Well... I can already see where this one is going. Yet another game I'll have to try to forcibly ignore, and then occasionally I'll give in, only remember - far too many hours later - exactly why I swore it off last time.
More than enough potential to tantalize, with bits and pieces executed well enough to make you *want* to hope that the payoff is just one more scene away... But ultimately it's just so god-forsakenly slow and tedious that it would actually bring more value to my life if it was utter shite. At least that way I wouldn't be tempted by it.
Honestly, dev... The good news is that this is still real early. If you fix it now, you'll have to throw out the least amount of work. Things that need addressed...
- Movement. I know it's a fine line between making it take an age and a half to do anything, and smashing any sense of space as the player insta-teleports between random backgrounds. As a sandbox game, this is kind of just an inherent problem with no easy solution... but it doesn't need to be this bad.
- You should really ask yourself if all the various little hallways really *need* to be there. If it's not a place that's important to have a spatial sense for, just remove it.
- The more common it is you need to go somewhere, or do something, the easier it should be. For example, why doesn't passing time at the end of the day automatically take you back to your room and sleep?
- Make it as easy and quick as possible for players to determine where they want to go. Less fruitless wandering means less wasted time moving. And if actually going somewhere always has a payoff, it makes it *so* much easier to deal with. To that end...
- Information. It's good that you tried to address this with the quest log and tracker, but... it's not enough, but a long shot. It's not just about the info being available, but being *easily* available. Think how many clicks it takes to actually figure out what to do next. Think about how easy it is to forget just one little thing in the process of gathering the information.
- Take everything possible out of a menu and slap it right on the screen. Not everything needs to be just lists either. You can do things like add visual clues to characters on-screen that have new interactions available too. And you can keep the menus too, for completeness, while the main screen just functions as HUD . You can keep clutter down by only showing information that is immediately actionable.
- The goal here should be to make it take zero extra time to figure out *something* they can do next. You don't need to achieve this 100% of the time, but it shouldn't be so far away that it sounds impossible either. This isn't that hard either. It's good enough if, at a glance, you can see who you might want to talk to *right now* and where you have to go to do it. The time between dialogue and moving around is more than enough to passively absorb that info.
- This is the least important, but I figured I'd throw it out there. Minigames... Again I appreciate your skip (at least for xp), but... If a player doesn't want to play a minigame, do you think they want to have to spend more days grinding?
- A setting is your friend here. Let those who aren't interested outright turn the minigames off and get max benefit from it. By throwing it behind a setting, you can sidestep the issue of minigame-enjoyers being slapped in the face with a max-benefit skip.
I really do mean it when I say you're in a great position to fix these things, major as they are. I mean, even if you don't do any of this, your event sequencing/dependency code needs some serious testing/fixing anyway
. May as well rip the band-aide off and just go for it, since the time lost won't ever be less than now.
