Are you talking about first tutorial part, or building part? I had similar feedback about it from friends, and have made ability to not begin building tutorial part, which is long.
Although it really isn’t my type, I liked the tutorial / onboarding. However, when playing alone in a round, it gets a bit boring after a while and I believe it may be a bit too much text to process from whoever controls the events, but that’s just in my opinion. The game also gives off “completed” vibes, not like it’s incomplete with tons of bugs and missing features - something I have to deal with unfortunately due to the history of my own game (never meant to become semi-popular; mainly it was just an experimental hobby game).
I do have a bit of an issue in the tutorial. Using a 2k screen, the window for the second part of the tutorial is very tiny - assuming it was using offset completely. Other than that, I had no other issues with the UI whatsoever.
I don’t have much of a final opinion since I only played for one round, but I believe it’s looking good right now and has a lot of potential once people start playing. I may come back once in a while to learn a little bit more about this :)
Thanks for telling me this issue - I accidently set it’s size to offset only.
Sadly, that’s the issue of such games - they are both hard and boring when playing solo. Playing with a team of at least 3 players changes how game works a lot - at least because not all negative events select you =)
You should probably consider making it available for mobile first. Most of your players will probably come from 3 year old tablet kids as that is unfortunately most of Roblox’s playerbase.
Excited to test it tho, since I used to play a game like this a bunch. I’d be happy to give any suggestions if you’d like. I’ll have my feedback when i try it this afternoon.
Okay, I have played it and I have some feedback to share.
First off, I’d like to say that the game looks pretty good. I can tell it is very well made. That being said, I do think there are a few things you could improve on.
User Experience (UX)
The UI of the game is mostly fine, but the UX lacks a little more. Lots of buttons, *especially* in the build menu, are pretty cluttered and some of the ways to do things feel a little excessive. I'll go into more detail in the building section.
Simplicity
This one is pretty big, since I, and many other older players probably do not want to go through a 5 minute tutorial on how to play the game. This doesn't even take younger players into account, who probably don't pay attention enough to care about the tutorial. The game might not be super understandable to a younger player, but at least they will be able to join a match and play the game. I honestly didn't really get the whole Oaklands chopping down trees thing or why it was necessary to upgrade my pickaxe in an PoF kind of game. There's a game super similar to yours called
Island Survival
that I highly recommend you check out. To build you really just need coins I’m pretty sure. Not saying the harvesting system should be removed but I don’t really see any clear indication of how much of a resource I have. It might be better to put some sort of menu that tells me while I’m building.
Building
This is something that could definitely use a little work in my opinion. A short tutorial is necessary but I think it's something you should put next to the building teleporter, that way, there's a clear way that I can learn how to build and I might be able to enjoy the game by playing a round first. (Shoving all of the information at once first thing could drive off some players). I think something you could do in the building menu is make 3 buttons: A placing mode that brings up the menu to place objects (and PC players still can press R to rotate during that time too). An edit mode to move, scale, rotate, and configure objects. And a delete mode to remove unwanted objects. Lots of the buttons to place stuff have images that are unclear, and a caption underneath them or when I hover over that button would really help. Same thing with the red and blue boxes in the bottom right corner, which I assume are object limits. I feel like saying "Object Limit" and maybe having the picture would help a lot more. Also, why can't Left Click place instead of E? Lastly, either a menu to select the material to place or part of the edit mode to select material and paint the color of the object could improve clarity a little. (also, you could probably increase the object limit by a lot so that dedicated players can get more creative with their builds.)
_
Anyways, these are the few things that I think are keeping the game from blowing up. Don’t take this reply as me coming off rude or anything, these are just the things I struggled with while playing the game. I wouldn’t make this long of a reply if I didn’t think the game was cool or worth testing.
Thanks for SUCH detailed feedback. Can’t leave it with no reply =)
Right now I have began redoing UI to fit mobile devices (cuz they are really important but insanely hard to support for me as I have never played on phone XD)
The lore of how this game was born is 2.5+ years long, which in short consists of the following: I really liked LT2 game, and wanted to make my tree generation system, made “Neighborhoods” game which was trash due to giant kid ambitions, and later I just not wanted to scrap it, so I kept it a tiny bit with trees. They are “tombstone” of that game.
