itch.io

Hello, it's been a while since I've last commented on the game but as I've played recently, I thought I'd share some feedback and list a few of current issues:

I do like the changes and improvements to one's town since I've last looked at it. Having it work, with little folks walking around doing their things is very nice. I would like to be able to decide who to let live at my place and/or possibly customize the immigrants and having the game remember their looks - currently they seem to be changing between my visits to town. Depending on how ambitious you'd like to make them, ideally there'd be a menu where potential hopefuls are listed, for one to choose whom to accept to live in one's town, with said immigrants differing slightly not only in looks or names, but maybe some minor traits (one is a bit faster/slower, another likes to eat more/less). I'd also like to be able to equip and clothe them myself as a goal, rather than them magicking up shotguns before I could even get one for myself or run around seemingly half-naked.

Ability to assign beds also would be useful there as currently all town beds get someone sent to them and with player and his battle-ready companions counting against that limit it means the population is always over it, with game demanding more beds, then filling them and demanding more ad infinitum. I would like to just be able to assign the town's farmers to a hut next to the fields, too, rather than having to figure out which bed the game assigned to whom and making them the farmer by proximity.

I wouldn't really mind it at all if the start of the game would be a bit rougher - like the starting house being smaller, worse-equipped and much more destroyed, requiring one to build much more from scratch. Same with other things - I had almost no use for torch at all, since we get the very useful glowing drone very soon in the game. I'd prefer some features like its glow to be some sort of additional mission reward.

I had a glitch where the weapon workbench wasn't available, making it impossible for me to finish its quest till I read elsewhere I am supposed to clean up EDIE and then accesing the upgrade panel (which doing so unlocked the bench). EDIE only mentions that I can do so later in its questline, after it was already necessary to build the workbench earlier.

Having dressers/mirrors first needing activation before they change one's looks would be nice. Sometimes when I pick up loot in some ruined house with one of these, it's very easy to approach the furniture and switch some clothes/hairstyle colors around.

I see that dirtying things was a bit changed and custodians aren't as necessary for sweeping floors. It's a mixed blessing. There does seem to be an issue however of game generating various trash (bones, skulls, dead grasses) on the floors inside roofed buildings and those don't get cleaned up.

Speaking of roofing - most locations seem to be yet converted to ones with a roof. Towns and various other bases seem to have none, with sandstorms pushing the player around when indoors.

I can put all kinds of items in all kinds of slots. Making my character wear clothes in wrong slots of the equipment. Or not really clothes but some other random objects.

It'd be nice if small quantities of items could be taken with a player - for stuff like missions at the town without a need for a whole wagon. Perhaps, since now most types of resources can be turned into stacks/barrels etc, just adding ability to activate a stack item like that from inventory would solve it (since right now they can only be "activated" for its items when build).

And in regards to those missions, may have been just a random glitch but Betsy in her dialogue didn't really give me a job, just directed me straight to the box.

Chickens became immortal. If there's too many of them, it seems one cannot get rid of any. Ability to kick the chicken to the great coop in the sky or some other way to take care of chicken overpopulation while avoiding chickens dying to accidential weapon swings would be great. Similar with other animals one doesn't want around but sentenced oneself to.

The games seems to be running noticeabl better than how I remember it. Many people may not care too much as long as their rig handles the game well overall but I always considered optimization an important part of well managed project and I am really grateful it's not neglected.

I like diversity of loot when it comes to skellies, but the "better" enemies seem to be dropping only scrap. Since raiders are technologically-capable, it'd be really nice if stuff like gears, electronics or plastic were found rarely among their loot.

Most enemies seem to not fight back when attacked by another group of hostile NPCs, especially noticeable in case of the burrowing bugs murdering skellies who just kinda stand there, taking bugs' projectiles.

One can put stuff like ammo pouch in the activable items tab, then when entering inventory durability of the pouch will turn to 0.1. It doesn't change anything, but looks weird. Items like pouches or canteens would benefit from some description that they work passively as long as one keeps some in inventory.

Meat in general seems somewhat neglected. Perhaps having access to it would let villagers feed themselves better and for longer, with a piece of meat per several pieces of vegetables?

