General critical feedback for the devs.

[TheBarbaryGhost]

Hi this post is mostly for the devs to see. While I am absolutely loving Brew Barons, there are a series of pretty obnoxious design decisions I'd like to bring forward.

First, this game does not respect your time. There is no fast-travelling (that I have seen yet), and the islands that make up the sea the story takes place in, are sooooo far away from each other. I mean, I love it for the immersion, but once you've made a log ass flight all the way out to one of these islands, you should have the option to fast-travel to and from it. And yes the game does have a Towboat that can take you wherever, but the cost of the service is not even close to worth it. Just give the player a free way to save time on travelling between islands (as an option). Also there is no way to save in-game, outside of autosaves at docks. A single quicksave slot would be such a huge QoL improvement. Quicksaves encourage the player to take chances and try risky maneuvers. This wouldn't really even be a big deal if you could just start a mission over again, during the mission. But you can only do that if you fail the mission (which usually also means wrecking your plane and having to pay for repairs). I don't feel like the player should ever be kicked back to their homebase to repair the plane during a mission. I had to redo this cave mission several times, because i kept accidentally getting airborne in the cave and flipping my plane. The player should be able to just hit pause and retry with zero penalties. I mean this isn't rogue-lite or some soulslike experience as far as I can tell. ;)

One other really annoying thing is when you make an experimental brew at the Brewery, if you don't like your results, you will lose all of those ingredients, when you choose to dispose of the botched batch. This absolutely discourages the player from experimenting, until they can track down actual recipes to follow. But that seems to kind of fly in the face of how the brewery is presented in the tutorial. The player is given the impression that they can just reset the brew from scratch and try different combinations, without ever losing ingredients.

Final bit of criticism, the controls are super awkward at first.I feel like defaulting controller users to have the right stick rotate all around the plane, is not really conducive to controller play. The default should be the setting that locks the right stick to slightly look off to the direction pressed. This way controller users are never completely turned around by accidentally tapping the right stick.

That's it! Even if you two decide not to implement any of these suggested changes, I'm still going to keep trying to push my way forward in this game, because there's just so much to love about it. Even a few minor QoL issues can't keep me from playing more. Thanks!

[TheBarbaryGhost]

Funny enough, I actually started crashing on purpose after a long flight, just to respawn at my base where it only costs like 3 gold to repair!

[lifetapstudios]

There's some very valid points here! The travel time can definitely be a pain (the islands use to be even further apart during development) There are parts that help with this. One could swap the engine or fuselage for something faster to get around a bit quicker. Though the real answer is the "Boost Target" upgrade. This is our form of fast travel, allowing you to zip back to any location previously visited at a blazing speed. It's actually pretty fun to use too.

Brew experimenting is admittedly a bit tricky. Despite there being over 300 recipes it's hard to 'guess' one due to the semi strict requirements. We had an idea for some prediction system, though it never really materialized and more dependency shifted to recipes. However one of the pilots does eventually unlock as trait to refund a majority of ingredients and rewards for the use of sub-ingredients, so there's a tiny bit of experimenting permitted, though limited.

Regarding controls with a controller or stick, some found a setup more suitable to their liking when they adjusted the Manual modes or Locked roll types in the General settings. Not sure if that helps. There might be some sensitivity issues, we've had a couple mention that issue.

[M1lh0u53]

Fast travel would be nice.
On you remark of the game not respecting your time, I feel the same. You don't get objective markers so you don't know where to go and you don't get locations marked on your map, say like your own brewery.
I got lost trying to get back there I ended up at the bank instead.
"Getting lost" is a mechanic i can't get around.
Just my thoughts.

[TheBarbaryGhost]

Originally posted by lifetapstudios:

Thanks very much for your response! After playing for a bit longer and making some actual profits, I've been able to mitigate some of the above mentioned issues pretty well. I saw that Booster upgrade and couldn't afford it at that moment. But I completely forgot to go back and grab it, so thanks, I'll try that next. Also the Taxi boat, is actually not that expensive, once you actually have money lol. So that's a nice option. Oh and I found a really perfect combination of flight control settings as well. I'll share them for anyone who might like to try them out.

To clarify a bit, when I thought of fast travel, I think it should still calculate all of the things that apply to that including, time change, fuel consumption, etc. Not like some immersion breaking kind of mechanic, like a teleport or anything. Just like a quick loading screen to signify the passage of time.

Thanks I'll keep an eye out for that NPC with the brewing buff. I have to admit, I was not a fan of the whole business mini-game thing, at first. But it is kind of growing on me. You guys really created a very unique experience with this game.

Oh yeah and for some reason, my flight stick just locks up on take off sometimes, and I'll roll right over and crash and destroy the plane (I called mine Scrappy, because it's always scrap).

Finally, I was going to do all this in my review after I've put a few hundred hours in, but I'm sure you'll appreciate hearing this now, I as a very longtime Studio Ghibli fanatic, feel that the three of you, have managed to create something that feels more true to the core spirit of Miyazaki and his peers than any video game to come before. Even the music resonates Joe Hisaishi's more adventurous moods, and the writing and general tone of the game are so dead-on Ghibli, it's literally insane! Like both Ni-No Kuni games, despite being "produced" by Ghibli, felt less true to Ghibli, than Brew Barons does. But, you have also created your own world, that feels unique from those of Miyazaki and Takahata, etc. I just can't believe what I have been playing for the past ten hours. Ok, that's all. I'm going to go back to delivering mediocre brews. Ciao!

[Matmans]

dock closed, so when is it open?
push slightly forward on my stick, plane pulls up??? often causes push to far forward and crasssshhhh
look around would be waaay better if it were like other games where you can fly, let go of the stick, the camera is behind your plane (immediately, not after +-5 seconds)
quicksave / load, would be lovely. very frustrating to continuously close the game to load before an accidental wrong button click or other unintended unexpected action

[Lejiwan]

If I way add tutorial suggestions :

- Players shouldn't have to come here to learn about water bombing the sea to harvest underwater ingredients,

- We shouldn't have to ask here where to find chilis (Seriously, Nigel is a pilot and he's taught how to turn on a plane engine... but no NPC tells him where to buy chili ?)

- And a little QoL suggestion : it would be nice if the copilot's markers could stay for a few minutes when spotting bottles / shipwreck (like if he/she was pining it on a map), because, for example, I have the wings upgrade for the missiles, I need to plan ahead to turn and land... and by then, I went too far and shipwreck marker disappeared (the bottles I don't care, I usually spot them before my copilot x) )

- One last thing, it's supposed to be islands controlled by pirates.. I would love to encounter small pirates patrols from time to time when travelling (you can escape if you can't fight them, it's easy with the booster)

Those 2 first points are essential game stuff, it's not about discovering on what islands you can find which ingredients. It WILL discourage some players or they will just miss out on those things.

I second the remark about game not respecting our time.. I have to try that boost upgrade.