Yes, I know. Was one of the reasons why I did this game - I dupe-bugged that game that much that I was unable to build further.
Sorry, but I quite not understood what you meant with this… Is it unclear how much materials you have in the build mode? Or how much mats you will get from tree?
Will do that!
Building system is sadly a not bit complicated, a hell a lot, due to the fact that I did that by my giant building ambitions.
Is it really that hard to use that 6 buttons? I think you are right that they need to be either labeled or show info box when hovered, but packing them into singular button… Unsure.
Configuring objects in “regular” meaning is sadly not feasible, and some object’s properties can be configured at the right side.
Overally object creation system is VERY complex, especially for 6-yeared kid:
Select object/primitive;
Select variant of that object (for example: barrel can be old wooden one or new metalic for oil or such);
Select material if needed;
Object created and you can place it.
Agreed on the part that some extra labels needed, at least to show what’s even is going on.
Yep, that’s are object and power limits (like in the game you linked). Will make that more clear.
Because it’s a bug I’ll need to fix
Can’t understand what that means. Sorry.
Max object limit is 5k and power is 2.5k, and limits are obtained by leveling up (or robux =)
And I’ll try my best to fix them. If real life problems will allow =\
I understand it now. I played the game a little, made the first part of my reply, and then played more before the next half. I just didn’t really understand it as much because I was comparing it to the Island Survival game, but I get it now.
Just for the building tutorial to be clear. So you can learn that part later and jump into the action faster.
I mean like there being a “Building” button to bring up a menu to place objects, an “Edit” button to bring up the menu to edit objects, and one for deleting. Then you can make the menus more detailed (with captions for example) and have to worry less about each thing taking up space, which would be great for mobile devices.
That was before I understood how the material system worked. But if you decide to have a button for an edit mode like i mentioned above, then you could add a paint mode to it too.
So, I have finished dividing tutorials by starter one and building one. Also did some context hints for better and easier building.
Also I have finished doing mobile support, and it was comedy how me and my helpers were testing it, so I hope it works “good enough”.
I think the game lacks some impact or satisfying feedback when breaking things early on.
Actions like breaking rocks, chopping wood, or sawing take a bit of time, so it’s important that they feel fun.
Adding punchy sounds, better visual/audio feedback, and more responsive effects could really help improve the game feel
UX
When cutting down a tree, the cut marker could be more visible. Using yellow or another standout color would help. I was confused at first and didn’t realize the cut circle was there.
Interface
I talked to the birthday NPC, and the dialogue UI felt a bit off.
The interface shows a large dark background in the bottom-left corner for a small piece of text, which feels like wasted space.
The NPC sound also is a bit weird, maybe it could be revised for tone or clarity.
I think a style closer to Fisch or Grow a Garden would work better visually and contextually.
You’ve done an excellent job, and it’s clear a lot of love went into this project!
That said, the amount of features might make it feel a bit overwhelming for new players right at the start, the good news is you can always cut or simplify a few things early on and release them later as updates.
Overall, trimming complexity a bit could help players hop into the fun instantly.
??? Like it’s not fun to break rocks and chop trees? Unsure if this things can be fun… Tools have complex system, where at the start they take a lot of time to get something, but later allow to gather entire trees and rock nodes in matter of seconds.
I have added some VFX now, and it indeed looks not 100, 1000 times better now!
About sounds - I have realized that I’m just overally bad at them =\ I can do everything BUT sound.
Making it diffirent color won’t help, because I have trees of all rainbow colors. Not all are like that, but magic, glimmer, blood, acid/marsh, icycle, void trees are pretty colorfull for just color change.
Size of that panel is now scales much slower with screen size. It used to be like that because text were scaling on it. But later I have realized that 100 sized font on big screen isn’t good thing…
In some cases yes, they can fit. But not for long dialogues.
Overally, thanks! You pointed some things which I’ll check twice and try to improve
Still isn’t released publicly if you didn’t know. (just checked)
Also, now that you’ve said you can get exotic materials, perhaps showing new players what their island could become might be beneficial. Like having a thumbnail that shows a starter island compared to a pro island with void wood. Perhaps even an exclusive material just for logging in a certain amount of days
Got it. Also I just encountered a bug where a tree i spent 3 minutes sawing fell through the ground. Maybe make it like auto collect if it falls off or something or respawn.
