One other minor comment is that I think the visual aesthetic hasn't fully gelled yet. Here's why - the UI is nice and smooth with rounded corners, etc. So it looks really nice. But the game is more about something I think of as rough around the edges, old, storied, etc. So the clean UI (despite being nicely readable) feels slightly out of sync with the content. For whatever reason the UI also feels a bit flat - like the elements on it don't have depth? Again I'm an outsider and I don't know what any of the in-game things are, so please take with plenty of grains of rice, or ignore altogether. Keep up the good work!
Thanks Chuck,
You’re right about the aesthetic feeling a bit too clean.
I’ve been experimenting with ways to give the UI more age, texture, and depth without sacrificing readability, but nothing has quite landed yet,
I pushed a lot of those experiments back so I could keep the game moving, but this kind of feedback helps confirm that it’s worth revisiting.
I’m also weighing whether the next step is to keep pushing the current framework or move the project into a proper graphics engine where I can build the kind of layered, storied look the game should be leaning towards,
Your perspective as someone outside this genre attempting to play this type of game actually helps a lot , as you are seeing it the way many new players will, and that’s exactly the kind of feedback that I am after.
Thanks again for the thoughtful feedback. It really does help shape where this goes next and where it ends up in the long term.