Got to play on PDXCON yesterday.
I realise this is early access and you pobably have a lot of great features planned. And that is great because this game still needs a lot of love and attention to get anything special apart from its setting.
While it seems very playable from a technical viewpoint it felt generic and bland to me. And that is in a setting where you have families and children fighting for survival in a destroyed world. Please make me feel this. Make me feel anything apart from being annoyed that I have to change the working area of my ressource gathererers every couple of minutes. The events are an exeption, the Dead-of-Winter thing works great here for me as well.
Suggestions:
Start different!
Let the player enact the founding of the colony. Start with a mobile group of survivors - problably best a little less than at the moment, like 4+1 child or something - its afternoon and they need to find a spot for the night. In the tutorial let them find a a natural source of water nearby and some berries around. "This looks like a good spot, time to build a campfire with some logs" (Really, this is a survival game, you NEED a campifre
). Then let some of the survivors collect water and berries and have the survivors sit around the campfire and chat (=having fun), which is healthy for the community. Have them sleep in sleeping bags - every single survivor should have one from from start, how would they have made it so far otherwise.
The next morning, let them find a stack of cloth in the area. "Great - we can build an improvised shelter from this". Collect and build the first tentlike structure for everyone. This should be movable - tents really have to be allways movable or it pains my brain. "The group is tired of allways moving around, this place has everything we need for a while" and settle down. Start building improvised versions of the work spaces (improvised resource spot, improvised scrapper etc) which dont need much to set up and are just a spot on the ground with some props. They can be upgraded later into the next level which could be tentlike things and then after that wooden or stone structures. Every first one of a level should be a milestone that should fire an event to transport the meaning.
By starting at the beginning you have a chapter more to tell in the story and make the players feel like it is their colony.
Dont hide the person behind the survivor!
The personality should be upfront and not in a secondary menu when i click on a person. And they should matter. And be the base of my decisions. Not something that I have to search for and only seems to be the implementation some generic personalty traits at the moment. Have the player be able to assign specific colonists to a workspace and give him/her reasons to do so. Those are people that have a past. They have skills and maybe had a profession. Make them good at something and let me assign the former metal worker to working metal and the former accountant to... accouting stuff later when there is a proper warehouse or something.
Make clear who is making the decisions!
In the event sequences you have the colonists react like to a call from a leader or something. That feels weird, because I am not represented in the game. Make the player have a leader to represent or tell the story without a representation, but choose one! The player-as-abstract-mayer does work maybe when you simulate a whole city but not in a group of ten! The story events after choosing an option should tell how the group settled on a decions by themselves and not refer to some call made by the player.
There is a great game in this foundations, I hope you find the right ways to make it real
Thanks for letting us testing it and have a good time finshing it!
I realise this is early access and you pobably have a lot of great features planned. And that is great because this game still needs a lot of love and attention to get anything special apart from its setting.
While it seems very playable from a technical viewpoint it felt generic and bland to me. And that is in a setting where you have families and children fighting for survival in a destroyed world. Please make me feel this. Make me feel anything apart from being annoyed that I have to change the working area of my ressource gathererers every couple of minutes. The events are an exeption, the Dead-of-Winter thing works great here for me as well.
Suggestions:
Start different!
Let the player enact the founding of the colony. Start with a mobile group of survivors - problably best a little less than at the moment, like 4+1 child or something - its afternoon and they need to find a spot for the night. In the tutorial let them find a a natural source of water nearby and some berries around. "This looks like a good spot, time to build a campfire with some logs" (Really, this is a survival game, you NEED a campifre
). Then let some of the survivors collect water and berries and have the survivors sit around the campfire and chat (=having fun), which is healthy for the community. Have them sleep in sleeping bags - every single survivor should have one from from start, how would they have made it so far otherwise. The next morning, let them find a stack of cloth in the area. "Great - we can build an improvised shelter from this". Collect and build the first tentlike structure for everyone. This should be movable - tents really have to be allways movable or it pains my brain. "The group is tired of allways moving around, this place has everything we need for a while" and settle down. Start building improvised versions of the work spaces (improvised resource spot, improvised scrapper etc) which dont need much to set up and are just a spot on the ground with some props. They can be upgraded later into the next level which could be tentlike things and then after that wooden or stone structures. Every first one of a level should be a milestone that should fire an event to transport the meaning.
By starting at the beginning you have a chapter more to tell in the story and make the players feel like it is their colony.
Dont hide the person behind the survivor!
The personality should be upfront and not in a secondary menu when i click on a person. And they should matter. And be the base of my decisions. Not something that I have to search for and only seems to be the implementation some generic personalty traits at the moment. Have the player be able to assign specific colonists to a workspace and give him/her reasons to do so. Those are people that have a past. They have skills and maybe had a profession. Make them good at something and let me assign the former metal worker to working metal and the former accountant to... accouting stuff later when there is a proper warehouse or something.
Make clear who is making the decisions!
In the event sequences you have the colonists react like to a call from a leader or something. That feels weird, because I am not represented in the game. Make the player have a leader to represent or tell the story without a representation, but choose one! The player-as-abstract-mayer does work maybe when you simulate a whole city but not in a group of ten! The story events after choosing an option should tell how the group settled on a decions by themselves and not refer to some call made by the player.
There is a great game in this foundations, I hope you find the right ways to make it real
Thanks for letting us testing it and have a good time finshing it!