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There's the low-scale higher-poly models like the foliage, characters, buildings, and then there's the higher scale low-detail terrain itself. It feels like the details and terrain are visually separate in the sense that one is not attached to the other. It's almost as if you glitched out of the playable world in a game and entered the low-resolution "filler" area not meant to be seen up close by anyone, populated only by randomly spread detail models, whole thing meant only to be observed from a distance. I understand that low-poly terrain was a stylistic choice and I see how it would be aesthetically pleasing, but in this case it's the difference in scale causing too much contrast.
That aside, the ore mining areas also look a bit out of place as they're generated as exact squares every time while the rest of the terrain is more "dynamic" in shape.
In the interface, I'd say you've nailed the look of the widget in the bottom left and the options menu (other than the tooltips toggle seeming to be either too far to the left or right to be perfectly aligned). The rest, especially the commandments list, bring my mind back to the scale issue. There's a lot of wasted space that makes the interface panels look too "separate" from the contents.
This might just be nitpicking/whining, but it's what stood out to me. I find it difficult to explain what just seems off, but I hope it helps.
+1
+1
+1
Agree
Some little things I noticed:
- the camera rotating could be a bit faster. The highest setting still feels a little too slow.
- there's no graphics options ingame
- the delay between hovering over a city/hut icon and the infobox appearing feels way too long
+1
If the alpha play through is intended to be 15-30 minutes, there should be a way to sticky the commandments. It becomes a click grind to refresh the commandments after about a minute of 3x play. Getting a semi-stable set of villages seems to require several commandments, so this would be a great help, and would add to the faraway god vibe, which is hard to muster when I'm furiously reentering commands every minute.
TL;DR: If I'm inputing a commandment that is already in effect, it would be have nice to have an auto refresh toggle somewhere.
Also, when I'm looking at the happiness indicator, sometimes it just says something like "baby" in red. Is the village in question sad because it had a baby and babes are hard work, or is the village sad because it's aching to make a a baby? It's unclear. But it'd be nice to know.
The reason for this is that we set out to make commandments that mutate and become forgotten over time since they're not needed anymore. The game world will evolve more in the future (it's pretty static as it is now), so the same commandments won't be viable forever. If you live in an overpopulated world for example making more babies won't be the best strategy, since they will deplete their resources. Of course, we could let you decide that, but that would go against our aesthetic that the people have their own will. So in short, making the same commandments over and over is not an intended way to play the game in the future.
But, frustration is not the intent of our system. We've felt the same grievances as you do. So, we're going to add a commandment legacy so you can write the same commandment again without a click fest. This our mockup of how it will look like[i.imgur.com] (the one to the right is the new legacy window). You will be able to browse all of your old commandments and with a single click activate it. We hope that this will help you somewhat, when you want to write the same commandment again.
Also, it's worth noting that the commandment system will expand shortly with the association feature (which we've talked about in an earlier dev blog update[eatcreatesleep.net]).
What we aim to do is that you won't be doing the same commandments over and over, but experiment and evolve over time.
If the follower has many unfulfilled needs they're unhappy. We've tried to explain this in the tooltip in the happiness window, but perhaps its not clear enough?
Also, we're aiming to make this feedback more granular in the future, and not just color coded by the way.
For instance, I wanted my tribe to attempt to cultivate more trees, and to hold nature in high priority. So I did "Desert Prioritize Forest". I don't think that helped. So I just did one commandment for every group I could select to get them to "prioritize forest". I don't think that worked, and they ended up flooding the entire island with the river. Can forests only exist on the edge of rivers? Because that's a little silly. Sure they need water, but they don't need to be swampland.
Furthermore, what should I do to get them to feed themselves? Must I actually instruct them to feed themselves? I was attempting to get them to cultivate more farmland within forest areas by getting them to grow forests, which made sense to me. Are my tribals really so self destructive?
So it might be the AI or it might be the interface. Perhaps more things to select? I imagine that's something you'd intend to do at any rate, but more helpful choices would be nice. And, again, more clear phrasing.
I even tried "overfed prioritize the hungry" to try and get them to evenly distribute the food amongst one another by implying that I was a just, loving god who requires his followers to be generous and for people to share. But that seemed to make everything even worse.
That feature is not currently possible, to plant trees that is. However, it's been expressed several times by other players and it's not outside of the believable. If you can chop down trees you should be able to plant them as well, right? We can't promise that it will be implemented, but we're discussing it.
But basically the environment symbols stands for areas, so if you tell someone to prioritize forests they will focus on doing actions in forests.
