Hello, I just finished checking out your game and I’d like to leave a review so you can improve it and perhaps gain your community!
I’d like to start off by saying that the game is amazing, it’s very well put together, the UI elements, the music, ambience, everything is very beautiful and you can tell a lot of thought and care was put into designing and making the game.
Although the game is very well made, it has a couple of issues that might be holding the game’s potential back. I’ll list them and also give an explanation to each one of them.
- Overwhelming with information
As soon as you join in, you’re presented with a very nice and simple menu, very good, however that is massively contrasted by the bombardment of information around you as soon as you join, this felt overwhelming for me, a grown adult, I can only imagine children would suffer even more with all of this information being spilled onto you at once. I’m not really sure what’s causing it or what could improve it, perhaps disabling UI elements and slowly enabling them back as the tutorial progresses could be a better way to inform the player of all the possible menus they can open or places they can visit.
After completing the tutorial and acquiring some new crafting recipies, I felt a severe lack of purpose to keep playing the game, it feels like I’ll be grinding it for no reason at all. You might argue that there are many other Roblox games that also do this, but there’s more into it, simulator games have all those flashy multiplying numbers and a lot of visual indicators of progress to keep your dopamine receptors fried while gaming, keeping retention. Whilst playing the game I felt like there was no reason to keep playing it, I wasn’t hooked.
- The game in its current state is design to fail
There isn’t any ultimate goal, at least not that I’ve realized yet, other than grinding for your own sake, getting better tools etc. Perhaps if there was more onto the game than just exploring randomly generated caves, which are pretty cool don’t get me wrong, caves were very nice to walk around, it would gain more traction.
I was playing with a friend that commented that there was another game, similar to this one, but you’d grind resources for a player-run faction to form and wage war against other factions for control, so there was more purpose onto it, you felt like you were contributing for something greater.
I believe you have a very strong team of talented individuals, capable of assembling a very nice and polished game, the only thing lacking is some game design, a purpose, mechanisms to keep players hooked into the playing the game more. I’m not a game design specialist so I can’t pin down the exact reasons why the game doesn’t feel interesting, even though it sounds like a game I’d play for hours!
I hope my feedback can shed some light into the possible problems with your game and allow you guys to improve it and turn it into a big success, I’m rooting for it!