Well, if you are not planning to continue this game, maybe it will drive me to make something like this on my own finally .
I didn't think about the summary window, but yeah, these are valid points. My first idea would be to show a non-blocking feedback every time a 'guest' leaves the 'park' and also an extra window that you can open any time to check the current state with all the stats. And I start to think about how management games solved this, like RollerCoaster Tycoon and Theme Hospital. Building new attractions and rooms in those were flawed a little bit as well, but acceptable after all. The 'escape after exploring everything mechanic' can be changed to 'spent enough time in the dungeon without facing any real threat and could leave without a scratch, so I doubt there is a dragon there.'
The real-time pace would also be exciting if you would add the manual collection of the loot. What if someone catches the madman who manages the whole scam?
It would be nice to see those hidden stats — at least approximations of them with icons or vague messages. I know the number of tributes and adventurers, and the fact how long they survive is feedback, but still uncomfortably insufficient.
I'm the dragon, indeed.
So you'll see if you want to continue the development of this game or not, but here are some quick and somewhat easy improvement tips to make the current experience a little bit better in my opinion:
- Add the dig and sell button to the list of build room buttons. Use them as interaction modes, and let the player update the map with the selected one without showing other buttons to click until he switches to another. It would make this cumbersome navigation through the options to a quick and easy to use Paint application. Tooltips can still appear on the side, but the player will read those only once or twice, so there is no need to alert them every time they decide to place a trap.
- Digging should be optional. Simply clicking on a new part of the map when a trap is selected should automatically dig that part and set that trap.
- Let the player remove rooms, bodies, slimes. Even if they cannot sell them, a way to remove them in case they changed their mind would be helpful.
- Add auto-refill option for loot, bodies, and slimes. If the player has enough money, this helps to decrease repetitiveness.
- Hotkeys. At least an Enter key for ending the day. But num keys for each build mode and arrows for navigating between them would be helpful as well.
- Damage should also increase fear. If a sturdier adventurer already faced five fire traps one after another, he should at least consider leaving before the sixth kills him.
- Dying adventurers should drop the already collected loot to let other adventurers pick it up and increase the chance of escaping.
Questions:
- Fire. How does it increase deception if no one witnessed the burned body?
- Slime. Are the effects cumulative?
- Body. I see that you can't place them until you actually killed anybody. But after you did so, you can basically fill your dungeon with them, even if the tooltip says 'Amount: 1'. A bug?
That's all for now. Feel free to ignore these thoughts if you already decided not to continue this game further. They will serve me as a note when I choose to go down the same path.