, the blueprint should expand as far as possible in that direction and stop at the border of the non-buildable land, instead of just freezing as soon as your cursor touches the off-limits terrain Let us clone buildings. Rows of middle-class houses are irritating to place Modules need rollover information on their effects AI/Colonists Emoticons need rollover explanations Do decorations (in their homes, workplaces, etc.) make them happier? If not, they should. I'd argue that any module with literally zero in-game effect should probably be removed, as a matter of game design, though YMMV! Are standing desks required for overseers? If not, again, they probably should be. Please let us auto-explore or something other than leading a colonist around click-by-click; it's time consuming, not-fun, and distracting. Maybe naturalists (or colonists assigned a naturalist job) could naturally head out into the wilds each day? And if they find something cool (like a new sub-biome, or rare medicinal plants, or a new resource type) we get an alert? If part of the game is going to be the cool factor of stumbling across a tentacle-infested canyon, exploration has got to be less micro-intensive. Content The game won't really feel like CE into we have factories/dynamics/machines in the game, and so it's hard to really discuss whether it's accomplished it's goals in that area yet. I do wonder why some of those items aren't in the progress tracker, though? It seems like at the moment we have access to the 'level 1' buildings- the artisans or workshops, but not the big mechanized brick factories. In my opinion, it'll be their addition that will make the game actually feels industrial/clockpunky, and I don't really see it in the tracker. As I imagine it, the progression will be something like this: first you have the Kitchen, where you can produce any food from any resource, but slowly and by hand. Then later, you'll build (say) a Cannery, which will only make preserves, but do it fast, use lots of cool modules like boilers and packers and such, require advanced items (like glass jars) and potentially dynamics as well (like steam to operate a boiler). Is that about right?
Auto explore for naturalists was implemented in experimental just before the Great Job Priority Rebalancing began. I'd expect to see it back next month. Regarding the unbuildable terrain, the Flatten Land job makes this a non-issue (for me at least). The area for enhancement I would suggest instead is to not stop the blueprint drag when encountering unbuildable terrain that *can* be flattened, then the colonists flatten it as a prerequisite job prior to construction. Lay the groundwork, as it were.
That's exactly what I'm looking for. My big questions, though, are content-related. I got very very excited by the vision of the game laid out in the early devblogs, and a lot of the stuff they discussed doesn't seem to be present on the progress tracker, which is why I'm slightly anticipatory to see what type of response this gets.
Thanks for the great feedback! There's a LOT of it so we can't really respond individually but we're reading it for sure.
Glad to hear it! Any chance of a response to this part: As I understand it, the progression will be something like this: first you have the Kitchen, where you can produce any food from any resource, but slowly and by hand. Then later, you'll build (say) a Cannery, which will only make preserves, but do it fast, use lots of cool modules like boilers and packers and such, require advanced items (like glass jars) and potentially dynamics as well (like steam to operate a boiler). Is that about right?
I must admit that with the new update things are going a lot smoother. The worked AI kinks are still slightly there, but they work a lot better.
Game development is inherently iterative - everything is a little better than last time, every time we polish or redo a thing, or make improvements! However, the *effect* of the changes is strangely non-linear.
To be fair Ncholas, in some games at this stage things don't always improve with patches - I am thoroughly impressed with how many bugs are squished and how much more streamlined/efficient the game seems to be in every single update - you (collective) are doing a fantastic job in incrementally updating/improving the game.
No, that's when work on the first expansion pack begins. What he REALLY needs is a neural implant that allows him to work and sleep simultaneously. It would create a virtual dream version of his office in which all code he writes would network to his actual computer. There's an eighty-five percent chance this would lead to a catastrophic mental breakdown, but it's well worth the risk.
