Hi there!
First of all, congrats on the amazing gameplay! It is original, simple, addictive and offers many hours of play content - everything you can dream about.
I played quite a few hours, mostly on alpha5, so after reaching level 24 I thought I'd make my additional feedback to the thread :
Bugs
- (on alpha 4, not sure if it is resolved) The 1st chest I found was just on an island, but further I unlocked 2 islands with the 3 gem-spots.
Filling the same blue gem on both (1st then 2nd island) made all spot from both islands disappear.
The treasure chest appeared on the 1st island though, and from then on all chests appeared on the "chest"-island before the one I was currently working on... - Choosing an inventory item by clicking when you have an item equipped (other than a tool) will throw the currently equipped item to the spot behind the inventory bar.
- Stone roads don't cost anything (the 4 stones don't get subtracted from your total).
Furthermore, they don't seem to serve any purpose, plus after saving and loading again they all disappear. - It is not possible to build bridges behind buildings and sometimes close to mining rods.
Might have disappeared with alpha 5, but a few times I saw two trees or one tree and one stone spawned on the same spot. - The game gets very laggy when there are many sprites (guess that's the term?)
The worst is with gold coins, but it also happens with other loot (be it on screen or further) - It is possible to craft a shovel when you already have the golden shovel (didn't try it out though)
- As pointed out, the system button doesn't respond
- The well-known inventory bug : if you empty a slot in the middle of the bar, the last slot will disappear, even if it is filled (let's say with gold bars).
If you then pick up another instance of this item (the gold bar), you will now have 2 stacks of gold bars. Trying to use them will always result in emptying the spot that is further to the left. Muardin's post sums it up pretty nicely.
The only work-around is to empty this slot, filling it with an item that you don't already have until making the 2nd stack appear again. If you pick the dropped items back up, they will stack correctly.
Basically, filling up your inventory enables you to see all the slots. (you can see the detail of my workaround in the last part)
Slight lacks of balance
- I always find myself lacking coal and/or wood but getting way too much stone
- Coining is not a good return on interest on the long run : trading gives more.
In the same way, crafting isn't always interesting when you keep in mind that the main goal is buying new land.
This mechanic might be an intended hidden trick and is also influenced by the different level ups...
Example 1:
- WOOD is worth 2 gold
- COAL is worth 3 gold
> So it is better to sell wood than coal.
Example 2 :
- GOLD ORE is worth 3 gold
- GOLD BAR is worth 4 gold (instead of 9 or 10 if you sum up the worth of the ingredients)
- COINING still gives only 7 gold - Very late announcement when starving.
- After level 14 or so, the demo pretty much offered all that is to do, and you have to spend an exponentially increasing (huge) amount of time for buying the next land.
- It would be nice to be able to quite the leveling menu with "E".
Tips & workarounds
Beside all this little problems, the time playing made me discover a few features, tweaks and workarounds, which seemed obvious later on but might help someone else from the forum :
- Hoovering with the mouse over loot puts it into your inventory (that's the most obvious one, I guess I was just slow at noticing it)
- Scroll button scrolls through the inventory \o/
- As indicated on the furnaces & co , ctrl+click crafts the maximum amount of items with your available ingredients, while shift+click does the half.
Notice that it rounds up and not down (if you make coal with 10 wood in the inventory, it will consume 6 wood for 3 coal and not 4 wood for 2 coal)
The interesting part here is that you can also drop/sell items the same way. Be careful on not creating too much sprites. - To live on with the inventory bug (alpha 5), just keep all the spots filled with at least 1 item as placeholder ; just leave the last spot open for items that don't occur often.
I had it like this : tools - minerals - gems - food - occasional fishing loot or other
(pick-axe; hammer; shovel; scythe; stone; coal; iron ore; gold ore; iron bar; gold bar; the 6 gem types; berries; eggs; and lastly, occasionally: apple/fish/cooked fish/algae/sand/key/bricks/steal/glass/bottle/meat/cooked meat...)
Keep up the good work, loving it so far! Can't wait to see updates and the final game!
PS: what is the generator for?