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eeenmachine posted:I think we are lucky in that the feedback has been so similar. Just spitballing, but what if population was tied to earnings instead of building count, and you could continue earning keys after reaching the population required to advance. The key earning rate would go up with each city but you could sit on a "completed" city for as long as you wanted without getting like you were wasting your time. Population being tied to earnings doesn't make much sense to me from a logistical standpoint. I don't mind at all that it's tied to building things- as you said, you want people building and expanding. I'd just look for more ways to increase the number than "build a plot, get 1,000." Bonuses for building in an RCI ratio, as others suggested. Bonuses for types of buildings in your city (which the player would need to pay attention to and lock down as historical- you could put a flavor line in the detail screen for the building saying this building is currently giving your town X bonus so they would know to actually lock it). That sort of thing. For what it's worth, having played for a while now, I've cooled considerably on the issue of moving from city to city. It reminds me a bit of the challenge levels in the first SNES SimCity. If you keep it this way, I'd just come up with names for the cities so it's not City 1, City 2, etc.
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Jan 22, 2017 17:03
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Quick feedback: (playing on an iPad Pro) I cannot tell you how much I absolutely adore the graphical style of the buildings, cars, boats etc. in this game. I seriously want a full blown city builder in this style (i do understand this is not intended to be). The UI is fine. Not stellar but it's fine. Navigating seems a little inconsistent though. For example you have to go a different screen than the prestige screen to see the building unlocks. You can upgrade the city from the main view, but the bank, cars, etc, you have to click on the building. I never played Egg Inc. so I was a little confused what the point was here at first. The building upgrade button needs more explanation, however it became clear after a couple of cities that it plays a big part when the cities are large. In the first couple of cities it felt unnecessary. I have seen friends play clicker games though and after a while it did... erm... click. This definitely has at its core the certain something that makes Niblebit games addicting. Can't. Stop. Playing. I understood the 'historical building' pretty much right away, and a quick experiment confirmed what I expected it to do. One thing I found annoying though was it reset the cute building counters after it was upgraded. I'm thinking making it a historical building should remove it from the upgrade queue at the expense of not being able to level it. Could be a good way to 'manage' the upgrade queue with a built-in drawback. I agree the maps are too large and was surprised there was so much unused space. It didn't turn me off though. I actually like the 'build x buildings' missions. It adds a bit of strategy to it and actually gives me a reason to NOT have the doubler on. It would be nice if it showed me what kind of building I needed though. Took me a while to figure out which one was a starbits for example (although it was pretty obvious once I saw it in that one case - the recycling center was a bit trickier) Ideas: It would be cool to have random uncontrolled surprise things show up that if you see them you can click them for a bonus. For instance a sea monster appears randomly and if you click it you get a big bonus. Or maybe a UFO. This may give more reason to be looking around at the extra space outside your city. Day/night cycles might be neat. I was thinking it might be neat to have disasters. Weather/earthquakes/kaiju show up and you have to rebuild. Bugs: Surprisingly bug free so far. I did run into the 'NaN' bug and I noticed that the affected hospital was rotated from normal. Actually I saw it was rotated first and wondered why you'd have 2 different hospitals so similar and the I saw the NaN bug.  Click here for the full 2048x2732 image  Click here for the full 2048x2732 image
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Jan 22, 2017 17:08
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IllegallySober posted:Population being tied to earnings doesn't make much sense to me from a logistical standpoint. I don't mind at all that it's tied to building things- as you said, you want people building and expanding. I'd just look for more ways to increase the number than "build a plot, get 1,000." Bonuses for building in an RCI ratio, as others suggested. Bonuses for types of buildings in your city (which the player would need to pay attention to and lock down as historical- you could put a flavor line in the detail screen for the building saying this building is currently giving your town X bonus so they would know to actually lock it). That sort of thing. Right now I am having a hard time trying to justify building more than one type of building at a time. The way the upgrades work, it makes more sense for me to upgrade incomes from one type of building, say residential, and focus on building more of that type of building before moving on to commercial or service. If there was a coin incentive to having a relatively equal number of each type of property, that might make people build cities that aren't 100% housing, or 100% stores early on.
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Jan 22, 2017 17:15
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Addition: I'd dearly love it if the game supported rotation on the iPad. Especially on the pro.
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Jan 22, 2017 17:23
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wisdomHNOX posted:Right now I am having a hard time trying to justify building more than one type of building at a time. The way the upgrades work, it makes more sense for me to upgrade incomes from one type of building, say residential, and focus on building more of that type of building before moving on to commercial or service. If there was a coin incentive to having a relatively equal number of each type of property, that might make people build cities that aren't 100% housing, or 100% stores early on. This is what I've been doing. I'm not building on blue or buying any of the business perks until the end. Much, much faster this way.
