Just wanted to give a really special thank-you to everybody who checked out the game during this weeks next fest! It's still going, but I've already gotten a lot of valuable feedback.
It's been a really special moment for me I was not expecting and I appreciate every single person that took time to check out the page, wishlist or play the demo. This has really been special for me and a experience I never really felt working in the 'proper' games industry for 10 years.
Even the people that had a negative impression or didn't like it at all, I think that's just a part of game development!
Some things I'm learning over this week that came up from multiple people -
Discord Community - Getting lots of people joining the discord which is SUPER valuable for me, I think its important to build a community way before release, even if the community is super tiny. Thank you to anybody that's been joining!
Its not as buggy as I thought - And so far nothing game-breaking from what I'm seeing, which is a big relief. There's definitely some bugs still but nothing that's breaking the game which is critical. The game is in alpha so new bugs will be happening as I add in new mechanics/designs (Thats what having a beta branch is useful for though).
Start Game - Find more things to do at the very start. This should be doable especially for a simulator; Simulators are all about the grind, so I think we can definitely experiment with this in the future. One idea that has been floated for a long time is finding scrap/junk or maybe a way to gather bait for the starting area.
Biomes need more stuff to do - I fully agree with this, and never was the intention to just release as they are now. Definitely will look into this when I move into alpha 5 and do another pass on biomes. For now I'll organize all the ideas for a attack plan!
Fishing Mechanic - This is going to be the most difficult thing, some people enjoy its simplicity, others don't. I fully expect this will a endless battle and I'm also not a game-designer or coder by profession, so it'll be a delicate struggle. I'll keep carefully adding more layers to this, without trying to make it frustrating because you repeat this action so much, its essentially the resource mining of the game. Absolutely will keep adding and tweaking this over every major alpha segment.
QOL - Got some nice little bits of feedback that doesn't require major amounts of work to tweak, but can help make things feel better like fast-travel waypoints being more convenient and getting rid of invisible walls with actual physical walls (Destroyed ruins).
Options - Already had some great suggestions to make the difficulty and QOL better, and implemented some to release in a hotfix soon - Such as letting you choose how long each hour of the day is (Default is 30 seconds). Also warning messages about when the end of day is close.
Tutorial - I was avoiding a robust tutorial until the game was close to completion, but I might want to rethink this. I need to do another pass on the tutorial and make sure things are covered I didn't show or didn't show well. My end goal for tutorials is having actual videos play, we'll wait until closer to launch for that.
Ideas/Suggestions - TONS of new ideas from the community and people joining - I always welcome ideas - But also caution it doesn't mean every idea is going to actually get added. But I add all of them to the idea board. As I develop the game more, these ideas suddenly can stand out or work.
Dog - Surprised quite a few comments asking about feeding/housing dog - I held off on Dog because I wasn't sure about enthusiasm for this, but seems like I can definitely schedule some deeper work soon! (Also giving the ability to choose different companions in the future, like a goose).
Voting - In the future, I want the community to help me see where the most interest is for future content, you can't put polls on steam however. So I'll try to find a way to link a poll page through the games main menu - Otherwise join our discord and you can participate in the future! I'm very inspired by the dev on Schedule 1 doing votes/choices to the community for what he should be focusing on.
Again big thanks to everybody, I appreciate this so much. I can't promise rapid changes or content immediately especially when I'm juggling my full time job, but I'll definitely be trucking along. I'm super super inspired and looking forward to working on the game any chance I get.