The game often starts in a window and is not responsible to attempts to turn between fullscreen and windowed more through alt+enter. Yet often during the battle, as I was clickign frantically, the game was turning full screen on its own.

Some greater difference between projectile weapon stats would be good. Assault rifle tech (which somehow let's one make MG weapon) required both more experience and the item - much, much more rarer resources to make than a pistol, but the effect against average raider seem comparable - both need quite a few accurate shots to take one down.

Would need to be balanced vs. robots as I already don't really use them, with human villagers simply looking better as they run around.

All animals ignore whip or I had no idea how to use it to control them.

Cemetary one can find generated in the wastes has graves marked with request to be edited.

As always, the post may seem somewhat negative, but it's just because I concentrated on reporting bugs - a thing much more important to be known than the praise. The praise however, I still offer as it is a fun game and I hope for future developments. Thank you for your time.

Regarding special locations and general accessibility of items. Maybe the size of the overworld could be used for that.

Right now outside of specific points of interests there's little reason to travel anywhere since all resources are accessible near home. Would be interesting if some, the less basic of them would be nearly impossible to acquire in the wild aside from occasional resource node once in a blue moon (together with loot drop adjustments as skellies certainly drop too much rubber, oil and electronics for how primitive they appear to be, living in ruins and whatnot and stone protrusions seem to be 50% made out of pure metal at times) with some areas all over the world where those defendable oil rigs, metal wrecks etc could be found.

Alright. By the way, do tell if you'd rather have me edit the posts or report each found bug in new one. I don't want to bother you to check whether my last post got a new edit but I also want to avoid spamming the thread with every single glitch I found, especially when my latest post is fresh.

Yup, normal version is used now as it was earlier. Also, I notice that the wind/sandstorm effect contributes severely to the FPS drop.

Some time passed since my last bug report so I think it's good to put it in the new post (I do hope though that the previous one was checked since I added to it before through edits and I worry slightly whatever was added then may have passed under the radar).

I notice the assets are a lot bigger - the dev mentioned that themselves - making the game bigger. However, for some reasons it's also very noticeably slower for me, as if the game would keep processing bigger assets all the time instead of any preloading. Upon entering map I have over 100 FPS according to the counter, but soon it all goes down to circa 30-15, with the only exception being the home town for some reason, where the FPS is relatively consistent or at least decent enough to not notice strong slowdowns. The general increased game slowness also led to exploration map taking a time to drop loading screen for the first time and that in turn led to this issue:

Happened upon loading random exploration map. The loading was left there and wasn't disappearing at all, the items carried were not shown either. Even leaving the map left it on the screen (while increasing its size) till another loading screen was triggered by entering elsewhere. Edit: Seems it's always happening at 94.34%

Other bugs:

• The workstations, no matter the chosen orientation through R key, face always the same direction.
• Building stone wall takes 4 stone, dismantling one drops two drops 4 stones each. Infinite stone exploit, yay. Similar happens with many other constructions, not only stone ones.
• Beds have the same boundary no matter the direction they face so when the headrest is on the left, the bed can be close to the wall but if turned so the headrest is on the right, one has to leave some space between the bed and the wall right of it. Possibly other furniture items have the same issue.
• E.D.I.E still requests weapon cabinet to be built per its questline/tutorial, despite that furniture not equipping defenders with their weapons anymore.
• 'Build a baby cow! Harvest for water and meat.' - cows give meat and leather, not water.
• Paying 500 scrap at the farm is more bothersome than acquiring the scrap. I know that joke about it is even included in the 4th wall breaking dialogue, but adding 'hold key to keep adding', with increasing speed of depositing like how it is with trading depots would make it much more manageable (maybe even the code itself can be repurposed).
• Street lamps seem to have no building cost (at least none is shown).

As we discussed, I certainly am for 'domestic' villagers, ones that actually do your work, but may be also guards or whatnto depending on what jobs you give them. In general, I think that automation would need to be harder, however, given its benefits - something locked behind certain quests and technological advancements you mused about in the past.

I also will underline I'd like getting the villagers in the first place slightly harder as they're now showing up all the time as long there's beds. Actual conscious effort in recruitment, perhaps?

All for them dying if you won't be able to provide basic food/water to your villagers, but again, they have to be somewhat harder to acquire if that is to impact the player. What's a few deaths if people to replace them keep coming in all the time, guaranteed?

