HTML Looking for early feedback

[Nagozo]

Hi everyone,
after spending quite a while as a player (and lurker), I've finally decided to try and develop my own little project. I don't have a huge amount of time on my hands and this is purely a hobby-thing, so I'm sticking to a text-based game. It's been heavily inspired by Free Cities.

Genre
I'd describe it as a 'text-based management sandbox'. We'll see where it ends up when it comes to fetish content.

Premise
You play as a recently awakened arcane being in a country called Eloria. Initially you start out with nothing but a trusty familiar by your side. It's a sandbox game, so there's not real set goal. The idea is to get as many followers as you can and essentially establish a religion/cult/whatever you want to call it in your name, and eventually control the entire country through it.

Current state
I've been working on it for a little while, but I've only just finished implementing the 'groundworks' in a manner I'm happy with. The game is still very barebones, and I'd say it's more of a proof of concept right now.

Spoiler: Full feature list

You don't have permission to view the spoiler content. Log in or register now.

My request
I'd like to get some feedback early on in development, so that I can make something enjoyable without having to rework massive chunks farther down the line. So, I'd really appreciate any input you guys have for me! It'd be great if some people could check the game out and give me their impressions, bug reports, grammar/spelling mistakes... the whole deal. Any post is welcome. (Also, if anyone has any other tips about development in general, I'm all ears!)

Thanks in advance!
Cheers,
Nagozo

You must be registered to see the links

Edit:

You must be registered to see the links

 

[CarrotCat]

So far the game seems a bit slow started. I traveled between the villages for a while without anything happening.

Initially I was a bit confused about the differences regarding renown, reputation and notoriety in the Travel menu. Turns out there was an explanation at the Home screen, a bit annoying to have to switch back and forth.

I would like to be able to end the week from the Travel menu, though I might be less inclined to later in the game when I assume there will be more things to do.

In the end I managed to get some followers by enabling debug mode.

Also encountered what looked like a missing continue during one of the events. All other events I've seen so far have had a continue button below the event text (in addition to the continue to the far left).

Spoiler: Missing continue

You don't have permission to view the spoiler content. Log in or register now.

Would like to be asked to confirm before the save is deleted. And of course a load save function (which I would be surprised if it wasn't added later in development).

The game is clearly early in development, but I believe it's a good base build on.

Good luck and keep it up!

 

[Nagozo]

So far the game seems a bit slow started

Yeah, the early game is very empty right now. I'm working on adding some interesting stuff to do during the first few in-game weeks, before/just after the player gets their first (few) followers.

Initially I was a bit confused about the differences regarding renown, reputation and notoriety

I've updated the in-game guide to (hopefully) explain those mechanics better; would you say it'd be more useful if there was some context/flavour text on the travel page itself providing more info about them?

Would like to be asked to confirm before the save is deleted. And of course a load save function (which I would be surprised if it wasn't added later in development).

Saving and loading is handled by the engine itself (Twine/SugarCube), so I'll see if I can get confirmation on delete working. However, loading saves should be functional. The 'local' saves won't persist across incognito sessions, but AFAIK saving and loading to/from file should work.

I appreciate your feedback and remarks, it'll probably be a while before I put something out again but this will definitely help me improve the game. Thanks!

 

[CarrotCat]

I've updated the in-game guide to (hopefully) explain those mechanics better; would you say it'd be more useful if there was some context/flavour text on the travel page itself providing more info about them?

Yes, I think it would be nice to have some kind of immediate feedback/info about the possible choices. It could just be a simple mechanically focused tooltip (might be problematic on phones) or to show the same text from the home page at an appropriate location on the travel page (eg. You will harass the people of Bellyn in order to teach them to fear you.). It should at least make it easier to infer consequences for new players and act as a reference for everyone else (especially for all of us that have bad memory and take weeklong pauses from games ).

More indepth explanations are probably better of delegated the guide, just as you've done.

 

[Nagozo]

or to show the same text from the home page at an appropriate location on the travel page

A simple, but fair suggestion: I think I'll do just that. The Travel page needs an update anyway because it's too empty right now, so this'll be a useful addition

 

[Deleted member 207364]

It's always fun to see someone give game development a go. The premise is interesting, it reminds me of Adam & Gaia.
Good luck!

I've written some thoughts and ideas for the game. Maybe you'll find something useful . I know that the game is in early development but I still wrote down pretty much everything I thought of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Spoiler: Thoughts & Ideas

You don't have permission to view the spoiler content. Log in or register now.

Spoiler: Tiny annoyances that would affect a very small amount of people and/or only affects players for a short amount of time

You don't have permission to view the spoiler content. Log in or register now.

 

[Nagozo]

I've written some thoughts and ideas for the game. Maybe you'll find something useful .

Thanks! It's great to get some ideas other than my own

Spoiler: Reactions to your suggestions

You don't have permission to view the spoiler content. Log in or register now.

Aside from all that, I'll probably work on the backstory and worldbuilding in general some more. The incomplete event you mentioned is a bit of forgetfulness on my part; the event doesn't account for players with higher reputations. On that note, I'm still developing the current events as well as adding new ones. As I mentioned in the OP, this is like a hobby project for me so I'm not rushing it. I don't want to burn out of motivation by taking on a huge amount of ideas at once and then getting nothing done, so development will probably be quite slow and steady, but I'll try to incorporate as much of the feedback I get as possible by the next time I drop a download link. Thanks again!