Downloaded this and had a play around. Looks interesting.
Some questions/observations. I assume that a good deal of these are already in your plans for the future.
Really needs some kind of indication to not go to the tutorials on the current download as they are broken(no options on the menubar besides return to main menu)
It takes a long while to create/load a game, should probably put a loading/creating text displayed when one has been clicked, as I initially thought it had frozen up.
Is it possible to toggle between the high walls and the shorter ones in your signature pic? While the tall ones look good for town walls, they block sight of most of the interior of small rooms. Ideally you would be able to pick which walls were shortened.
I noticed that equipment has different properties, is this determined randomly when made or does each individual have a different skill level? If by skill then we would want the ability to assign individuals to a craft station.
Following on from this, we need a way to examine an items properties when it is on the ground/stockpile.
Need some organisational screens.
Population, showing individuals with their stats, equipment, assigned task etc.
Stocks, possibly just showing items that are stored in stockpiles and hence accounted for. Also show items stats for those that have them.
Production, showing all queued construction/crafting with the ability to cancel individual items.
Are there going to be limitations on the size of underground spaces before they risk collapse?
Any possibility to build upwards? Perhaps maximum height determined by the materials used as support in the lower floors?
Roads/interior flooring needed.
Need harvest added to the orders menu.
Mines need to be able to be rotated 90 degrees.
Dug dirt underground shouldn't turn to grass.
Charcoal. Having to stripmine entire levels to try and find coal is excessive. Make production somewhat wasteful so that you would prefer to find coal.
The menu bar is somewhat confusing.
Renaming 'Items' to 'Craft Items' and 'Item and place' to 'Place Items' would help clear this up. A few other changes would be, use Military instead of Militaries, Utilities instead of Utils(doesn't seem to be any need to save space, so why the contraction?), renaming 'Zones' to 'Zone Building' or 'Zone Room'
Trying to fit longer item names onto one line causing them to have a smaller font looks strange and makes it harder to read. Have them maintain the same font size and split into two lines instead.
On the sub menus you need to keep the name of the previous menu at the top, particularly as some share names with sub menus in other trees. So you would haveCraft Items
Military
Armors
Wooden Set
at the top of the list of wooden armors.
Hope to see another release once you have finished the transition to custom rooms.
Thank you very much for the input!
Although we have plans for almost everything you said, i can only address but a few things right now:
While-Loading tips will be implemented in the future.
You can hit Ctrl to set walls to be transparent allowing you to clearly see everything.
We will introduce a citizens experience/skill based system that will influence every behavior and task they do, from creating better weapons to bartering their price against the heroes and even to preferring spending time in the tavern rather than work.
citizens will have higher chance to do tasks that they are better at, so in time and skill progress, every citizen will have a profession that mostly he will do, but this will not be in the hands of the player. it is rather more like a social evolution thing.
we are also heavily considering having items progress: if we take "sting" from LoTR for example, that sword would have been probably translated to have a bonus like "+10 damage against orcs" and "glow when orcs are in 50 cells near".
right now we have a system that can randomly assign names to items and give them special bonuses. it is already in your version of the game.
but what else we were thinking of adding is that an item will gradually gain bonuses added to it relating to its achievements (killing orcs), thus generating what might be called "legendary weapons" by progression - this is still under internal debate though.
Roads and flooring will come sooner than later.
Harvest will be added to the orders menu when more in depth nutrition values and automatic food production lines will be in the game.
Mines will be built using the custom buildings system.
We are currently working on a graphical user interface which will address all of those problems. sneak peak pictures of it will come soon.
Again, thank you very much for the feedback, those comments really encourage us and make us work twice as hard.