Certainly I like the idea of unique or merely rare quest/secret NPCs. I am not sure there has to be a lot work to flesh them out with unique traits, though. Slightly different stats, robot NPCs possibly using up some electricity for an hour a day instead of sleeping/eating/drinking but also requiring 'wrenching' to heal would be fine. For me, most of their value would be in that they stand out and are unique, not in any particular mechanics gimmick but I may be in minority on this one.

Certainly, as written in my wall of text in suggestions, I wouldn't mind some NPC/player customization - both in terms of looks and names!

Awesome. Though I am also now a bit worried about my settlements. Hopefully there'll be some minimum wealth before enemies even consider showing up at all. In the meantime, I'll keep fiddling with the bug list I prepare for you in the other thread (sorry for the wall of text).

To be honest, I don't think the resource accessibility is so bad as to make one require permanent resource source or some resource-generating tech. Personally, merely slightly bumped number of boulders around the wastes and possibly a way to break some ruins down for materials would be enough. On the other hand, as mentioned, oil barrels are a bit too common and I wouldn't mind it if those would be much more rare and mostly to be found in some ruins.

Regarding dying, no, it works as designed, I just indeed think that merely losing what you have found since embarking is kinda too little. Losing all tools may hurt but it will hurt only early game while not mattering much late-game. Thus idea of having stuff like currently used vehicle (including llamas) risking a chance to be lost, companions temporarily disappearing to return later, die permanently or require rescue, maybe some slight debuff. Of couse, in the end, you call the shots.

Some more things I found in recent playthrough:

• When closing door/gate character is going through, the character is pushed out of the way. That's good. What is an issue is that sometimes the character is pushed into a wall/fence, being stuck. It's not a big deal if it's in one's own village (though deconstructing and reconstructing a wall to get out is a bit of a pain), but if it happens in location where player cannot deconstruct the tile, one ha to restart the game.
• Related to that - the game doesn't check the surrounding when spawning a character. It's possible to spawn in the middle of a group of hostiles or in a wall of some ruined building upon entering exploration map.
• Enemies possess sixth sense in determining character location. Approaching "Do not eat the chickens" hut may make the person inside attempt to shoot through walls if the have a bow (and often it leads to them murdering their own chickens in the line of fire).
• Probably just a matter of AI still needing some improvement rather than actual bug, but just in case: hostile characters trying to track the player are unable to open doors/gates of their own places (but will use those opened by the player). Doors being unopenable by enemies makes sense in case of one's own houses/enemy bases (in which case it's the player who shouldn't be able to easily get everywhere without using force) but they should be able to handle their own stuff.
• Hitboxes are kinda wonky. I noticed that when an enemy approaches one from the left or right of the screen, a pistol armed character has to target their legs - bullets pass through upper parts of the heads without causing injuries.

EDIT: SOME MORE STUFF

• Animals can wander off the map (walk on the area that moves the player to the overworld screen if their character touches it). Especially annoyed with llamas which wander around when not mounted by a raider.
• Bone Smashing mission (repeatable from the farm) keeps reactivating itself when I finish it, get the reward, come back home, quite the game and then reload
• Randomly, reloading my gun leads to the 'loose' ammo decreasing without the gun itself being reloaded back to 10 rounds.
• Connecting a wire from a relay with no power to the relay with power often makes the first relay still not receive any power (at least the animation of light traveling through the wire isn't shown and the blinking icon of no power is displayed on nearby devices). If one makes connection from the relay that is receiving power, it's being relayed properly.
• If one makes a swing with a spear and then switches to some other tool mid-animation (a gun, for example):
  
  ############################################################################################
  ERROR in action number 1 of Draw Event for object obj_player: Trying to draw non-existing sprite. at gml_Object_obj_player_Draw_0 ############################################################################################ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- stack frame is gml_Object_obj_player_Draw_0 (line -1)

• Oil barrels provide double resources when struck with a pickaxe
• Similar to the shotgun sound bug mentioned above, sounds played upon leaving a map may carry on and be repeated on the next map (ie when leaving settlement, my automatic water pump chugging followed me to the wasteland exploration map).