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Jan 22, 2017 17:37
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Doctor Zero posted:It would be cool to have random uncontrolled surprise things show up that if you see them you can click them for a bonus. For instance a sea monster appears randomly and if you click it you get a big bonus. Or maybe a UFO. This may give more reason to be looking around at the extra space outside your city. oooo, that would be a lot of fun. I can already imagine a bunch of ideas for special rare cars / boats / planes
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Jan 22, 2017 17:38
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What if the population was based off building levels rather than buildings? Then it would go up even without expanding (albeit slower and slower), and you'd still have an incentive to expand.
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Jan 22, 2017 17:42
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eeenmachine posted:What if the population was based off building levels rather than buildings? Then it would go up even without expanding (albeit slower and slower), and you'd still have an incentive to expand. This would be a little better, I guess?
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Jan 22, 2017 18:00
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Which plot type/size provides the Recycling Center? I'd assumed the large blue commercial one but I can't find the drat thing. Another vote for more info in the task list on the fetch quests. 
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Jan 22, 2017 18:43
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IllegallySober posted:Which plot type/size provides the Recycling Center? I'd assumed the large blue commercial one but I can't find the drat thing. Large yellow (services). The building itself has a green trim.
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Jan 22, 2017 18:47
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Enigma posted:Large yellow (services). The building itself has a green trim. Thanks, I'll stop wasting my time on this single large commercial plot then 
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Jan 22, 2017 18:50
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Here it is, for anyone else hunting: You'll notice it took until Level 37 for it to show up for me   Edit: Okay, I'm going to suggest for these missions specifically, one or more of the following needs to happen: A) The rate for the targeted item needs to be increased in the RNG while the mission is active. B) When the item shows up, it's either immediately credited or automatically locked as historical. C) The mission description needs to include the size and type of plot as well as any other info (are some building restricted from showing up until a certain city/level?) This was not a fun mission to complete. For starters, it can't be completed at all until City 5 because you need three large yellow plots to build on (and Cities 1-4 don't have that many). Secondly, as designed, the only real way to complete this is to get to City 5 and build on nothing but large yellow plots until the mission is achieved, because if you're playing normally you're not going to see these being built in time to lock them (and you wouldn't know what they even look like until you find one). My three didn't appear until Level 37, Level 51, and Level 44. That was a lot of waiting around doing nothing until they showed up. Okay, rant over
Referee fucked around with this message at 19:20 on Jan 22, 2017 |
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Jan 22, 2017 18:55
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What does Building Codes +1 level each construction do? I thought the buildings levelled up each time you rebuild them anyway?
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Jan 22, 2017 19:31
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monkeytennis posted:What does I believe it raises them two levels per build but it's not written very clearly.
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Jan 22, 2017 19:34
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Is there any way to go above 10% for the bank?
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Jan 22, 2017 19:48
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Rupert Buttermilk posted:Is there any way to go above 10% for the bank? Keys, but it's expensive.
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Jan 22, 2017 19:51
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Just tried this a bit and it's not bad at all. However there are a few things that might have been mentioned. 1. So far, I've a strategy of making nothing residential and getting the boosts only for that without penalty. It works really on and by the time in ready for services or industrial, I've already purchased all the upgrades. I would issue a penalty in growth for the lack of balance if you go entirely one way like unemployment, under employment, lack of services etc. 2. If you start with the 2x2 as your first building, it always displays 4 upgrades at the bottom even if it's the only structure. That's pretty much all I got right now. Oh and there's no White Ford Bronco as a vehicle 
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Jan 22, 2017 20:03
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Malek posted:2. If you start with the 2x2 as your first building, it always displays 4 upgrades at the bottom even if it's the only structure. If you're talking about the build button, I think the way it works is you can always be building x number of plots at a time where x= the city number you're on. So if you're on City 4, you can be building 4 at once and the count will always display 4 - the number of plots you're working on.
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Jan 22, 2017 20:12
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Malek posted:
Having the price of each type of property scale independently might help remedy this. For example if I tried to spam residential it would scale faster than I could keep up with, but commercial and service plots would be relatively cheap until I "caught up" in those types of properties.
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Jan 22, 2017 20:28
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Basically this game is Cookie Clicker 3.0 AND I loving LOVE IT.
