Thoughts & feedback

[padlinka]

Hi devs!

I'm enjoying the game and I'm super happy that there are people willing to take on the challenge of creating some (or tbh - any...) competition in the life simulation genre.

I like the simplistic style, everything looks very cute!

The gameplay is smooth most of the time, but I do have some thoughts/feedback on a couple of things:

1. Easier household merging through interactions
My tiny got herself pregnant with a dude, but there's no way to move the dude in. I've found him in a household list, but unfortunately if I do move his whole family in - the current Tiny that I have a relationship with, will be deleted. It would be great to have more options on that through organic interactions.

2. Inquiring about relationship status/ask about family
Connected to the above - I've learned that the aforementioned dude already has a daughter and is in a household with someone else. I'm not even sure if they're together :P But it'd be great to be able to have this knowledge outside of the UI options.

3. Unclear pathing and blockers
A couple of times already, the Tinies were fully blocked from exiting a room, started taking weird paths (i.e. using a backdoor and then using a front door - exiting the house to enter the living room) or got fully stuck. I feel like it sometimes is very spacey visual wise (so it looks like they should have plenty of room) but anytime I was expanding the house, the Tinies were blocked and I found myself having to test the pathing several times before I got it right (and I swear I usually don't have this issue).

4. Waiting around for other Tinies to finish something.
It got extremely bad when taking care of a baby - baby was watching tv, I'm trying to give baby a bath - my adult Tiny stands around, waiting for the baby to finish. In general that part was the most annoying imo, with the baby asking for things and my own actions queued up it was super messy for a while, I was saying "NOOOOO STOP" so many times at my computer :P Not sure how to resolve this - maybe it would be possible to prioritize player-made actions and cancel the rest of the queue for other Tinies? I imagine that'd break a lot though - so not sure, but it does get annoying.

I think those are the bigger things - for smaller gripes:
- small table can fit four chairs but will not allow other Tinies to use it if one already is being either used by one Tiny or there was one plate on the table; so a child will eat at the dining room table, two chairs are free, but the Mom will go eat upstairs at the desk

- getting too sad because of a Techie trait blocks practicing programming, which is what would help with the tech withdrawal sad debuff - it's a bit annoying to have to play a game for a bit and then go do the programming. If the sad debuff is caused by something else, that makes sense, but not when it's caused by tech withdrawal.

- "tinker with" and "upgrade" options - I'd consider making them smaller or something, 99% of the time the toilet/shower will be used for its main purpose
- similarly, sometimes when navigating menus - it is a little unwieldy imo. For example, when choosing an option on the computer and going into sub-options - it skips a little bit and leaves your mouse in a random place - you have to spend a second navigating back and since there's no visual distinction between the main option (which we're branching out from) and the rest, it gets a little irritating to navigate. I think it'd be best if the mouse stayed on the 'main' option that we're branching out from, and if the main option had a bit of a visual distinction.

- would be nice to be able to call/invite people from the social menu - since the best relationships are at the top, they're easy to navigate to. My love interest/best friend are in the middle and end of the list when calling from the phone, so I have to scroll to get to them every time, I just stopped inviting them :P Or - introduce sections/sorting/grouping that will remember my choice from the phone menu.

- not sure if I can change the color of already existing furniture - I'd like to be able to do that

- I have selected the "move house" option multiple times by accident - I think it doesn't need to be so prominently displayed as it's probably not going to be used often; instead I'd consider adding an additional 'objects and furniture' to the top menu, as it's going to be the most used

- if Tiny is watching TV alone, that same Tiny cannot change the channel without cancelling the current one, since it's "rude" to change it :P

- would be really nice to have an option to 'visit' a Tiny that has a home - going through all the houses manually to see if your friend might live there is not super convenient

- cafe's not working for me at all - I pay for the food/drink, it gets placed on the counter and cannot be interacted with, or doesn't get made at all; getting a drink in a bar has worked.

- fooling around with and playing an online game with someone should also impact the Social tab.

- would also be nice to track the things Tinies do and count them towards the goal progression, even if the progression is not chosen at that moment.

I'm also missing some options for Tinies playing/doing something together.

I know it's a lot of feedback, but I am enjoying it anyway!

[Ellpeck]

Hi, thanks so much for your feedback!! I'm really happy that you're enjoying the game overall so far :)

I'll try to respond to all of your points in order, numbered the same as you did where possible!

1. You can ask another Tiny to move in if you're high enough friendship with them! You can also split and export any household members and then import them as part of another household. I'm not sure what you mean by anyone getting deleted, as exports are meant to persist all relationships and other information when you import them. If that's not happening, then that's a bug!

2. You can ask someone if they're single already, which would've let you know that they have a partner at least. You're correct that there is no way to enquire about children or anything yet, though :) This is planned!

3. I haven't experienced (or gotten reports of) any pathfinding bugs in a long while, so I doubt this is a bug you're experiencing - but of course, it could always be one! The thing you have to keep in mind is that movement in Tiny Life is tile-wise, which means a Tiny will always only be able to stand in the center of a tile, and each furniture item takes up a full tile. While it may look like, for example, there is physically enough space between two diagonally placed flower pots, Tinies won't be able to walk that way, since there's no full tile of space inbetween them.

4. "maybe it would be possible to prioritize player-made actions and cancel the rest of the queue for other Tinies?" - this exact behavior already occurs, but only within reason! For example, Tinies will always cancel *unstarted* actions in their queue when you try to talk to them, if those actions were enqueued by the AI. Social actions also cancel some types of actions, but I assume the ones you were having issues with just aren't included in that list - it's definitely something to revise & improve the behavior of over time, though :)

- "getting too sad because of a Techie trait blocks practicing programming, which is what would help with the tech withdrawal sad debuff" - this is a bug! I've made a note of it :)

- "when choosing an option on the computer and going into sub-options - it skips a little bit and leaves your mouse in a random place" - can you elaborate on what you mean by this? the center of the interaction menu's circle always appears in the spot that you originally opened the menu from, so the "back to the previous category" button will always be in the center of the pie menu, which is also the center of the pie menu for the previous category. This is, in my opinion, the most intuitive behavior, but please feel free to elaborate on what exactly your gripes are with it :)

- "would be nice to be able to call/invite people from the social menu" something like this is planned, but unfortunately, a gamepad only has so many buttons, and most of them are used up at the moment. It's no issue to just add another clickable thign on the main UI for mouse+keyboard users, but it's a lot more difficult for gamepads. Since I really don't want there to be any big missing features when using a gamepad vs. using a mouse, i'd rather not have this *at all* until I figure out a good solution!

- "if Tiny is watching TV alone" this is also a bug :)

- "cafe's not working for me at all" - this has been fixed in-dev for a while now! it will be part of the next update :) If you want to have it fixed before then, just add a way for customers to access the front side of the counters that the barista places the drink on - the bug is that they're only accessible from the front side in the release version.

- "fooling around with and playing an online game with someone should also impact the Social tab." - it already should! there might be a bug though, so i'm noting it down :)

- "would also be nice to track the things Tinies do and count them towards the goal progression, even if the progression is not chosen at that moment." - I've been mulling over this for a good long while, but I'm still divided on it.

I hope that's every major question answered! :) I know you're also in the Discord as well, so feel free to respond to this message there if you want a more open discussion or just.. don't like Steam's awful BBCode formatting, or something haha