... I'm hoping this could sell a few copies. That's the plan for the future. I'm not really thinking about that right now because the game needs to be made first and that's what I enjoy doing.
Oh, I think it could sell more than a few copies, if it turns out as good as I think it could.
But you are right: This is not the time to think about that. Thinking about money is not going to produce a good game. Putting love, care, and hard work into making an enjoyable and coherent experience will. Or at least it
should.
Anyway, I did some testing, and here are my notes:
Many places in the game, tool tips would be really handy.
It would also be nice if you could skip the intro by hitting space, enter, escape, mouse click, or all of the above.
In the town:- It should be better indicated in the starting tutorial that the town is basically a menu. I spent some time wondering how I could move my character.
You could also think about making the town not a menu.
I was thinking that it would be fun if you could walk around and do stuff. It shouldn't be turn based, but work more like a single turn with endless moves. You should also keep the menu, so it would not slow the game down further. Exit the tavern after entering with the menu, and your character is now magically standing at the tavern entrance.
Then I had the thought that if you tried to cut down a tree or harvest someones crops, your movement would freeze, and the town guard would come running and warn you that it was illegal, and if you did it, say, 3 times in a row, he would kill you on the spot. Game over. Sort of a fun little gimmick, but one that would bring immersion.
You could even expand it further by adding the ability to buy property, once you have the status and resources to do so. Property could give small resource bonuses. - You should make it so that the first ship is paid for, and subtract the expense from the starting funds. On my first play, I went shopaholic in the supply store, thinking that I had plenty of funds, only to find out that I could not purchase a ship, and there was no way to progress.
- You could think about omitting the die roll on the character creation for the first character, since you always get the same total amount of skill points. Having predefined 'good' values for each character class would serve as extra documentation for new players.
I get that you probably have the randomness to encourage variation, but I think that limiting control over other party members stats would serve that purpose better. What if you had a limited selection of companions at the tavern, with little or no influence on stats? - I noticed that the item selection in the supply store menu sometimes acted strangely when switching between categories. Some times, but not always, a different item would be selected when switching category and then back again.
The easy fix would be to make sure nothing is selected when switching to a new category.
During the expedition:- Are you sure it is wise to refer to the turns as days? It leaves a lot of questions that wouldn't come up if you simply call them turns. For me, it takes away from the immersion.
- I would like an easier way to select characters. It is a lot of clicking to get to the next guy.
- Next and previous item should be cyclic. It would also be nice with a list to select the item.
- The 'walk-to' marker is invisible when it is in the fog of war.
- When eating and drinking, it would be practical with 'eat/drink until full' buttons.
- When picking up things such as herbs and berries, it would be nice with 'take all' and 'take all I can carry' buttons.
- And then the game crashed when I was disembarking.
The style and coherency is still the strongest point of the game. It doesn't matter if it's pretty. That is a matter of taste, anyway. As long as it knows what it wants, it will have the ability to engage players. And with its distinct style, this game does so with abundance. I really wanted to explore that world further.
The interface is generally very fiddly, and a lot of my notes are about that. It is a lot of clickety-click, and it gets tiring fairly quickly.
This is probably the weakest area of the game, and what I think you should focus most on improving.
The games style is probably one of the things that makes it hard to get this
just right, so be sure that you don't make any compromises here that takes away from that wonderfully coherent style.
You certainly made a lot of progress since that first release, and I thoroughly enjoyed revisiting and playing with the new features.
I hope you can use my notes!
