Post by AngryGoatGames in Game Dev Masters comments

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Great work on this game, we played the pre-alpha and were loving it! The style of the art/music, the overall smoothness of the UI, and the depth of the different systems is very nice!

Overall I'm really looking forward to playing with some of the more advanced features, like organizing conferences, more developers working in the studio, etc. We didn't get to play too much, but will be looking forward to playing more in the future and following development.

Here are some feedback from us as we played the game. Some has to do with UI, maybe you already have plans for this, but just pointing out the top things that stood out to us!

* On the main menu, looks like the decorative symbols at the bottom are not all aligned up

* We love the quirkiness of the intro music and the character select screen dancing :-D

* During play we were a bit confused on what to do next. Maybe this goes along with the UI / tutorial development? (which we know is not developed yet). I think at first we didn't realize we could click the character herself to start the research, maybe a little UI indicator pointing to character might help during pre-alpha.

* Maybe some more helpful hints about game mechanics at beginning (I saw the tutorial is still being developed, that's ok!)

* Would be nice to have an idle-auto-train/idle-research mode. Maybe you could direct the character on the tasks to do and they would automatically continue doing those tasks until the player tells them to stop or changes what they are doing. This way player wouldn't have to manually select each time (maybe something to think about).

* Loved the review system after completion of our first game. Felt like a real review system, and we were impressed by how good the game made us feel for getting some good reviews (our first game was a "porn / idle" game rated Teen lol, got 7.8 stars).

* Maybe text/words on some of the UI could be larger.

* We only got through development of one game, but I'm wondering what kind of new elements will be added as the studio grows. Such as more devs in the studio, a larger / better studio, things to decorate studio with, etc; giving the player new things to look at or play with during each game loop will keep it feeling fresh. Maybe you have this already, we will just need to play some more to get to some of these features :-D

Great work, looking forward to following this more in the future and we will test again as new versions come out!

We can post some screenshots on our upcoming devlog and will point readers to your itch.io for this game as well as your twitter!

Hulgarth3 years ago

First off thank you for trying the game, and I am so glad to hear you had a positive experience overall..

- The main menu screen itself is super place holder.. those edge icons are only there so I could toy around with diff resolutions / aspect ratios to see how my formatting would work. They aren't anchored to the same edge as the side ones and does look like they are off, but they are actually where they should be they just look like trash and will be replaced by a cool opening menu eventually.

- I am glad you liked the dancing I wasn't sure if that would come off as cheesy or funny, but a couple people have expressed they liked that, it like everything was just an initial idea, but based on feedback that will prob stay in full version. :)

-Sadly you are far from the first person to get confused about how to play. Aside from the itch landing page short how to, which no one ever reads. I don't really have any good guidance yet and its very much needed. The main issue lies int he fact that the UI is work in progress so if I made a tutorial pointing to this element than this other with guidance, once I change the hud the tutorial has to be re-done . So I have been putting this off, but it has caused some issues, and I don't want people being confused and giving up. My next build I have come up with a compromise. I am going to just put a short video clip tutorial in that the player can watch. Something quick clean and concise, that will give you the basics. This way I can just replace this video at a later date without exhausting to much dev time creating it.

- I really like the idea of an "Auto" of sorts or maybe even just a que where you can select to train xxx 5 times etc.. that or a checkbox for auto repeat this training.. With some sort of click on them to end auto training, or you pick the number of training times. I will have to consider some ideas before I nail down specifics, but this is a great idea and I will 100% add this feature. Thank you for the suggestion..

-I currently have medium games / 2nd office which takes you to 3 total employee's. You also have to manage your workers during the 3 stages of development by putting them in charge of specific sections of development, without going over 100% workload which will hurt quality of your game if you do. Endurance comes into play here as well as it will reduce the affect of workload on your character making it easier to assign sliders etc.. I have some additions / fixes / changes coming for next update followed by adding large games / office 3 with additional complexity, and then eventually AAA which I plan to make you use multiple studios for maybe?? I also plan to add the ability to create your own consoles and some other cool end game stuff eventually :p

- Any form of support would be appreciated, I will be putting the steam store page up tonight. I have had a heck of a time making all the store art / trailers as that side of development is my weakness I am a programmer at heart, but my first draft of the store is finally done. Once store page is up wish-lists become the best type of support at-least for steam visibility. I hope to hit EA release on Steam in June 2021, until then I will continue to work via itch so I can continue to get feedback from amazing people like you.

Once again thank you so much for taking the time to play the demo, and then even more so to write such a well thought out post giving great feedback / suggestions. Your auto train idea is really cool. My goal is to make a super deep tycoon experience jam packed with systems and player choice. I want you to wonder about how you could of done your game better, and then I hope I make it fun enough that you are willing to try and do better. Any great ideas I can add to the game only serve to help me reach that goal so thank you, and I hope you continue to check out the game as it grows. Have a great day and stay safe and healthy out there, I don't really have to worry about that since I never leave my PC. :)