With yesterday's release, I thought now would be a good time to write about what the next steps are for Swarmdustry. This is not a roadmap, this is just a list of a few critical next steps.
First of all, thank you to everyone who has tried out the game so far! Thank you streamers as well, watching you guys play the game gave me a lot of good feedback.
Three things are very clear right now:
1. The mover system is not fun.
2. The tutorial is confusing and not newbie friendly enough.
3. German and Japanese translations were poorly done.
First off, the mover system just ain't fun. That's the overwhelming opinion of the community. People seem to enjoy every type of worker except movers. They are unintuitive and require too many clicks to set up something that should be simple and a core base mechanic of the game. And to make matters worse, when you saturate a trail full of movers, the system becomes functionally similar to Factorio's belts. I'm still exploring solutions for this with the community. Ideally, the entire system would not be scrapped. Just like Snatchers didn't replace grabbers, I'd prefer a solution where the movers could remain as an option to accomplish the same thing. One thing's for sure about movers, the next patch will contain an update where they will remain bound to trail buffers just like miners are bound to depots, eliminating the need of a worker bay in the early game. This is a temporary solution to at least solve the unintuitive part of the problem and hopefully make the system a little easier for new players.
Second, the tutorial needs a rework. It's too confusing for some people. It also suffers from a few issues, such as being able to complete future objectives before they even appear on screen.
Third, some of the localization seems to be badly done. Translations were done by different contractors but it looks like German and Japanese players have reported bad translations, while the rest of the languages seem to be fine. At least I haven't seen any reports to the contrary. So localization will need a second pass once the tutorial has been reworked. I'm currently in talks with specialized translation agencies to get this resolved, but it might take a while.
Now of course there are plenty of other things to improve on. My ToDo list currently has 83 items on it, but I believe the 3 above are some of most pressing matters.
Again, thanks everyone who believes in this project!
The Swarm must grow.