Firstly I want to say that I spent a solid 2-2.5 hours straight playing your game. I really enjoy the calm sandbox-like nature of the game right now and had a lot of fun balancing my resources (I ended up with about 50 population and tons of the other resources after turn 150 or something like that).
I bring that up first so you don't misinterpret my feelings about the game when I bring up the issues I ran into, the feedback is just meant to help you make this game great :)
Issues/suggestions (not bugs but things that I think might be changed/explained better):
- Armies - I see that the tutorial points out you can't buy them yet, but it made it extra confusing that the rivals would gain armies because my expectation was they were working with the same constraints as me.
- Blue (metal??) resource - I just couldn't figure this one out. Every other resource seemed to operate on a one-to-one gain or loss based on other resources/buildings in the game, but this one I couldn't make sense of.
- Gold - It took me a few deaths to realize that you use gold to buy tiles and you earn it via population.
- At first I just thought you were limited to three tiles or that it was breaking.
- Then when I realized it was taking that resource... I thought it was dirt (cuz you're placing land a.k.a. dirt :P and the visual looks a little like dirt), and purchased one of the dirt patty tiles. Quickly found out that was just another food tile which was also confusing because the water tile is also food.
- It would be helpful if this was briefly brought up in the tutorial or even have a simple menu that acts like a chart of costs and gains for each tile etc.
- The rival's turns felt like they were taking too long. Especially now since they don't make a difference for the player, it would be nicer if the turns moved faster since I was purely focused on building my village.
- An idea that might be interesting for the future is give the player a look-out/scouting button that lets them see the rival islands (what tiles they have, resources they own, etc.) instead of showing the rival turns and resources every time. That way its more gamey since the players have to search for the information they need which takes up their time thus creating tradeoffs.
Bugs I ran into (smaller things first, bigger things last):
- I couldn't hear any music which was weird given the attribution to Josh on the menu screen.
- In the tutorial, the part about placing a new tile, the new tile stays red and jitters back-and-forth forever. I thought the game had broken and I was locked out, but clicking the tile worked anyways. I don't know if this was just unintentional confusion or if the code wasn't working right.
- The quit button in the top right corner doesn't do anything for me. I can only end the game by starving or reloading the page.
- If you starve the game doesn't reset completely. I started up a game only to find that I had the same resources as before and if I added a tile it would show up as the tile I built before (pre-purchased and everything). The rivals' resources were also not reset.
- When you click on a tile (ignoring upgradable tiles since there's the cancel button in that window), you are locked into taking your turn with that tile. I would prefer being able to click on as many tiles as I want before making the choice of which to buy/change.
- For this reason, it would be nice to have a visual distinction between tiles that haven't been purchased and those that have (pre any upgrades).
- There seem to be two separate numbers that store population which can become inconsistent with one another. I'm speculating this because there were two calculations that I could tell occurred based on population: how much gold I got per turn which was consistent with the number of houses on screen, and how much food I used up per turn which was consistent with the number displayed in the UI for population.
- When I sold any housing units (at least I think that's what the button is supposed to do), the number of houses on screen would change, but the population # in the ui wouldn't change with it creating the inconsistency I brought up.
- The UI overlay on the tiles was causing problems for me. If you click on a tile where there would be a button in any of the UI overlay, it will automatically click that button and cause some strange effects.
- The main issue came from the three tiles just below the first tile (if the first tile was (0,0), they are (-1,-1), (0,-1), and (1,-1) ). If you click on the (-1,-1) tile, it can sell your tile immediately. If you click on the (0,-1) or (1,-1) tiles it can upgrade it immediately (Note: this would also happen even if I hadn't purchased that tile yet).
- A secondary issue comes up from the tile you can place just under the End Turn button. If you do so, first off the button itself is covered up but the text shows through. Secondly though, clicking on the button and tile at once starts the rivals turns and gives you the option to upgrade that tile even if I had no moves left.
Sorry if this was more than you were looking for, but I like to thorough where I can be! Lastly, I really appreciate the visuals of the game. Each tile looks great with each upgrade and the change in seasons is a nice touch :)