03-31-2013, 01:20 PM
Hi Eric!
I gave the current open-beta release a shot to see what you've been cooking up, and thought it would be unfair to not leave any comments. Having very limited experience with Gearcity - I've spent only some 2h in the game - you need to take this feedback for what it is. As you may remember, I'm the producer of "Automation", which may put more or less weight into my words depending on your view.
Firstly, I'd like to say that the game and the genre has big potential to become a very enjoyable, rather nostalgic title.
For me personally I found it rather difficult to find my way into it despite watching the three pretty good YouTube tutorials you posted. 2h into the game I still haven't sold my first car, and I have no clue why that may be.
I track this back to a general lack of UI feedback, obscuring dependencies and making it unnecessarily difficult to make choices based on anything but gut feeling - which makes it very tough and somewhat frustrating for people not being used to the game yet.
The major example I'd like to give you here is 5-star rating concept, which in its current form doesn't allow for detailed feedback on your design choices. Sometimes in component or car design moving a slider from minimum to maximum changes exactly nothing in the star rating, while having a huge effect on price. This makes it incredibly difficult to gauge if your money is well invested or not. I would suggest you give all your star ratings at least one decimal (e.g. 3.7 stars), for more direct feedback to the player's actions, especially considering you are working with non-integer values in the underlying calculations anyway.
Also, the road to getting your cars to sell could be somewhat more comfortable: adding an option to autofill all current projects on a monthly basis would have saved me many turns of wasting money. Removing some depth of UI branching in the different design stages would give a better overview and reduce lots of the unnecessary clicking-through-all-windows. It's seldom you make use of more than a small part of the screen at any given time in the design stages.
This UI branching with lots of pop-ups is made more frustrating by the fact that the tiny windows currently dislike being closed, I found myself clicking X on average two times per window, so I guess either I should practice more FPS, or those windows/buttons need to be made somewhat bigger for better usability.
Well, enough of this for now. Wish you the best of luck for further development!
Cheers!
/Robert
I gave the current open-beta release a shot to see what you've been cooking up, and thought it would be unfair to not leave any comments. Having very limited experience with Gearcity - I've spent only some 2h in the game - you need to take this feedback for what it is. As you may remember, I'm the producer of "Automation", which may put more or less weight into my words depending on your view.
Firstly, I'd like to say that the game and the genre has big potential to become a very enjoyable, rather nostalgic title.
For me personally I found it rather difficult to find my way into it despite watching the three pretty good YouTube tutorials you posted. 2h into the game I still haven't sold my first car, and I have no clue why that may be.
I track this back to a general lack of UI feedback, obscuring dependencies and making it unnecessarily difficult to make choices based on anything but gut feeling - which makes it very tough and somewhat frustrating for people not being used to the game yet.
The major example I'd like to give you here is 5-star rating concept, which in its current form doesn't allow for detailed feedback on your design choices. Sometimes in component or car design moving a slider from minimum to maximum changes exactly nothing in the star rating, while having a huge effect on price. This makes it incredibly difficult to gauge if your money is well invested or not. I would suggest you give all your star ratings at least one decimal (e.g. 3.7 stars), for more direct feedback to the player's actions, especially considering you are working with non-integer values in the underlying calculations anyway.
Also, the road to getting your cars to sell could be somewhat more comfortable: adding an option to autofill all current projects on a monthly basis would have saved me many turns of wasting money. Removing some depth of UI branching in the different design stages would give a better overview and reduce lots of the unnecessary clicking-through-all-windows. It's seldom you make use of more than a small part of the screen at any given time in the design stages.
This UI branching with lots of pop-ups is made more frustrating by the fact that the tiny windows currently dislike being closed, I found myself clicking X on average two times per window, so I guess either I should practice more FPS, or those windows/buttons need to be made somewhat bigger for better usability.
Well, enough of this for now. Wish you the best of luck for further development!
Cheers!
/Robert