I played the tutorial and the Phenor round and had a ton of thoughts to share. I'm gonna be real with you, the tutorial has too much dialogue, I think you should start cut like 90% of it AND/OR start the tutorial on the planet screen and sprinkle it in. For example I'd keep the line about untrained captains, then ONE line about harvesting a planet (vagueness is ok) and then for the gameplay part have a red circle around the Logistics Network with every other building blacked out, then the player creates 2 helium (scripted) and then unblack the Atom Smasher, red circle around the Atom Smasher. Player creates a medium quality helium, unblack the Trading Hub and put a little right click mouse sprite above it with a red circle, check the thing and there's a dude who wants one medium quality helium, red circle around return and red circle around trading hub and a left click sprite above it, red circle around medium quality helium. BAM! That's the tutorial. Now aside from the tutorial, I didn't like that the request guys in the trading hub seemed quick to leave, I got a request to sell 10 things and felt like it wasn't physically possible, are they time based or action based? They also need a counter, like 5/10 items sold so far. I feel like either way its based if you are taking actions that fill up the counter then it should extend the duration they would wait. Final bit of criticism is that I feel post tutorial you should just black all or most of the planets out as it's not clear where the player should go first, and a progression might be better than a free form. The game is interesting and has a good premise, so don't take it too negatively. I really like the music as well and it seems like you put a good bit into this so I hope you keep at it!
Viewing post in Planets For Sale jam comments
Thanks for playing the game and the criticism!
- I definitely hear you on the tutorial dialogue being too much. It's funny that you suggest sprinkling some tutorials into gameplay because for anything not need-to-know-to-play, it does just that. Like the contracts about to leave usually gets triggered during the tutorial (which probably shouldn't happen) but it'll play whenever that first happens. There's not a lot that uses that setup yet, but I feel like moving more to it would be beneficial given the feedback.
- You're not the only one whose read the contracts as "Sell X over time" instead of how they're currently implemented as "Sell X all at once". That definitely needs to be fixed, along with how hard they are.
- Interesting point on planet progression.