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Jan 22, 2017 20:52
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IllegallySober posted:If you're talking about the build button, I think the way it works is you can always be building x number of plots at a time where x= the city number you're on. So if you're on City 4, you can be building 4 at once and the count will always display 4 - the number of plots you're working on. Ah, it's just weird since it said 3 (cause the 2x2 was under construction.) Just seemed like an oversight that it would display more than how many buildings you have. (especially with no plots it shows 0) vvvv: Ah oops, sorry Malek fucked around with this message at 00:42 on Jan 23, 2017 |
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Jan 22, 2017 21:13
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Malek posted:Ah, it's just weird since it said 3 (cause the 2x2 was under construction.) Just seemed like an oversight that it would display more than how many buildings you have. (especially with no plots it shows 0) With 0 plots it says buy land
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Jan 22, 2017 21:47
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IllegallySober posted:Edit: Okay, I'm going to suggest for these missions specifically, one or more of the following needs to happen: I just wanted to reiterate this (also at the recycling centre mission). The way the game is currently set-up, these missions are more frustrating than fun/challenging to complete, which is a shame because I can imagine this aspect being a very good hook to keep me playing if it was tweaked. My thought process when I'm doing these: - "Collect 3 recycling plants" - okay, which ones were they? I assume large yellow, but with no way of checking (either in game encyclopaedia, quick game note telling you which, or the eventual online wiki), players can waste a lot of time chasing the wrong tile. - Now I just stare at my 4 large yellows on screen, waiting for construction to cycle through to them (takes ages at later levels). Can't focus on anything else in case the auto builder takes the building from me while my attention is away. - Wait an hour (or more, depending on your luck), finally accumulate 3 plants. Hope the auto builder didn't take any away before I could make them historical. Now things are worse if you don't know which tile you're chasing (example the Starbits mission, had no idea if it would be yellow or blue). In that case, I was frantically pressing the red mission tick button every few seconds to see when it goes from 0 to 1 (out of 4) complete, at which case I would then frantically search the map to find it, praying the automatic builder wouldn't take it away before I could find it. Then go back to the steps above, a lot of staring and waiting for things to finally happen. The only reasonable way I've found to do them is to just wait until I start a new city (all the while not progressing in missions), then just build nothing but the tile I want until the mission is complete, then continue my city normally from there. Also not a fun way to play the game. Some suggestions: - Give the player a way of knowing which tile they'll be playing on - Get rid of the possibility of having the auto builder take the mission building away before the player can make it historical - maybe allow a pause button (either in the overworld map or in the auto builder yellow button itself) so the player can freely roam the map to find the building, or make the game automatically make it historical - Accept the building as complete, even if it eventually gets built over (i.e. you can't go from 1 out of 4 back to 0) - Give the player a bigger indication that the building has appeared, either over the building, or make the red tick button flash brighter or something - Make the mission building a higher chance to appear - Have multiple missions at once so all progress doesn't grind to a halt. - Maybe have a way to cycle through/skip missions (maybe for a bux fee) if someone gets stuck on one On an unrelated note, I'm not sure if it was intentional, but the coins over the cars/planes/boats don't scale up when you zoom out, which makes it unplayable/very difficult to press. I like to zoom out when I play so I can see more of the city at once (so I don't have to scroll as much), but I'm limited in how far I can zoom out before the coins disappear. On another unrelated note, as others have said, the way I'm currently starting new cities is to build nothing but residential buildings (up to 15000 pop or so) and taking advantage of the residential bonus, until I've accumulated enough money to transition to the other buildings. Not sure if you want to change things up or not.
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Jan 22, 2017 23:46
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Oh, also, Tier 3's Autonomous Driving doesn't seem to be worth it given the pay off (of 625/sec) at least at Tier 3. I'd put it at Tier 1 or up the bonus.
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Jan 23, 2017 01:17
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I'm on Android and haven't lost my save yet luckily. Chugs a bit once I hit city 4 though on my Nexus 4 but then it's an old phone so whatever. I dunno if it's optimal to beeline for large lots first? It feels that way? But the flip side is that the gameplay loop becomes unsatisfying because it's build 1 plot, wait a long time, upgrade a lot and get lots of cars and planes until you can build up a bigger lot.
