The game is pretty engaging, and with some graphics and sound added, this could turn into a really interesting resource management game. I would have liked to see the current total income for each resource displayed somewhere. It is also not very clear what happens when you go into deficit, for example with food or tools, since the consequences are not really shown. I also was not sure about the purpose of cards with negative effects, because there is almost never a reason to pick them if there are better options available.
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Thanks a lot for your feedback. Yeah, there are still a few things I just didn’t have time to finish. One thing I had planned, for example, was that when you hover over the icons, you’d see how the current modifiers actually affect things. That would’ve made it clearer what happens when you go into deficit, since you’d be able to see that, for example, factories don’t run at all or only at reduced efficiency.
The cards with negative effects were honestly the biggest issue for me and a bit of a learning experience. I personally like games that aren’t easy, where you can still mess things up even in the late game. But at the same time, I have to keep in mind that not every player feels that way. I spent hours trying to balance positive and negative cards, but in the end it just didn’t work out the way I wanted. So it ended up being a pretty simple “pick 3 cards out of X” system.
In a lot of my runs, my highscore list has 67 entries, I actually ended up with three negative cards multiple times and had to decide which bad option to take.
But yeah, I get your feedback and I’ll take it on board. There’ll definitely be another version coming.
I think purely negative cards feel somewhat pointless, not because they are too difficult, but because there is simply no real reason for the player to choose them. A more effective solution, in my opinion, would be to design cards that offer a meaningful benefit in one area while also introducing a downside somewhere else. That creates actual decision-making space for the player: is the bonus worth accepting the drawback or not.
In that kind of system, negative effects become much more interesting, because they are part of a trade-off rather than just a punishment.
And yes, I would be very happy to follow future updates if you decide to keep working on the gam