Interlude - WEEK 18 : Plan The Future (Analysis Of Feedback)

[DEVLOG] Week 18

Patch Notes [18.0]

• Rewrite of in-game text's by Abyssal Novelist
• Save File Import & Export Feature by Alex Munoz
  • EDIT [18.1] : this is a bit cursed, clipboard (copy/paste) does not work in Godot Web project so I had to make a Javascript app inside the Godot app for this feature... at least it works now 🤷
• Tiny fixes by me

Coming Next: Boss Battle 👀

Plan For The Future (Feedback)

Building an incremental game is a lot of more work and depth than I anticipated! 

After finishing the base mechanics of the prestige system last week, I went to look for feedback on /r/incremental_games/.

"Overall, I like the game and think you have the general progression right here in terms of your core loop of getting to Infinity on all the resources, then resetting to achieve faster progression. I think you could smooth things out for the player by making it more clearer what the player should be focusing on achieving next, maybe breaking up gameplay into more phases/milestones, and reduce the amount of clicking required to advance at various stages."

Below is a a new summary list of TODO features and Open Questions based on feedback comments. Let me know if I overlooked something?

TODO

New Content

• Finale Boss Battle & Ending
• Cat dialogue after subsequent prestige's

Ambience

• New Font that looks good in full-screen
• Refine the story, lore & dialogue
• Integrate new music tracks

Quality Of Life

• Export & Import save file data
• Filter Resources & Diary lists by categories
  
• Setting mute music should be clickable right away
• Setting to disable unlock animation, not to be confused with shake effect
  
• "Click All" button, but sometimes you don't want to make swordsmen
• "Infinity" resources can be decreased which is a bit tedious to manage

Accessibility

• Warning that the save file will be reset if local storage is disabled
• Credits in-game (Contributions, Assets, Supporters)
• Some text coloring (gray, blue) may be difficult to read on some screens
• Some UI/UX design choices should be reworked / improved
• Move all text's to CSV file(s) & Localization
  

Bugs

• Spellcheck the game text's & integrate spellcheck plugin
• Lag spikes when shaders are loading for the first time
• Leaving full-screen without in-game settings de-syncs the setting
• Some MacOS devices, shaders crash the game (related to game engine itself)
• Game does not load in Incognito Chrome (not sure why yet)
• Game pop-outs on Firefox (related to game engine itself)
• Offline calculations not capped at "Infinity", e.g. Masons -> Swordsman -> Soulstone interaction 
• Some people losing save data? (was not able to replicate yet)

Game Design

• Early Game
  • RNG of early resource gathering can be a bit frustrating
  • Flint & Fiber are not used after early game
• Population Management
  • Lot of clicking before first prestige (before smart assign charm effect)
  • Farming infinities with Population management gets repetitive
• Darkness Content
  • Pre-Darkness section unfolds a bit too fast
  • Darkness section is made irrelevant by "Housemaxxing" strategy
  • Spirit & Essence substances are not impactful after first prestige
• Prestige Content
  • Subsequent prestige's can be completed a bit too fast
  • Prestige is not intuitive, players use it without collecting all infinities
  • Diary loses meaning after first prestige (repeats same entries)
  • Clicking Charm effects are much stronger than AFK Charm effects
  • Charm descriptions / effects are not clear to some players
• Endgame
  • "Craft Soul" needs to be reasonably reachable

Mobile

• Mouse hover information is not easily accessible when playing from phone

That is a lot to think about!

The two biggest problems, I think... are the facts:

• the scope for this project is too big, given my limited free time for gamedev
• the development process it currently not optimal, as discussed in WEEK 6

Perhaps the game will never be perfect, but the development continues!  ❤️