Ooh, that's fantastic - ditto the above post!
A few feedback points on the game at present:
- Needs more info/intro when you start your first formicarium. I imagine this is coming, but had I not known how the thing was meant to work I'd have found the start a bit confusing - not so much in terms of the actual controls, which are really nice and intuitive, as the overall setting - one of EOTU's biggest selling points is that it has really nicely researched actual creatures in it, and so I think you need to make it clear early on (and ideally as part of the voiceovers) that the formicarium is a kind of contrivance that functions as a base/home camp and that they will soon get some more natural-feeling games. At present I think it'd be too easy for a new player to assume that EOTU was actually a sort of mad science game from the way things start.
- In the Rising Tide level, my ants didn't seem to be able to gather properly from the fish, they just milled around down there. Is this meant to happen?
- I think the tile upgrade stuff bombards the player with too much info. I'd change it to a more colour-based visual, where an outer hexagon around the tile has the six bars coloured according to how much "support" the tile is getting from each direction, and the centre has the level-flags and maybe an X/8 number to show how many more support-grades are needed (although there might be a neater way of doing that too).
- In terms of mission variation, I think at some point a build & destroy mission taking on another colony directly would be fun. Likewise, flipping the idea behind Rising Tide (perhaps with a different core threat) and relocating your own colony would be a cool "protect the objective" mission starting point.
- Suggestion from my mother - ant spiders, which mimic ants in appearance and have front legs that they raise if spotted to mimic antennae. This would provide a great higher-level challenge as they'd be "infiltrating" enemies for the player to deal with that could slowly pick off parts of their colony. I can get you some more info & a relevant paper if helpful.
All in all I'm really enjoying it at the moment, though, I got my formicarium through the levels pretty fast (found the first challenge tougher than the second I think, though I see you've upped the ant limits to compensate since I did so).
Great feedback as usual. We are light on intro info and tutorial stuff generally. It definitely needs more of an explanation as it takes a while to feel things out. One of the problems is that the whole scientist thing was a bit of an afterthought that we came up with around 8 months ago when we realized that a full campaign was going to take too long and we needed to switch to an Early Access game. So it doesn't sit perfectly.
- In the rising tide there shouldn't be a fish. Unless John added one without telling me, I thought it was just on "queen of the hill" and it should be quite difficult for your ants to get down that far past the rival colonies. I think the max number of ants that can harvest a fish at any one time is 6 or 8 so if there are more than that, the rest will wander around. If you hover over the fish you should see a number "X/8" or similar. If not, you may have found a bug.
- I don't like the tile upgrade info overlay, it was our art guy's first pass and he just left it as is. We probably want a 2-tier overlay: a simple colour based one for everyone, and then the ability to add the numbers if you really want them.
- Conquest missions where you destroy an enemy queen are on the way. We will experiment with it in the upcomming "freeplay mode". A new tier of missions is going to take a while as we want to do a bulk batch of 9 in one go (mainly due to the expense and time investment associated with working with the voice actors).
- Love the idea of ant mimic spiders. The spiders in hats have been a big hit, I think it is likely that each new tier of missions will come with their own spider
Show Posts
