itch.io

The zip contains a build of the game, which could be hosted and run locally with a little work, but the game is intended to be played in browser.

Had a lot of fun with this!  Some feedback:

Some of the hitboxes feel unfriendly, particularly the ores.  

I believe the item sprites may be blocking clicks, which makes it hard to move certain workers around.  

You can drag workers off the map.   

The existence of clusters of three nodes made me think that that was a sort of cap, one worker per slot, so it took me a long time to figure out that you can stack as many as you want (assuming that is the intended way).  

In general, moving guys around is a little finicky.  Maybe the ring on the node could subtly change color when you've dragged into range.  Maybe the workers could snap to the node when you drop them.

The stations on the two woodworking jobs look the same so I didn't realize for a long time that I needed people on each one (even though it probably should have been obvious.

If you have two managers in range and you drag one of them out of range, it drops the aura.

If I'm reading correctly, the processed items sell for the same value as the ores?  A dragon-ore axe takes 7 times as many workers as the ore alone. (4 on coal, 1 on ore, 1 on smelting, 1 on forging).  Well I guess selling items is just an extra perk and a by-product of leveling, but it still seems like that's too much diminishing returns.

Might be nitpicking, but it's a little sad that the supply chain for mining is more or less the same (actually slightly more involved because of coal) than wood.  Might as well try to differentiate them a little.  Bonus points if they feed into each other a little more (maybe they do and I just couldn't see the mechanics at work).

Haven't quite done my first prestige yet, so forgive me if I'm missing some things.

Some of the tooltips aren't working correctly.  I specifically tested Craft Nautical Relic boosted by Paganic Percussion.  The tooltip always said +1 relic but it was adding +2 every cycle.  

There are some others that behaved similarly but I don't remember them off the top of my head.

Speaking of tooltips. it would be great to see the total production instead of dividing it up by lane.  There's no mechanical advantage to making a given lane self-sufficient (and usually there's a disadvantage since you need to group certain tasks according to their required and bonuses.)

I had a ton of fun with this.  There was just enough freedom to feel more like strategy than puzzle.  That's the sweet spot for me.  Loved the progression from struggling with a resource, to making a self-sustaining setup, to reaching a level of technology that renders it trivial (and opens up new challenges).  

I was just barely able to make a setup that increases all storage and production bonuses simultaneously.  That felt like the true end of the game for me.

Thanks for making something fun!

The enemies are invisible because, just like in life, the challenges are mostly in your mind.  It's a metaphor.

It's either that or the person who made the game was too lazy to draw a bunch of pictures of enemies.

I spent most of my prestige currency to unlock new locations and... you can't use them until you get back to where you were before prestige.  Okay fine.  So I finally saved up enough currency to unlock the factory and... there's nothing there.  Argh.

Absolutely love it.  Love how unique and thematic the mechanics are.  The pacing is great.  The discovery feels natural and rewarding, not just because you get better numbers, but because there are new mechanics to explore that all feel worthwhile.

A "clear map" button would be a huge quality of life improvement.  Right click to place field without having to go back to the menu would be nice.  Click and drag to place multiple tiles would be nice as well.  I want to experiment with more layouts, but it's getting very click intensive.

A compendium of your discovered tiles would be good, in case you forget how to lay something out, or are slightly unclear on what the rule is, and so you'd know if you've found everything.  Having to try every tile combination to be sure isn't ideal.

It might be nice to use a 3x3 kernel for adjacency bonuses.  It's kind of a feel bad to be able to make all these cities that give 50% adjacency bonus, but they mostly grant the bonus to the tiles that you need in order to make them in the first place, which often don't score much (or anything)

It seems like every tile is has a build-around that is somewhat viable in the mid/late game except for forests.  You throw a few of them into your other layouts, but it's marginal benefit.  Maybe forests (or one of the forest villages) could get a bonus for every other forest in the clump, instead of just the adjacent ones--similar to the way ports work.  Given how aggressively tile costs scale, this doesn't seem like it would get out of hand in the early game, and in the late game it would give you something to do with the only tile you can often afford.  Maybe that's too complicated to introduce so early in the game though.

I'm not sure I love the cost scaling in general.  It means that specializing in one type of tile will almost always be worse than building a few of everything (at least until you run out of land, which I'm not that close to being able to do yet).  Ideally you'd want the option to do either for a more creative experience.

I'm missing one tile still, and maybe I don't know about some combinations, so it could be the some of these (minor) complaints are dealt with anyway.

5/5 so far, and it still feels like there is a ton of design space to explore!

