itch.io

Thanks for playing the game. Your initial impressions are correct. However, this is a mixture of my inexperience and intended design.

-The map has a lot of empty space, as in, you walk a lot without doing anything specific...

While the map might seem big, there is not that much wasted space. Every map has something that might be useful, be it items, wild plants, animals to hunt, npcs to talk to and so on. While there is quite a lot of walking at t he start, the amount of it gets lower and lower as you progress. 

You can fast travel from your home to the village, you can create your own custom fast travel spot (you can increase the amount of spots you can have by exploring and finding certain items), you can buy or make speed potions to move faster, you can even buy and repair a motorcycle. You can also pick a starting trait that allows you to move faster, or you can developl mutations that also make you faster. And lastly, there are quite a few shortcuts you can unlock to make traveling easier and faster. As I said, world seems big and there is quite a lot of travel, but you will drasticaly reduce your travel time as you progress. I designed it this way to make your characters progression more meaningful than just numbers getting higher.

-Is not very clear where everything is, it took me a while to get food after the tutorial

That is partialy intended since I want players to actualy explore and find things them selves. However, there is alredy a long term teaching system in place.

The NPC that stands outside of your hideout will give you series of very simple quests that teach you the basics of the game. First task you get is to work for Billy, the farmer who you met in the tutorial section. This teaches you how to pass time, get money and what food is. After working for him for  about two weeks (I actualy forced  Billy to stay in same location for some time so you don't have to go search for him), the NPC will return to your hideout and give you another quest, learn certain farming and cooking related skills. And after that, he will tell you how to farm, how to cook and so on.

The farmer that lives pretty much next to you also sells you cooked food and you can also buy food in the village, so you don't even have to farm if you don't want to. Yes, this will take some time to figure out, but I don't think figuring out that farmer or innkeeper sell food is that much of a stretch. On top of that, there is no running time limit. Time only advances when you want it to so there is no hunger bar forcing you to quickly search for food so you have all the time you need to explore the game world more and find where everything is.

-Tutorials aren't the nicest, I feel overwhelmend seeing so many question marks in the map.

That's probably the biggest problem with the game right now. I don't want the tutorial to be too long (It is already quite long alredy to be honest), so I split it into three parts. The tutorial pretty much throws shitload of information at you at the start. After that, you can learn more slowly from the basic quest NPC and you can also learn from question marks, which are always place near the thing they want you to teach.

It could be done better. I plan to replace the current tutorial with relatively long and linear optional intro section, which will teach you more things and also give you some time to get accustomed to them. This will also allow me to get rid of some question marks, or even all of them. 

While the current system is in no way great, I feel it is passable. This is not a game you can just pick up and start playing immediately. There is a learning curve and you need to spend some time to learn the game, since there are quite a few mechanics which are not that common in other games like this.

But as I said, I agree the tutorials and conveing information to players is somethig that deffinitely needs more work.