itch.io

Oh, thanks.  I thought Resources told you how much Resources you have.  Or had something to do with stockpiling Resources.  I kept thinking, since the door is structural, it would be under the same menu category as Nursery and Workshop.  Looking at it now, I realize you had the ++ integrated into the icon.  Maybe consider renaming this to "Resource Production" or something similar?  I know short words look nicer, but this game throws a lot of concepts at the player at once that aren't handled the same way they are in other RTS games.  When you can't use existing tropes or genre conventions, you should be as specific as possible.

Role didn't make much sense to me, either, the first time I saw it.  It has a picture of a bee.  But you don't use it to build  bees?  You use it to build rooms.  Rooms don't have a role.  They have furniture in them.  After playing the game a bit more, I eventually understood that "Role" is short for "Rooms that require a bee to have a specific role in order to use them."  Except that the Nursery also lets you change a bee's role, or at least lets you influence the role distribution of newborn bees.  I'm not sure what else you could call it besides Role.  Maybe Job?  But that doesn't really change things.  If I think of a better solution to this, I'll let you know.

But on the subject of the radial menus, this is probably the most important suggestion I can make:  Don't make the player fight their own muscle memory when learning new systems!   Every single time I opened a menu after researching something, it felt like everything I'd previously learned went right out the window because now the things I have to click on are in a different place.  It's friction.  It's a reason players would churn out before learning the game.  And you'll never personally experience this for yourself because you made the game, you're not learning it from scratch the way a new player would.  You'll just have to take my word for it that this makes learning the game more uncomfortable than it needs to be.

The solution: Radials should display all the hexagons that will ever be there, and the ones the player doesn't have access to are just blank or greyed out or invisible.  That way, as the player builds understanding of games systems, they are also building muscle memory.  If you only listen to one suggestion from my post, please listen to this one.  It's the biggest obstacle to learning the middle of the game right now.

I will add to this that even though I read that it said to click "resources" to build an exit, I was still confused by the tutorial because I thought "empty cell" meant a grid cell that didn't have anything in it yet (the green ones with white outline), and clicking on those there was no resources option, just "cell". I think the language used could be reworked to be less ambiguous.