Very cool little puzzle game! All of the synergies are cool, but there are a lot of them, so I don't think I'm smart enough to think too strategically about this one beyond trying to grow my island when i can to open up more possibilities. My first time through I mostly ended up just randomly hovering and spinning until I found something that didn't lose too many points. I think if you wanted to discourage that behavior, you could consider showing only +/- for each tile (this tile's score will go up, or this tile's score will go down) without the magnitude. But I liked it as-is (and my second pass through I did a little bit better). I'm by no means an expert city-builder, but I got 159 on my second run (the other comments confirm that I am a bad city builder) and it was cool to be able to stop and screenshot my city afterward.
Love the graphical style. The music is very nice, too, though it gets a little repetitive given the length of the game.
I had three thoughts about UI / QoL things:
- I wish there was more visible feedback before placing a tile when you can't actually place a tile somewhere. The early feedback about scoring is great, but it was a little frustrating when, having thought I was about to make a great move, I then discover I was accidentally trying to build on water.
- Being able to rotate the camera would also be helpful.
- I might also have liked in in-game indicator about the zoom-in/zoom-out keys so I could reference that without jumping back out to the game page.
- Maybe this ruins the balance you're going for, but it might be cool to be able to "hold" a tile like you can hold a piece in modern versions of Tetris, to give a bit more control.
- Maybe also a "quick restart" button after the game ends to start a fresh game (though I wouldn't want to lose the wide-openness of the current game where you can just sit there and look at your city after the game ends.
Despite those nitpicks, I really enjoyed this game! Very cozy puzzler. Great work all-around!