Lost in Athilidus - Prototype

after 2 years, still an amazing prototype that looks complete. how did you do it and are you still working on it?

Hey there! I finally managed to give the game some good testing and here I am, ready to give you some feedback! The game looks very cute and I'm curious to see where it will be going! ♥

So my first run was pretty wild and I'm afraid I managed to break the game several times... I had prepared a detailed feedback to describe the bugs but it's awfully long so I was kind of ashamed to post it, haha. I will try to be brief (spoiler: I failed miserably) and if you need help to understand more specifically where those bugs occurred I'll gladly send you the longer version with everything I did and how I did it.

First, some minor annoyances:

-The screens/pop ups often cover each others when triggered at the same time, which is fine if the new/most recent screen covered the others but it's the other way around, example: you're collecting a resource from the building screen and the quest completion gets triggered but the quest screen appears behind the building screen, so you have to close that first. Same when you want to assign people to jobs, the screen appears behind the building screen again. Also when you select a building in construction to see the time that's left, and then you click for example the build shop, the little timer screen remains on top of the shop screen. So yeah, it just needs a way to recognize the priorities of the screens (the most recent should go on top of all the others).

-Whenever you select a building to construct it and it gets temporarily placed on an existing one which is stil in the building process, it's very hard to drag it away for some reason, you have to find a very specific point to click and drag otherwise it will just keep dragging the whole screen.

Bugs

-Sometimes buildings will get stuck in the building process after the timer reaches zero, they will remain semi-transparent and the speed up button is still there with cost zero, but decreasing overtime beyond zero (like -1, -2 etc.), which means when you click it, you can gain an unlimited amount of hearts rather than spending them.

-Another bug appears if you trigger the previous one: suddenly the other speed ups for resource production stop working. If you press the speed up button it will consume hearts but without having any speed up effect.

-When you wait for a resource to be produced and the building screen with the timer is open, when it's finished and the button "collect" appears, if you click it, the production doesn't restart but you still have the "collect" button there ready which again can grant you limitless rewards as you can collect the resource again without any limit or waiting time.

Edit: with the resources that take longer to produce this bug sometimes happens even while the building screen is not open.

-The quests for producing materials don't always register the fact that I produced said material, especially those that take long to make because they often trigger the aforementioned bug. The only way to make sure they count, is to always speed up the production by spending hearts.

-Sometimes while building something, after I select "confirm" on a chosen spot, the building just stays green and both the "cancel" and "confirm" buttons disappear and I can't interact with anything in the game anymore, I can just move the building around without placing it, nor exiting the building mode. I just have to restart the whole game.

Oh, I tried also the downloadable version and from my first try, it seems like only the production bug occurs (the one where you can collect the resource forever without the production restarting), the others don't!

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Some personal suggestions and ideas

-Having an inventory for all the stuff you can produce in your town (like the materials, goods produced by citizens, etc.) and ways to use them.

-Making the materials actually involved in the building process would be interesting, for example (like for a house you'd need 10 normal bricks and 10 floor tiles or something like that).

-The construction/production times. Some are way too long. This may be okay for an idle mobile game where you check it once in a while and let the game do the rest on its own, but for pc it's going to become tedious having to wait 30-45 minutes for a resource or building to be ready (and it's not very rewarding to only get one single item for all that waiting). You'd have to keep spending hearts for everything you do and I don't know how easy it's gonna be, since I don't see many ways of earning them yet. You could make every resource easier to make, like taking between a few seconds and a minute to produce, and maybe put an internal storage in the building where the materials accumulate until a certain maximum, and after it reaches the max, the production will halt? So you have to collect them manually once in a while to keep the production going. Just an idea to make the production faster and a bit more engaging, but still having a limit to how much is produced.

-The three different currencies. I really like the idea. Is there a particular reason why there are three of them? Is there a difference in how they're earned? I feel like it's a bit confusing right now since they can all be used to buy buildings for example, but without knowing the reason why you're using one or the other. I don't know if it's already in your plans, but I feel like it would make more sense if each one had a specific purpose, maybe? For example, one is the main currency, used to buy buildings and everything else inside your town, the other is only used to speed things up, buy boosts and in general things that just make the game easier. And the last one maybe some sort of special currency used just for special purchases? Like, I don't know maybe once in a while a travelling merchant passes by and you buy rare stuff from them with that currency? Or to trade with other towns? Like some sort of foreign or universal currency that is used outside of your own town? I don't know, just something that makes them more distinct from one another.

-I'd also love to see dialogues between characters!

Okay, sorry for the super long comment! I'd really love to know more about the game! I'm curious to know who is the main character, how they ended up there, the story of this magical world and all! So I will patiently wait for updates! Keep up the good work! ♥

Very neat game -
Bug - allocating people to jobs the people screen is behind the work/output list

I really like the feel of the environment and the building is mechanics are great!

I'm not so sure about the building shop mechanics. I was unsure what to do, perhaps it's just not fleshed out yet or I didn't follow it.

Great stuff.

Hey! I played your game a bit (browser version). Good work! This is a lot of progress.

You asked for bugs and ideas, so here you are.

Bugs:

• In the credits menu, if I click a link to someone's page, and then click back to the browser, the contents of the credits window will scroll up and down as I move my cursor (I clicked "Event Manager by Ben").
• Mouse wheel scrolling in menus is really slow and affects the zoom in the background (I think that you mentioned this at some point in regards to mobile).
• When clicking "Jane's House" and viewing the text behind the character portraits, the text for Jane ends at "specializes" and I can't scroll to see the rest.
• I built a house on the character and never saw them move after that. I actually never saw the character move at all; not sure what triggers it.
• I built Mark's house before the quest and didn't get credit for it when the quest began. Same with the table and bench.
• I can build multiple of some items that sound like they should be unique (multiple "Jane's Houses", for example). I actually noticed that I had multiples of these characters in the "hire" screen as well.
• Fullscreen mode doesn't scale the game to fit my screen; it adds black to the right and left (I know that this description sucks).

Things that I would add next if I were the developer:

• Tooltips that tell you what things are and do when you scroll over them (like the strawberries, hearts, etc).
• A lore background that explains why/how I am here, and what I'm doing.
• A form of adversity.
• Something to do while waiting for stuff to build. I know that you can skip them, but I guess that I'm assuming that that's a "premium" sort of thing? Without it, you're just sitting there. Perhaps some sort of active way to earn the currency to speed up production, or some other mechanic to focus on? Especially if this is going to be released on PC (I can't think of many games that you start and let sit there, or revisit later on PC).
• Not sure how much of a lift that this would be given how you do the art, but it would feel better to be able to rotate stuff like benches, tables, etc.

Other:

• Typo in description: "...on mu YouTube channel Tamara Makes Games."

Again, good work! Looking forward to seeing where the game goes!