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Jan 23, 2017 02:26
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Ok trying to get organized before tackling as much as we can on Monday. What am I missing? Issue: General confusion for new players. Questions about functionality of build mechanic and clicker progression in general. Improvement: Replace current “mission” tutorials with new tutorial system to improve onboarding. Issue: Dislike for the current way you advance to the next city. Feelings of wasted opportunity to grow the previous city to its full potential. Advancement feels too forced. Improvement: Crop landscape closer to city boundaries to remove “wasted growth opportunity” and make next city feel that much bigger. Move to a combined building level based population and allow keys to be earned even after reaching the pop limit to advance. Issue: Desire for more player choice (as in Sim City). Improvement: Allow zone choice when buying a new lot. Add RCI-like balance graph with % building earning boost to promote balance. Issue: Frustration with specific building missions. Improvement: Show preview and describe zone type and lot size of require building. Add explanation to historical button. Bug: Total progression wipe. Bug: Lag when closing menus in large cities. Bug: Autonomous Driving upgrade underpowered.
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Jan 23, 2017 02:51
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I think you got most of it. Thanks for being so willing to implement feedback!
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Jan 23, 2017 03:10
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Played way too much already but that means I'm enjoying it, nice job! Issues: Happened to me twice, I was spamming the building upgrade button and the world zoomed out and then disappeared along with the UI. I spam the button a ton but it doesn't happen all the time, can't reproduce at will. Being able to spam the upgrade button while using my other hand to scroll and tap coin upgrades would be nice. It kinda works but usually ends up changing zoom levels or shooting my POV across the city at high speeds. Not related to the previous comment as far as I can tell as the world and ui have only gone away when I'm just spamming the upgrade button. That loving drone is so aggravating to tap I've tried to stop doing it altogether. I tend to aim for the huge floating coin since that's what I want but I think it wants me to tap the drone. It isn't an issue to me on the other aircraft but I usually have to zoom in just to tap it. I'd rather just not buy that thing at all and start with the helicopter but that isn't an option. This might just be a me thing but holy poo poo I hate that drone The X amount of specific building stopped being fun after the third or fourth city. I know you are looking into it but I haven't seen any useful work arounds mentioned. Maybe a visual indicator on the quest button that something had changed might help but it's just an aggravation I'd love to never deal with again. Starting to get slowdown after the app has been open for twenty or thirty minutes. (At least on the NYC map, which is level 7 I think?) Lots of chop. Fixed by a hard close and restart of the app. iOS 10.1.1 on a 6+ Otherwise this game is clean and solid and looks really nice.
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Jan 23, 2017 03:31
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What about allowing manual upgrades as an alternative to the automatic button? Then if you know you need a particular plot to upgrade to a mission building, you can at least take some of the RNG out of it. Otherwise it's really hard to complete those quests in a large city, where you have to pray you can find the building to lock it before it turns into something else.
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Jan 23, 2017 03:31
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* Goal button does not indicate when a goal is complete - Changing it from red to green would make it obvious I can collect bucks. * Download video ads over WiFi only option would be nice. I don't want to download them over cellular data, but on WiFi would be more than happy to use them, but it'll be annoying to switch back and forth * When game first started, the upgrade option was showing so I was spending money there and nothing was happening so I eventually closed the screen to find out I needed to build things to start income.
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Jan 23, 2017 03:39
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Aredna posted:* Goal button does not indicate when a goal is complete - Changing it from red to green would make it obvious I can collect bucks. It does flip around every few seconds, like the level advancement one does, but I like this suggestion a lot.
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Jan 23, 2017 03:40
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How do you earn keys? It's not tied to income?