EDIT: EVEN MORE STUFF

• Anchor Rage mason quest mentions providing metal for a pickaxe. May mislead into thinking pickaxe is a reward. Also, IIRC the mason doesn't mention pickaxe himself, he required metal for a chisel (must be huge chisel, what's with it being 50 metal - maybe whole set of tools would be better?).
• There's farmland patches on the desert. Dunno if it's intentional but they're magical. Seed planted there and watered creates crops at any stage of growth, including, rarely, at the final one (already ready to be harvested).
• Cars seem to knock out but deal hardly any damage to enemies.
• No indicator of health/damage for car/player when inside said car.
• Car, when in motion seems to have desert 'background' under its sprite no matter actual surface on which it travels. It causes flickering, for example, when driving on the remnants of asphalt road in Anchor Rage.

• Ability to butcher any animal.
• Ability to pick up eggs and have them convert into some food resource.
• Stone path tiles of both kinds merging together relatively seamlessly to allow one to create actual paths and squares.
• Customizing one's followers somewhat (clothes, hair, name?), I suspect some people would like to make villages of their friends.
  • During customization through mirror/dresser, ability to choose style/color out of some menu rather than having to cycle randomly.
    • Possibly clothes/armor being an actual thing. There could be then a couple of stylistic choices for each set of clothes for unarmored, leather armored and iron armored villagers, rather than, for example, current, seemingly purely decorational helmets.
•  NPCs. It'd be nice to make NPCs actually matter more. Right now they're very easy to get, free to maintain, hard to lose, easy to replace and of questionable utility as anything but cannon fodder most of the time. If one would have to hire/go out of their way to recruit people rather than have them show up ready and loyal en masse whenever there's beds, it'd be also easier to care about them.
  • Could be expanded to having certain unique followers as per some quest/story reward.
  • Rather than being forced to use robots which seems a bit far off (and if available, should be an endgame thing), an ability to delegate villagers to particular tasks/areas where they farm, tend to livestock, sweep the floor etc and turn into idle/guards only if enemy is spotted, are done with their chores, the bell is rung or being a guard in some particular area is their designated job.
    • In case of bell ringing, their status as a guard should reset once alarm ends after a bit with no hostiles in the area, so only designated guards stay as such.
  • In regards to that, ability to assign particular weapon cabinet (with each cabinet being per one villager) to an NPC rather than having them grab stuff randomly. Possibly similar for setting up armor if it'd be available?
  • Perhaps various villagers having slightly different stats, with not everyone doing as well/being able to perform every task or being as good in combat.
    • A toggle for what things villager should do in their designated area, with most being greyed out for most villagers and whether they should engage hostiles or run away to the nearest guard/player/edge of the map if attacked and pursued
  • To balance their new usefulness, making them use up several units of veggies and water per day, possibly meat and water if vegetables are unavailable in sufficient numbers. Maybe even proportions of meat and vegetables being character-dependant.
  • NPCs could also actually path to their beds from time to time and sleep for just a couple of hours (with hours depending on whether they're a daylight person or a night owl), being unavailable and out of commision unless attacked/injured or summoned by the bell (and going immediately back to sleep after the threat/alarm ends).
    • This would require teaching friendly NPC to open doors of player-owned structures to go through (and close doors behind them). Enemies probably should be able to do the same with their own structures rather than just crowd the door waiting for the player to let them out.
      • Making doors/gates be unopenable to NPC of hostile faction (and possibly locking some hostile camp doors/gates against player and their party), but in such case allowing an use of force to bash through.
        • Whether the door can be damaged and how much damage it could take could depend on the weapon and the type of door. Stone/metal doors would matter for things beside aesthetics.
• A bit more consequence of failure.
  • Reviving followers should probably require some item, maybe use up first aid kit.
  • Death of the player character has currently no consequences beside pushing the player to the moment before embarking. A risk of losing some tool, a vehicle/llama if there's no follower to gather those and bring them back home (or maybe even losing some follower as well, at least temporarily/with a quest to retrieve them later) or a slight, temporary debuff would be nice.
  • Ways to lose the game. Possibly enemies both destroying E.D.I.E. and killing the player character during a single raid would force a bad end?
• An upgrade/skill that allows to attack off one's horse (llama) back.
• Some reddish, bright tint when one's sufered severe health damage, maybe some sound effect or music change when one's on the verge of dying as well. It's sometimes easy to not notice one's health about to run out when in the middle of a fight and aiming at enemies, since it's just small trianglish indicator.
• Don't know how ambitious you'd like those to be, but in the future having quests with various results and lasting consequences (you kill more skellies in the farm's area so now tehre's less of them in general, at least for a time), possibly even leading to slightly different fluff and responses from NPC and E.D.I.E about what kind of civilisation you create and how may it fare in the future would be kinda nice.
  • Would IMHO tie well with the above optional NPC-joining-your group reward one of possible reward choices, a bonus on swift completion of the quest  or consequence of decisions during said quest.
    • For example, killing a bunch of cannibals in a matter of a couple of days since taking a quest gives one a random chance to save some prisoner or two of them (or turn them in to the quest giver for additional resource reward) since they didn't get to go into a pot. Again, just an example, as I have no idea how serious and post-apocalyptic you actually want to make the game and what themes you want to touch.
• Slightly more rocks and slightly less oil. Often I find plenty of barrels strewn around the wastes, but almost no rocks.
  • Some way of breaking damaged non-player-owned rock floors and other such constructions, maybe set fire to wooden ones.
    • Turning local neutral/friendly NPC hostile, deleting their quests etc if such is done to their locations/buildings.
      • Ability to pay hefty sum in scrap and raw materials for damage to return said NPCs to neutrality and have their location regenerate (assuming player have not murdered them first).
• Main menu options. Ability to set resolution, set the game fullscreen/windowed, change music/sound volume independently (the music is nice but after several hours of repeated tracks playing it.. tires), toggle what's currently in options/ini. Maybe save slots?