Flooding is mainly due to the rain. The ecological system isn't fully implemented, and not really balanced either. We've just completed some balancing tools so the non-programmers (artists in other words) in the team can crunch numbers on balancing. We won't fix the ecological implementation next week, but we'll at least look at if we can increase the forests. It's not meant to be huge desert islands (if your followers aren't out to chop all the trees that is).
They are somewhat self destructive, yes. But they're controlled by their needs, it's basically a big list which they shuffle about. It was loosely modelled on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs[en.wikipedia.org]. So your commandments affect their need list.
So, to simplify the system a bit; if a follower has "giving food to others" as their no. 5 they will get to it eventually, but "eventually" might mean that all your other poor and hungry followers will starve. So you tell the greedy one to share it right away, and then that "need" will go to the top.
The phrasing is tricky since what we call a "symbol" is three things: mechanics, image and text. In the prototype from Spring 2014 (you can get it on Game Jolt if you're curious) we used only text, but text becomes ridiculous in a modular system (especially with the planned feature called "Associations", which we've talked about in dev blog #11[eatcreatesleep.net]). So, it's hard to pinpoint the exact meaning. However, that's not an excuse for not trying. So we'd gladly hear more feedback on what you think symbols mean.
Your commandment that reads "overfed prioritize the hungry" should work, that's how we build up our welfare system in our game sessions at least! It all depends on how much food the givers have. We suspect though that the distributors might give away too much, so they become almost self destructive in their selflesness. Again, something that we'll take a look at next week.
I think a village chief or an elder of some sort with unchangeable priorities would be interesting. He could have a random set of priorities, like he may prioritize the well-being of his people above all else, or he might prioritize personal wealth, or the dominance of his tribe over others (I really hope you intend to introduce other tribes at some point), or strict devotion to you, or whatever. This would give some character to the tribe, so they're not just mindless ants vaguely obeying your whims.
When you make a new commandment, it would be him receiving it and not the entire tribe as if they were some kind of hive-mind ant colony. And he would relay your commandment, but possibly tweaked to suit his own priorities depending on his devotion. So either he might tweak a commandment asking your tribe to prioritize the forest, he might be a warmonger and interpret this to mean that you want the tribe to go out and slay a neighboring tribe living in the forests and steal their land. Or you might order that your tribe attack another, and he might be a more peaceful man, and interpret this to mean that the tribe must simply shun the other village.
Possibly you could be given the choice of having an elder relay orders, which could improve efficiency and the likelihood that any commandment you make would at least be followed in whatever form it gets relayed. Or you go with the enigmatic direct communication to your followers, which, as has been pointed out, is somewhat confusing and suspect in terms of efficiency, but your words would not be twisted.
Another possibility that has been mentioned is permanent commandments. I'm not saying we get to go crazy and permanently have a million of them, but maybe just give us one to serve as an overriding defining commandment for the entire religion?
Also already stated, belief. I think belief should be a commodity, and the more belief you have from your followers, the more immediate and direct their obedience is. When (please please please) other tribes come into play, belief could even be a factor useful for takeovers of the other tribes, and assimilation.
A further factor of the power of belief could be the ability to perform some miracles. When you're just starting out, these could range from a small bounty of food to a slightly rich seam of ore in the mines, but escalate to the parting of waters and the razing of enemies when you're in the endgame.
The premise for Crest is really that each city is its own city state, it's a bit underdeveloped now but that is basically how it works. For example they only mate with their own. But there are some actions that are interconnected such as cannibalism (you can eat people in another city) and giving resources (that's why you can see distributors walk across the map with food sometimes).
Your suggestions are similar to what we discussed when we revised our mechanics back in early autumn, 2014 (you can check that out in our earliest dev blogs if you want). We've a lot more design than what we're able to implement at this point, in late autumn last year we decided to focus on the core aspects and make them polished. We'd rather have a smaller but stable game than a huge mess of over promised potential.
However, we've design for different schools of thought (that they would argue over the correct way of interpreting your commandment), war, trade and other inter-city relationships. So in the beginning you'd have one city and as it develops different cities grow apart and creates all kinds of worries and laughter (depending on your outlook on life, of course!).
But, as stated earlier, this is outside of our current scope. If Crest manage to do well financially after we launch to "full release" we're definitely going to make an expansion. This is, as you probably understand our passion project. We'd like to expand on it as much as we are able, but we have to be realistic, for now. ;)
That is certainly an interesting idea, we'll bring it up during our next meeting. But as always, no promises. :)
Yeah, belief as a commodity is another subject we've touched upon before when we were in the design phase of the project. We'd like to expand on that in an expansion as well.
Regarding any direct influence on the world the short answer is simply no. We want to keep the feeling that you can't directly influence the world in any way. We'd rather polish and perfect the commandment system, so it feels rich and meaningful to interact with.