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Jan 23, 2017 04:01
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IllegallySober posted:It does flip around every few seconds, like the level advancement one does, but I like this suggestion a lot. A mini progress bar on the top like the "auto-build" timer would be great too. Speaking of auto-build - maybe this is unlockable later, but if it were to stop at full and wait to click the next one when 1 is available that would be nice too. e: Lock "Game" upgrades until the player has reached that level at least once. For example I dropped some bucks on "airlines" early on to find out that I can't use them for a while. Aredna fucked around with this message at 04:12 on Jan 23, 2017 |
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Jan 23, 2017 04:04
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eeenmachine posted:Issue: Dislike for the current way you advance to the next city. Feelings of wasted opportunity to grow the previous city to its full potential. Advancement feels too forced. This would help the game immensely! Looking forward to seeing what you guys do, thanks for listening
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Jan 23, 2017 04:11
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OK, I'm an SQE in my reality type job. So this sort of thing is right up my wheelhouse, although it's been awhile since I've manually tested stuff and filed bugs. All of what I do now is building and designing automated test systems. Anyway, I'm not sure how far you are in to this and without understanding the code base I'm really not sure if what I'm asking is anywhere near reasonable, but here goes: * The game is undeniably addicting. I constantly am opening it up, similar to how I did with Egg, Inc. So good job there. The key concept is good! * The only things I'd find "buggy" are that shadows seem to flicker a lot on my iPad Air 2. I'm not sure if this is fixable, but you can see it if you zoom in to any police car or a car with a coin above it. * Performance seems solid. I noticed no lag between menu switches or anything. * On opening the game, the Nimblebit logo is not scaled to the screen. It is completely cut off. As far as the design of the game goes, I'd like to outline a few problems and then make some suggestions: 1. The switch between towns is not particularly meaningful. As was mentioned before, each town is simply larger with maybe a new gameplay element added (aircraft). Each town does not have its own personality. To steal more from Egg, Inc., one of the things that made it more driving was figuring out what the next egg was going to be and how it totally improved humanity. 2. Upgrading buildings is unpredictable and more annoying than anything else. Without any sort of timer on the building, I can't tell if I should concentrate on building new upgrades or harvesting car-coins. 3. There is a lack of meaningful interaction with the town. As an example, I can take a picture of my town but why would I want to? It's just a random assortment of randomly-picked building upgrades. Nothing personalized. 4. There is little connection with previous Nimblebit titles, and the connections that are made are subtle and short-lived (TIny Tower only existed in my town for like 30 seconds) 5. I don't feel a need to spend any money on the game, as it is very easy to get enough coins to get the next upgrades faster. Now on to the suggestions, because I'd hate to leave you with that laundry list of things. * I believe you can address 1 & 4 together by adding a Bitizen spokesperson to each town, and giving them a couple of lines as a way to introduce each town. You can also use it as an onboarding technique in a more normal tutorial. "Hi, I'm Slim Spitty. I'm the mayor of this town. After the dog acting as city manager ran off after a car and left us alone, I've hired you as the city manager, and you're set up with ManagOS 9000 which will help you with your day to day tasks. It'll make your life easier, because we designed it to be so easy a dog can use it. To approve a permit for construction, just hit that button! Remember, it's designed for a dog. So we didn't factor decision making into it." Then other cities could take on different personas. It'll be a little work, but Charm will make people want to see the next city and read the next lines. * Addressing 2 may be as simple as adding a timer mechanism. You've got a blank billboard on each Now Building area, why not put the timer there? Or, if you don't want to give people timers, create a random bitizen numeral system made of symbols and use that as a countdown. Or come up with an in-theme reason why the user doesn't get feedback as to how long it'll take. ("Yeah, to save money we didn't buy you the "See How Long It Takes" module.") In Performance engineering, there's some human interaction studies that show people will do certain things if they don't get feedback within a certain amount of time. I've used these to help set performance thresholds (ie a page cannot take more than 1 second to show some sort of feedback). I mention this because you're not offering any feedback or anything for the user to do while they're waiting for a building to build. Yet, the time it takes for a building to build really isn't long enough for them to go somewhere else. So you're having the user hover in that "I'm JUST bored enough to find something else to do, but I don't want to leave the game." area. Offering an animation or some form of Bitbook (or Bitter? The Bitizen version of Twitter?) may help. It also gives you a place to hook in to previous Nimblebit titles. * Allowing the user to choose what a zone is will give them a lot of ownership of the city. That would certainly get me to take more pictures of the town. * I have literally no idea how to address 5. I am so, so sorry. Anyway, sorry this is so long. What I want to tell you is that I'm going to be playing this a lot more. I think you have a solid game on your hands here. It could definitely be a great game. OH! One other thing: Raise the levels required for newer and bigger buildings. I feel like I've seen literally all of them in an hour of playing.
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Jan 23, 2017 04:19
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eeenmachine posted:Ok trying to get organized before tackling as much as we can on Monday. What am I missing? Don't forget the NaN bug (unless you already squashed that one).
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Jan 23, 2017 04:38
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Thanks for all the well thought out feedback guys!
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Jan 23, 2017 05:32
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Along the lines of wanting to see flavor text - even though it's grayed out I can just scroll down and read it all from the start instead of seeing something new as I unlock each tier.
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Jan 23, 2017 06:02
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I like how the Police Station is pretty much just the Simcity 2000 cop shop.
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Jan 23, 2017 06:28
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eeenmachine posted:The one downside I see right off the bat is there wouldn't be much incentive to build more than a handful of buildings. Edit: Just noticed you added this to your notes of things for Monday. Godspeed, developer! DaveKap fucked around with this message at 12:13 on Jan 23, 2017 |
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Jan 23, 2017 11:59
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