Notes from gameplay:
Splash screen:
- Music is decent. Not too distracting, melodic. A bit too repetitive, I think. It eventually shifts to a much more soothing melody. Maybe just shorten the intro of repeated chords?
- Title font is too pixelated to easily read. Button fonts have nice legibility while still being pixelated.
- Typos and grammatical errors, such as in continue (should be saveD game) and difficulty
- Would be good to be able to select gender
Intro:
- Skip all button is nice feature
- Art is very pixelated...
- Loading icon, can't tell what that is
- "Printing" noise gets a bit grating
- Nice text, though feels a bit chat-gpt, maybe spice up the wording to inject some personal style
- Wish I could be a female president...
- Grammatical errors ("on what do I say", missing period, etc)
- Text box feels a bit too long on a wide screen, maybe have it adjust in width based on screen size?
- You switch tense from past to present when the dialog part begins - is this intended?
- Nice sprites for the dialog
- This intro is looooong without any gameplay
Game:
- Story impact report looks nice. Conveys information well and looks polished. Nice use of green text to reinforce something changed.
- Overall UI looks polished. I like the box shadows, nice touch.
- Background noise overlay is a lot. Chatter, sirens, etc, becomes a bit distracting
- A tutorial is great to have, but this needs to be more interactive. I've just been hitting next for the entire game.
- Try to keep tutorial information in-character. It's odd to see the secretary of state saying "as the game is generated"
- Music is sounding nice. There are some pretty tracks in here!
- Info dump, I'm kinda forgetting what I've already been told
- Why is text flashing in the building request?
- Create button in the building request doesn't seem to do anything
- Help section is great, although the repeated opening paragraphs about what the game is are unnecessary and hinder finding useful how-to info. Very obviously chatGPT - need to edit the results it spits out. To not do so suggests to players that the game is just copy/paste from a LLM, although I'm sure you've put a lot of work in
- Clicked game world and now I'm back in the infrastructre overview, have to click next through again
- Maybe add a setting to adjust text display speed
- Lots of cool setup here! I'm in the building section and there looks like lots of future gameplay. Maybe guide players through where to click to build that first landfill. I forgot how many I need to build by the time I found it.
- Looks like I'm being forced to next day?
- Claimed the landfill result. Guess stuff is just done instantly?
- No more requests, what to do now?
- Oops back in main menu., from settings popup. Maybe put close on the left and then main menu on the right. Left is what we read first and consider the default click option.
- Confused about the game world. I can zoom in/out and drag it around, but is it just there for background aesthetics? Doesn't seem like I can interact with it.
- Can't unlock anything, not enough technology
- Next day, I guess? Maybe I'll get a request...
- Had to skip several days to get another request
- Feels like I'm just clicking buttons. Create, create, claim. Not doing much thinking or making choices
- Hit next chapter
- The dialogue writing could be improved a lot
- I can demolish buildings after creating them and still claim rewards
- Next day button displays a visual error while the popups for day change are displayed
- Lol why does the president own 60 food trucks
- Visual effect on demolish is nice. Not clear what demolishing does. Do I get money back? Sound effects imply that I do, but I can't see my stats from the building window, so I can't see any changes updating
- Destroyed all the police, fire and hospital. I still seem to be quite popular. The people crave anarchy!
- Multiple requests of the same type can queue up at once if you skip and don't build. I was able to complete 2 solar power station requests at once with one building command.
- Lol I'm at super high popularity now. Who needs hospitals!
Overall, it's a complex and ambitious effort. I like the polished UI and all the stats and charts, but I think the core gameplay itself needs to be refined and made more interactive.