Having sunk a few hours in, I'm pretty impressed with this game. I think it does a lot more right than wrong.
Thank you for taking the time to go through this. Since you provided a lot of specific examples of what you liked and didn't, I'm going to address some of what you said.
-There seem to be a lot of people complaining about signposting of the next step in the game and UI issues. The UI in this game isn't bad. It's actually pretty good most of the time, but there are some inconsistencies that stand out because they don't seem to follow the same rules of UI design as the rest of the game does. For instance, most events that advance the story or that the player has not tried yet are marked with a big red "!". However, there are a handful of instances where this is not the case and those exceptions are disproportionately frustrating because they spoil the flow, even if they are rare.
-The game UI is not 100% consistent in what indicators mean. In the workshop, for instance, there will be a white highlight around The Pen if you haven't used it yet that day/night when you mouse over it. If you click on it when there is no white highlight, it only brings up a message saying that you've already used that action. You cannot waste your time trying to draw more than is possible. When navigating the park at night, however, a white highlight means that a location can be interacted with at all. The white highlight around the BBB, for instance, doesn't go away when there's nothing new there and it can feel very "adventure gamey" trying to figure out where the next chain in the story is if you need to go back and check every location. As with adventure games, sometimes the in-text clues adequately signpost what is going to happen next and where, but sometimes they do not.
These things are more consistent than you think, at least under the hood. When the player is
inside any location, all the markers work as intended: new items have the "!" and things which can't be interacted at all never highlight or display a negative message. When the player is
on the map, they only do the second, not highlighting if they can't be interacted with. (We didn't want to restrict visits to the BBB, Mine, or Tavern like we do with the girls, so yes, those specific examples you gave will always highlight and let you go there even if there's nothing new.) The other piece is more of a problem, because we don't currently have a good way to know
on the map if there's anything new
inside the locations it leads to. There's something I've been experimenting with, but A) I worry about load times if the game has to rip through every single location to determine this every time the map opens, and B) an update of that magnitude would require everyone starting a new game...which is not something we ever want to do again. We have to be 115% sure we want to go down that path before we do. And if we do, we'd want it to be toggle-able so that players can still feel clever for solving the problem or using their knowledge of D**y to go to the next right place without being hand-held to get there. But that means more time and effort also.
Switching between the regular park and the epcot is similarly clunky for no reason; why can't I just go straight from the workshop to epcot and straight vice versa? Why do I have to go back to the main menu to load?
How would you do this? Currently you click the door to open the map, then click the icon in the corner to switch to the other park. (The map opens to the last park you were in.) If we added a popup to choose your park every time you clicked the door, that would be an extra choice to make there
every single time. And it wouldn't even reduce the total number of clicks needed if you do want to switch. Our rationale for not putting a load option on the pause menu was because you shouldn't need to load partway through a session of play. There is no missable content in this game, no branching paths, the only thing it would be useful for is save-scumming during the dates, and needless to say we don't want you to do that.
-The interface for the management side of the game desperately needs to have a projected daily profit displayed somewhere.
This is also in the works. We're going to be redoing the laptop interface sometime in the future, we need to decide what the most important data to show there is because there are quite a lot of stats we collect and the more we show, the smaller the text has to be, which can be a pain to view on mobile.