Love it as a start.  Seem ripe for supply chains, technology, interlinked systems, more resources.  Obviously needs more content, a sense of progression or goals to work towards.

The radar is pretty underwhelming since you are going to wind up blanketing everything with towers anyway, maybe if it very slowly revealed far away locations instead, to show you which direction to grow.

Very quickly you're earning more resources than you can possibly spend, so having a bunch of storage doesn't feel all that necessary either.  Does get a bit tedious spamming out buildings.

I would absolutely spend a ton of time on a game in this style, with simple graphics, if the gameplay mechanics were really well fleshed out.

Is it even a baseball game if you don't have a 77th inning stretch?

I have another idle/incremental game on the site that you might also enjoy, although it's a little more hands on.  Anyway cheers.

Hey.  I'm glad to hear that were able to get so much gameplay.  By all means it sounds like you've done all that there is to be done.  If I remember correctly, a few of the upgrades are added procedurally so you won't necessarily reach an end point.  This was the first game I worked on, I was just focused on making something a little bit original, and didn't get as far as endgame or post game content.

Thank you for checking it out and taking the time to give some feedback.  

i didn't realize the shop covered up other options.  I spent so long trying to figure out how to make anything happen.

Maybe?  Depending on how far along you are in the game?  (it's been about three years , I don't remember well enough)

Utterly gorgeous and oozing with charm and polish.

I was disappointed at first that it leaned more towards puzzle than city-builder/strategy, but the more I played it the more it won me over.

You're totally right.

Endgame/story goals are something that have been on my mind a lot.

I have some superficial plans like achievements to hunt, a bestiary complete, a catalog of items to collect, speedruns or endurance runs .  Also some more concrete ideas like adding a progressive boss rush, and boss battles to the end of each zone, as well as more advanced aspects of the town to work towards and use resources on.

Dwarf Fortress is hugely influential to me, I'd love to be able to cultivate something like that level of flavor and endless storytelling.

I Really appreciate detailed feedback like this.

It's definitely something I'm aware of.  For now if someone is willing to go through the hassle, they're welcome to it (It's probably just as easy to ship poor adventurers off to die with no gear in a lot of cases).  Still I'll probably get around to shoring it up sooner or later.

I played around with this a bit.  Levels seemed to increase for me even while in another tab.  That said, there's always some quantum weirdness about out-of-focus browsers.  Did you also notice abnormally high kill counts (more than 330) in the battleground when you came back?  It's not unreasonable that you could have gotten 1400 scrap just from having a bunch of items in the queue to be collected and scrapped.

Thank you.  Still lots more to come!

There is an upgrade to speed up how quickly your  workers recover items, if that's what you're referring to.

Great use of the theme.  Controls feel nice.  Background looks great.  No complains really.

The season resets every 162 games.   This should affect achievements however.  All achievements are taken from the lifetime stats of the players or the organization.  Some of the achievements may be too tedious;  I've toyed with the pace of the game a bit since first release without giving as much thought to readjusting achievements in response. 

In any case,  I'm glad you had some fun.  Thanks for giving it some of your time.

Ahh yeah, I think I renamed the rating to "Teach" at some point and must not have updated the name in the upgrade.  

The balancing is certainly a bit out of whack in the late stages of the game.  I'll consider making a hitting coach with blanket coverage and appropriate downsides.  I have plans to add some potential sinks so that you won't necessarily  be maxing out every rating. 

I will say that there is a trade-off with your strategy as well.   It may be a few less clicks to max out pitchers (and I won't blame you for wanting that), but pitchers do have less overall stat points available to them for now, so you will earn less for cutting a maxed out pitcher than a maxed out hitter in most cases. 

I appreciate you making me aware of that problem.

Wow.  That's quite an impressive game.  There are definitely points early on or in the very late game where you can see bizarre statistical anomalies like this(though 90 innings is the wildest one i've heard).  I've resisted the urge to just hard code a fail case, because the occasional 20 inning game sounds like fun to me, but I definitely need to tighten up the constraints a bit.

Thanks for letting me know.  I've been working on weeding out these sorts of issues.

Thanks.  I tried to make the decisions feel meaningful  as much as I was able, rather than just a steady progression of upgrades.  Now to do a better job making player scouting feel as meaningful.   Thanks for giving the game a play.

Yeah it seems like I've introduced some rounding error somewhere.   It seems like you are able to finish the goal after a couple of tries.  I'll Try to get that fixed at some point.  Thanks for pointing it out.