Began playing this game today, binged on it for a few hours because I liked it and I figured I'd look for anything wrong with it since there is an open suggestions thread. Dunno if you're actually still accepting them or if the game has been finished/finalized but here goes nothing. I didn't read any of the suggestions on here because I wanted to get right to the point of my own opinions of this game so I apologize if I suggest/say something that's already been said and handled.
Things I noticed/Would like to see:
-After a certain indeterminate amount of time, your gaining population/money/happiness seems to start to make the game lag slightly. I'd guess it's a half second slower than it was at the start, making the lines of text from the citizens and their dialogue sounds sound and appear slower. The game begins to feel like it's dragging on after a certain point. (I noticed this once I reached about Day 75-80 and had around 3000 Population/450 Happiness/3500 Money)
-The events don't really seem to line up and seem to be randomized. I get that the people who show up every day is randomized, but to give a proper example, this happened: Dragon came, I gave it the money it was demanding. The blacksmith crafted the Dragonblade. It sat in my possession for 23 days before an action was prompted by a member of the town asking to wield it. Then, because the only person who actually set up the prompt to wield it was the common thief girl, I gave it to her simply because I wanted to see if anything would be triggered by it. She was never heard from again, and there was no event other than an alert at the end of the night popping up saying "The townspeople are worried about a common thief wielding the Dragonblade." I was hoping to see something come out of it, like maybe the girl running off with it and triggering a Dragon attack because she never slayed it, or her using the blade to kill the Dragon and steal all its money, I dunno, something.
-Continuing off the previous point, there are certain events that aren't able to be fixed. For example, at certain random points, the spirits get angry and start terrorizing the town, causing the townspeople to be unhappy and the merchants to cease trading due to their fear. Well, usually the witch would come to you and say something like "We must make an offering! 1,000 coins!" followed by the occasional "Small offering of 200 coins!" text. After a certain point, she simply stops spawning in and you don't receive those prompts to stop the hauntings, resulting in the town constantly losing happiness and business. If it's able to be fixed, it would be a great help, because the hauntings have been going on (for me) for about 40 days now and there is actually no way to stop it, because the witch simply didn't come in and say anything about it. Instead, she'd offer to slay the goblins. Great.
-I successfully had the Scientists build the gold making machine and it seemed to not quite know what it wanted to do. At first, it steadily raked in 20 gold coins a night, with the occasional "big bag of coins" or "gold statue" coming in. Some nights it brought in all three at once and other nights it didn't bring in anything, so I was confused by what its rate of income was supposed to be.
-Some alerts of differing nature like "+50 coins" followed by "+5 people" would appear on top of each other and would render them both unable to be read. Not a huge deal, because you could always just look down and see how your stats changed, but it still would be nice to have those alerts stacked above one another, not appearing right in the same place on top of each other.
-After a certain point of "town growth", the animation for it ceased. You saw that your town was growing by the thousands, but there stopped being an animation to follow its progress. I want to suggest adding an animation for it. Like, after the town has grown to the max that is shown currently, you could have the background of the town pan out, and show the ever growing land and have the player actually be able to put a picture to the numbers they're seeing.
-To follow along with the town growth animation, I want to suggest a coin growth animation as well. After about 2,900 coins, the animation for coins dropping in around the throne stopped. I don't know if it was that exact number, but that's around when I noticed it. I think it would be good to have a way to track that progress as well, like maybe after reaching the limit (which I assume to be between 2,500-3,000 coins) in the throne room where the king sits, you could be prompted with an event by your adviser, like "My lord, we have an abundance of gold. Would you like to build a new place to keep it?" And there could be an animation of that, like a building in the background slowly filling up with gold. Once you reached the determined amount of money where it stopped spawning into the throne room, it could be deposited into this "bank" and the animation would reset, allowing you to collect another (supposed) 3,000, so you can keep up with the animation and feel like you're actually accomplishing something.
-After a while, like I mentioned before, the events don't seem to line up or really have a sense of progress. Days on end are just spend with "Would you like to buy these swords for your soldiers?" and "We need to spend money fixing up our roads!" but there is no real sense of you doing anything with them. I feel like my decisions have stopped having meaning. In the beginning of the game, everything felt like it had real consequences and meaning, but by day 50 it feels like you're just going through the motions. I'd like to see an event following things like "Would you like to buy these swords for your soldiers?" and such, and here are some "event" suggestions I have in mind (that stay true to the idea of the game):
- "Would you like to buy swords for the soldiers of your town?" Could possibly trigger an event where you actually go to war and if you chose not to buy swords, you'd lose a number of people, happiness, and money.
- "Would you like to buy my flowers? They're at an all time low price just for you!" Could trigger an event where if you buy enough flowers, the plant people have them magically imbued and they rise up against you in a revolt.
- "We need to spend money fixing up our roads so they don't fall into disarray!" Could trigger any of the following events: Not fixing the roads means you are physically barred from your population rising for any reason until you spend money to fix them, and the more days consecutively you don't spend repairing them should add a certain amount of gold to how much it costs to repair them; By fixing the roads, you draw attention from local thieves and raiders, causing them to raid the caravans as they enter/leave your town; Having fully fixed roads could allow you to have a festival, where you can have the jester, caravans, and tavern all open at once and have a max event list triggered at the end of the night.
- "I got sick from eating too much candy.. Can I have gold to go to the doctor?" This one has always bugged me. Giving her money just results in loss of money, and no added happiness; Not giving her money results in a loss of happiness. No real reward here. I suggest either adding a happiness trigger or an actual risk/reward system; at the current moment, this character in the town is nothing more than a nuisance, despite her "candy business." I think any of the following are good ideas: Giving her money results in her selling more candy and you getting more in return; Giving her money results in a happiness bonus; Not giving her money results in her breaking her candy business off with you and removing you from the earnings she receives; Not giving her money results in her actually retaliating, by either hiring a thief to steal your money, or leaving the town, etc.
These are just some of my suggestions. I only played it for a few hours but I really enjoyed it, though I believe there are certainly things that can be done to improve the gameplay. That being said, I got through about three hours of it before I got tired of it, so that says a lot about what's going for this game.
Good luck and I hope it continues to succeed.