Hi, I been enjoying your game and it's overall story/concept. However after my current playthrough of the game I'm just curious if improvement to the UI will be implied next patch or generally quality of life for players? (listed below are suggestions/issues I faced)
I think we "imply" we'll fix it every patch.
Kidding...kidding; yes, it does need work and there's a list of things we have to fix.
1. Will there be a quest log/information's page? throughout the game I had minor trouble following the story (not because it was boring) but instead not knowing where the locations are and when to go their. I understand the locations are told via through the story however some players may have skipped the overall story for the porn. Which in turns leave them confused trying to figure out where and when the next story location is. (What I'm trying to suggest is there should either be a quest log/chapter log which simply remind the player where their next location is for story advancement.) The second issue at hand is an information's log, what I'm talking about isn't the "Players stats" or "Girls stats" but just information's on required items within the cave for upgrades and upkeep/production. I had to go back and fourth from the hardware shop to the cave just to see the required resources for the upgrade. Alongside I had issue keeping track of the "upkeep" for my overall lair/girls I understand we receive a report at the end of the day for upkeep. However This can cause a problem if a player for example didn't stockpile on enough milk and mismanaged by upgrading their lair which in turn forces a player to guess how much milk they need depending on the amount of thrall they have. (Before I get called out I understand you can mass buy milk from the store because currently you don't need money for a lot of things expect for a couple of boilers and the occasion pump for lair upgrades, and you don't need to buy food cause your thrall only consume milk and can easily steal large batches of food for free. However some players may not pay attention to their upkeep because they don't have easy access to their upkeep before the day ends and don't want to write down the math on paper to keep track of their upkeep. Yes I had to write down on paper my upkeep and do the math for it.)
Yes, we are going to be adding a quest log. In fact, one of the biggest things that broke old saves was when we refactored the object model in the code for the girls to include a "stage" number. So, 0, 1, 2, 3, etc; which let the code know when you entered an area if you were on that girl's initial meeting, more advanced interaction, etc. This will also let our Quest Log know how far you have gotten with each girl and thus which hints to display. This is still in the works and a bit buggy so it has not been included in release as yet. You are correct that it can get confusing and it is one of our top priorities to get worked on in this quarter.
We have code that is supposed to change the color of resources that will under run by the next day to red to help you spot a problem; but for some reason the style isn't being applied. We had to back burner that in favor of a couple other issues, but it is coming and you're spot on to point it out.
2. General Quality of life. Throughout the playthrough the grind to get the required resources for upgrades can get repetitive of course the whole purpose of the game is to grind and although it's sounds stupid but on occasion people can forget to press the the button to gather resources at the end of the day. Which in turns leave me to suggest that when the day ends a warning should pop up telling the player that they forgot to assigned their thrall to gather resources or forgot to milk/breed their girls these warnings could be turned off by the player via options. Another grind that can get repetitive is the breeding of the girls, a main factor here which get annoying for a player, is the player has to scroll down through a text wall every time they breed a girl (which ofc can get worse each time the player upgrades the breeding limit for a girl) if possible there should be an option to autonomic breed a girl similar to the milk option. The autonomic breeding option can work by having the player select how many girls they want to breed then the number of time they want to breed them. One final quality of life I like to bring up is the possibility of adding autosaving/more save slots. I accidently lost two hour of progress after I forgot to save and was forced to restart the game
((Example of how autonomic breeding can be implied)) "How many girls do you want selected for breeding two, three, four or more" "You Selected three ---> (Input the selected three girls) "How many times do you want to breed the girls, two times, three times or four times" "you selected two times ----> (Input energy's cost and amount of minions birthed after the automation).
A pop up reminder is a great idea! I'll pass that along to the team. We're working on a way to allow auto breeding that is balanced as the energy cost for it can wipe you out real quick, so like you suggest, perhaps a sliding scale of how many and maybe check boxes for which girl, so you still control who you focus on (the number of times whey have been bred will eventually add some bonuses).
We've never considered an auto save, but I'll pass that idea to our Dev (I don't personally know what it takes to set that up). Really good idea though!
3. UI. I understand the UI is currently being worked on and possibility the last thing on the development list. However the overall UI is a complete mess. It can be an eyesore for players and the locations listed "feels all over the place" there are occasions where I clicked on a location only to realizes nothing can be done within said location and I'm forced to backtrack my way to the beach and find the location I actually wanted to go (This is only a problem I faced within the early game/mid game however it got worse when through Kim story as I was running around like a headless chicken trying to find where I'm suppose to go)
Yeah, we've looked at how some other Twine games did maps, but that's still a ways off for us; we agree as a team though that it's clunky and unintuitive at this point.
Overall the game is on the correct path for development and I see a lot of potential for the game as a whole. I understand you as the developer are focusing on more important content such as combat, tech, balancing, story, etc. But I hope my playthrough gives you an insight on how you can improve your game even further in development.
Sorry if my post is a mess or comes off as rude it's my first time actually posting a suggestion to a game, thank you for reading my post and good luck in development!
Doesn't come off rude at all, this is all very insightful and while a few things are issues we're aware of, we appreciate you bringing them up. You noted some really good ideas and pointed out a couple things we hadn't considered; that's very helpful. As we playthrough to test, we get blind to things we dismiss or because we've memorized what to do/where to go next without realizing it won't be intuitive for a new player, so thank you. Please provide any further insight you have, it all goes to making this a better experience for everyone.