Pretty much those on top of Trello's To-do would be enough for me to consider it a complete game. Tried to avoid doubling the suggestions with those of other users/roadmap but may have missed some, in which case I apologize.

I also understand some of these suggestions are much more ambitious and harder to implement than the others, but, well - something to aspire to, to make the game as good as possible, I hope? Especially since in case of some, those ideas roll into one thing as I try to look a few steps ahead and offer suggestions of how to solve certain issues an implementation of them could cause.

Current settlement. Really lacking how various stone path tiles do not connect seamlessly to create actual roads and squares right now, but still, I like it. Traditional village layout, with market square in the center, surrounded by various buildings, fields and (out of frame) walls and other defensive installations. The only difference is that each citizen doesn't get their own house as much as a room in apartment complex partially visible in the lower part of the picture.

Thank you kindly for your swift response. I just checked the page again ready to look for the ini file but if it's already not needed, all the more thanks to you.

Latest version as shown (0.3.8) often (usually) has the mission tracking shown as bugged upon game load ("Mission 1 of 0") preventing completion of acquired missions. Resetting/deleting may help temporarily but the bug returns upon next save/load and forces one to redo all the prior missions.

Also, slightly less important, there seems to be no way to clean up the corpse of the person by the E.D.I.E beside waiting till they disappear on their own. Maybe being able to search them like corpses of enemy dead sentients could be provided?

I'd like to drop a list of suggestions myself. Many of which meant to slightly improve clunkyness or even outright fix bugs/design flaws, but not all:

- Have captured people count immediately, so one can move with them from outside to the slavers guild. Currently, if capturing someone meant to be immediately sold, one has to go back to mansion and then leave again. It doesn't add anything to the game and is just unnecessary clicking.

- Consider expanding choice in the market stalls. I understand that some items are meant to be unique, but many regular articles like the manacle item, some alternative clothes and so on can and already are balanced by the virtue of their price and shouldn't be restricted to be found only as loot. I understand actual magical, rare, dangerous equipment wouldn't be fit to be available and I agree that not every item in the game should be acquired through regular market stalls, just more of them than currently are.

- Speaking of clothes, it'd be nice if there could be a few default, 'already worn' clothing items. I understand that currently equipment works on the idea that whatever you put in is meant as an addition to whatever set of clothing the character has by default but often already among those are clothes - there's even NPC which switches to maid uniform without having a maid uniform item which IS an item, actually. Thus, I'd appreciate it if every character would already come with some clothes set, even if it's just non/negative-stat rags for a barefoot urchin.

