Timberborn notes

[alice-i-cecile]

[alice-i-cecile]

Design

• unable to run in background makes for poor idle game
• very focused on individual worker happiness. Cute, but not the scale I want to focus on

[alice-i-cecile]

Science mechanics are extremely dull and feel unsatisfying.

[alice-i-cecile]

Technology advancement is hard to plan: there's no paths / prereqs.

[alice-i-cecile]

Some technology unlocks are competely useless on their own :(

[alice-i-cecile]

Distribution post + drop-off point design is fascinating and very fun. Creating new civs is great. Also increases resilience significantly.

[alice-i-cecile]

Business

• very appealing concept
• proves market
• does not need to be very complete before launch
• basic assets are fine
• story hook may be too close; may need to pivot to reduce

[alice-i-cecile]

Unique, viral hook is critical.

[alice-i-cecile]

UX

• plz give hotkeys as basic foundation
• information display / power is everything
• tutorialization needs to be extended
• visually group related tools
• make tooltips more useful
• 3D
  • works well with voxel terrain
  • adds interest

[alice-i-cecile]

Priority system is powerful; definitely needed.

[alice-i-cecile]

Flip, rotate and mirror plz

[alice-i-cecile]

Showing production pathways on buildings is cute!

[alice-i-cecile]

Copy-paste and blueprints plz :(

[alice-i-cecile]

Undo-redo plz :(

[alice-i-cecile]

Systems

• very small area
  • points to poor optimization?
  • unstable systems?
• impossible to recover from complete population failure, but easy to death spiral
• no combat!

[alice-i-cecile]

Idle workers very important to shift resources around.

Fixed jobs and no feedback loops means they're terrible at responding to emergent needs though.

[alice-i-cecile]

Lack of things to do + resource management system encourages keeping no buffers.

[alice-i-cecile]

Fixed job system prevents dynamically shifting workers to adapt to changing situation.

[alice-i-cecile]

Like usual, overly large buffers mask dangerous problems. This is brutal without any production statistics available though.

[alice-i-cecile]

Projected time until critical resource failure (runway) would be very useful!