Hello, I'm a person who plays tons of games with something of an interest in game design. I recently played this game, and found it really nice, which is why I thought I'd drop by and leave some feedback.
I know it is a very high volume of things, and that I am an extremely critical and nitpicky person, who can often come across negative, so I would just like to note that I like the game, and I think it has good potential. For an early version of an ambitious(open-ended-ish) project, it has great amounts of charm.
- E-spamming - I feel like the game gets too clickergame-y, with focus on quantity over quality, of what you do and how. Replanting and harvesting, or especially chicken farming, involve far too much E-mashing, and at times progressing feels like progressing your carpal tunnel syndrome.
- One suggestion would using lower-tier resources as foundation to make sure you can get, or produce, higher-level ones. One possibility would be refinement, e.g. wood->planks, scrap metal->refined metal, stone->stone blocks, so as to cap the amount of low-level resources you need.
- For that matter, delinearizing progression as much as possible would be great, too.
- For chickens, and animals overall, what if their birth rates were to depend on proximity to other creatures, so as to enable them to automatically get born, but taper off if they're in too small a space, or too infrequently close to each other?
- One suggestion would using lower-tier resources as foundation to make sure you can get, or produce, higher-level ones. One possibility would be refinement, e.g. wood->planks, scrap metal->refined metal, stone->stone blocks, so as to cap the amount of low-level resources you need.
- Trading - this ties into my previous point, IMO, a simple supply-demand system so you reach a cap on how much of a resource it is worth to produce/sell would do a lot for the game.
- Performance - the framerate seems to be alright, but the game appears to still slow down when you dip below, what, 200? That's really unacceptable, and unless you need deterministic simulation(e.g. planned multiplayer), using framerate-independent code would be vastly better - and even if you want it deterministic, you should run the sim at a fixed framerate independent of rendering.
- One thing that is a common cause of poor 2D game framerates that get worse with objectcounts is not batching your sprites to be rendered in one drawcall rather than individually, or not splitting your large maps into chunks of which you only render 1-4 currently onscreen. Simple quadtree partitioning works well for this. Drawcall counts hurt more than overdraw, and texture switches hurt even more(compile your sprites into atlases if you don't already!).
- Furniture - I think that it should occupy tiles, rather than any spot, as that feels more... "coherent" with the game's tile-based world, and fitting furniture(especially barrels/crates) into tight space feels so messy. It has some flavor for premade structures, but otherwise leaves a bad taste in my mouth
- Storage - In fact, IMO storage should individually matter more, perhaps eventually even specialized. Spamming tons of crates is distasteful to me
- Items - I think that "list of resources" type of inventory tends to contribute negatively to how the player perceives them, e.g. as numbers rather than individual items they've obtained. I think that a more inventory-like UI, as well as manually storing(or even one-click dropping off into storage) resources would reinforce the sense of these items being "physical"(inside the game's world) items that the player handles.
- It would also be more future-proof, for if/when you want to introduce more different items, or perhaps material subtypes(say iron vs steel vs plasteel)
- NPC - I think that it would be nice if they were a little like RimWorld NPCs, with some traits, though for the immediate time, I think they should feel like less of a resource, and more of a part of the colony. Instead of "press E to recruit", give them a simple interaction menu, perhaps add some rudimentary(for starters) ways to control them, like "guard post", "patrol waypoint", eventually stuff like "farmer's shed". And def give them names.
- I also feel like it would be nifty if rather than having NPCs spawn, you were to meet them, for starters even just in randomized monuments - perhaps needing multiple visits/chats with them to recruit them, or helping them with some tasks, etc.
- Eventually they could come with individual skills, that they can offer for a charge either before/without or after recruiting, their monuments coming with tools, and the possibility of you doing trade caravans to peruse those. Of course that's a "far off" topic.
- I also feel like it would be nifty if rather than having NPCs spawn, you were to meet them, for starters even just in randomized monuments - perhaps needing multiple visits/chats with them to recruit them, or helping them with some tasks, etc.
- Fonts - tiny fonts are very difficult to read, and people with disabilities or certain conditions like heavier autism might be incapable of reading them at all. I think fonts are the one thing where staying true to the lo-fi is the objectively bad choice. The font is already upsized, so just develop a 2x or 3x sized version. It would be of great benefit.
- Weapons - Spear has embarrassingly low range, imo. Whip has a bit too high, but such low damage. Bow is crazy strong, but it's somehow counter-intuitive to aim, with other ranged weapons also. Pistols are fairly low damage, so I think it'd be okay for their projectiles to be faster at least. What if bows required you to hold LMB for a bit, also so enemies would telegraph attacks?
- I think that overall, ranged weapon ammo should be craftable, rather than free, with arrows/bolts having break chance. It would also be nifty to one day have ammo subtypes.
- Misc Balance - Floors should cost 1 rather than 4 like walls, wells should store a little more water, small batteries likely ought to take 1 electronics,
- Misc - Escape should pause the game, not just show a "do you want to quit" overlay while the game continues, IMO. Ideally eventually the world should be one
I have more thoughts, also, such as about the world, or further thoughts about the first point and resources overall, but I do not want to so to say "cramp your style", because I know that I am a very opinionated person, and tend to overdo imposing my vision on others. However if you would like, I can share more thoughts.