- It's great there's an ability to vary character age, but I also on top of that would like certain modifiers for NPC class. For example, I may enjoy getting a whole bunch of daughterus for my mansion together with a few older girls as concubines, guards etc but at the same time I'd like to avoid whole gangs of bandits being composed of barely pubescent serial killer girls. Changing this to make it considerably less likely for little kids to be for example professional, battle-hardened highwaymen than it is for adults would mean it's also harder to find loli you look for, but I'd say that's a fair trade, for the sake of believability and immersion. I have to point out I wouldn't want to completely ignore the gender ratio values one sets through slider, I just think it'd be great if there'd be modifiers on top of that on some logarithmic curve.

- Interactions for the sake of getting mana get really tedious after a bit. I understand that they'll get more interesting over time, there's many acts etc (probably nice, even if generic images of some acts would help here, by the way) and so on but sometimes I just really want to harvest mana and get on with the day. Some sort of standarized, not-leading-to-pregnancy "enjoy your time" button would be awesome in avoiding being forced to click through things if one's not in the mood to actually pay attention.

- Tooltips for luxurious living options and sex status icons are necessary. Costs and effects for the former, what do they mean and how they affect what's going on for the latter. Sure, some things can be figured out easily enough but I am willing to say one shouldn't need to figure out basic indicators on the HUD.

- Currently the game recognizes races when one's choosing portraits (using the popular portrait pack), but it'd be nice if it could also recognize tags for hair/eye color, age and gender as locks. Without loading everything else every time. It would be also nice if which locks are chosen would be saved, so one doesn't have to wait for the whole gallery to load and then wait again after choosing current race lock to only show relevant portraits.

- Most occupations require particular traits/stats. That's good. What's weird is that those stats usually seem to be raised only from other occupations. I understand so for very theoretical or fundamentally dependant on academical knowledge tasks, but having to send foragers to the library sounds weird as all the wits and applications of them should be trained by the very practice of the occupation they perform - namely, looking for and picking up edible things.

- I like the idea that more skilled and respectable servants expect certain quality of life but it'd be also nice if there'd be certain modifier for very obedient, devoted, loving ones allowing them to rough it without complaint for the sake of their master. Sometimes during the game I had rough patch and had to downscale the comforts just to have those who'd seemingly worship me just start complaining. I also realize there's the Grateful trait and that's great, but it seems to be more dependant on storyline than how well a servant is broken/loving/obedient. Maybe some sort of compromise between those could be found.

- Connected to above, please make the game recognize lack of food as such. I had servants complain about quality of their room before noticing what really was the problem is that the pantry was empty and I forgot to buy more food.

- Some sort of indicators of enemy traits, looks would be useful and make sense since normally a person can notice straight away whether someone considerably bigger and stronger is so. The same way, assuming that the enemy doesn't cover themselves fully, noticing if they're attractive and generally how they look wouldn't disrupt the game but allow certain planning and visualization of the battlefield instead of guesswork which enemy<number> is more of a threat and why. Certainly there are unassuming spellcaster enemies out there and those should be what mind reading is for, not absolutely everyone everywhere.

- There's magic, there's alchemy, there's supernatural creatures. I'd like it if after some time one could include such kinds of upgrades for one's mansion. Magical garden generating steadily X food every turn, quality sheets providing more restful rest, incense that relaxes the staff - things that may not have great impact but actually show progression. Some stuff like that may already be in there, but it still seems like majority of mansion upgrades are just generic 'let room do what it already does but now it can hold more people/items/resources'.

- Learning ability menu is crap. Not only it kind of spoils possibilities ahead of player by listing every ability ever achievable (could easily restrict it to just what's available and maybe what one can soon get if point or two will be allocated in right stats) but many of them, especially of supernatural nature seem more like mutations that should be acquired through one's laboratory. If spitting acid is actually a spell, have it learned like a spell but if it's developing innate biological change allowing you to do so (and it's not a regualr ability of your specie), it shouldn't go through learning menu but some alchemical/magical procedure.

Here. Thank you for your work so far and I hope you'll keep on going - while aforementioned list may give a different impression as it concentrates on what doesn't work well and should be fixed, I do enjoy the game and hope to play more of it in the future.

EDIT: Typos and elaboration on some things.