SLiV: Thanks! Have PMed you a link
bigosaur: Thanks, just watched through your video, that was extremely helpful and I really appreciate the feedback!
The big thing you didn't get from not doing the tutorial, I think, was the keyboard hotkeys which are really important to how I envisaged the game being played. E.g. rather than going into the menus you can just hit "Q" for a quests log or "Z" for skills and money or "R" for a quick units log. I think what I need to do there is have the game remind you at game start that you can press "H" for the hotkeys list at any time. Readouts for money etc: I'll have a think about fitting those into the UI and how do-able it is, I do see the point that it'd be useful.
It's actually really important that search area
isn't an automatic thing: my idea is that it should be done either a) occasionally when the game prompts you to or you feel like it, or b) if you have something to actively search for. But some things you can find by searching in some quests are quite dangerous to the player, so you need to have the option not to search so you don't run into those things when you're wounded and need to get to a city fast. I'm thinking maybe I should highlight "search area" when there are the "now is a good time to search" events.
I see the point about making the map scroll, I'm not sure I can face rewriting that much of the code to allow that to happen, but I agree it'd be nicer and I wish I'd designed the engine to do that. Maybe someday when I'm feeling brave and want to wrestle with code a lot
Regarding the things you were stuck with: the east border is actually a border to the map, the dark mountains/darker sea are always the map edge tiles. I need to make that clearer when you walk into them, I guess. That's also linked to the map size decision you make at game start: a 2x2 map means 2 screens by 2 screens for 4 map areas, the size you had (and has a minimum of 2 cities in it: 3x3 has min 3 cities, 4x4 min 4 cities, etc). I need to do more work to make the 5x5 maps work, they're too big at the moment.
The things I think you needed to do next mainly were to progress with quests. I guess I should tell you what to do and then ask how that should be better flagged up (spoilered in case anyone doesn't want to know how to complete those):
- You had one fugitive hunt quest. The game tells you he's "hiding in nearby farmland" or similar - that required you to go and search a few times around the farms near the relevant city (Xhanihalla I think). It sometimes takes you going around several of them and searching each tile a couple of times, but eventually you will find the fugitive and get to fight them.
- Your other quest was to find a person for the ruler of Caradinge. You had a readout saying they were at the tavern in silver district. What I guess wasn't clear is that the game wanted you to go stay at that tavern to find the relevant person (it randomises which district's tavern you end up at with that button so again it's not necessarily instant).
I guess maybe I just need to state some of these things more explicitly as instructions for the player: I'm thinking actually that I should maybe implement a rudimentary achievements system and tie that to it, so each standard quest type gives you an achievement on completion, and you get some extra advice/details on how to do that quest until you've completed it at least once?
Anyway, thanks again, that was really really useful