Hello! It's been a while since the last update because I've been very busy on what is basically a full rework of the game's UI, which you can see above. There's still some bugs to work out, but if you're interested in getting an early look and providing feedback you can try it out on the beta branch:
- Find Factory Town Idle in your Steam Library
- Right click on it and choose 'Properties'
- Navigate to the 'Betas' tab
- Select 'beta' or 'NONE' to switch between branches
Save files are compatible between full and beta branches, and you can switch back anytime you like, but some balance changes were made in this version and it has the chance of instability, so if you want to protect your main file you may want to start a new town for beta tests.
A little background: I felt that the old UI required quite a lot of clicking between tabs, and wasn't flexible enough to provide some really important quality-of-life features like viewing the full production chain for an item or recipe, or global text search. Whenever I tried out a brand new file I found the first ten minutes involved a lot of hunting around between tabs, which didn't feel like a great new player experience.
So I felt the solution was to create one central panel that could display all recipes: Harvesting, Production, Cultivation, Prospecting, Markets, and Trading. This allows players to apply a filters via item selection or text that can show any of those recipes in a single panel, so you can identify bottlenecks much faster.
Here's some key features of this change:
- There are buttons at the top that let you change the filter to just 'Harvesting' or 'Markets', as a convenience that mimics the old tab buttons. But the key is you're no longer forced to view things in separate category groups.
- Top-level Building categories (Harvesting, Cultivation, Trading etc) can also be expanded or collapsed like other section headers
- As you scroll downward, the headers for the top-most section will remain on screen until that section has been fully scrolled off the top - making it easier to access the parent building's settings for the recipes you are looking at
- Clicking an item icon will immediately apply a filter that shows all recipes that use that item as an input or an output
- Town data has been compacted to fit in the top left, so the full vertical scroll area can be used for the main recipe panel.
- The Clickables panel is gone, but instead every recipe is clickable (just click on the big green arrow on any recipe)
- The Quests panel was taking up a lot of space, so it now fits neatly in the left panel.
- The inventory panel is still visible all the time.
- Buildings, Research, and Upgrades have individual pop-up panels and can be accessed via hotkey.
- There are new windows that can show a big list of quests and recent notifications.
- Hovering over the building add or remove buttons will show the current ingredients required, so it's easier to discover why a building construction is slowed
It's a lot of changes, but I tried my best to keep it as similar as possible to the old layout while providing all the quality-of-life improvements. Again, would be great to get a bunch of feedback on it while it's on the beta branch so if you are interested in helping out please give it a try!
If you are on Discord, it's my preferred place to collect feedback & chat about changes:
https://discord.gg/t3KXHD3scF
Specifically, there's a #beta-branch channel where I post beta patch notes and collect details from beta testers.
Thanks for playing and hope to have this on the main branch in the next week or so!