A Couple of Suggestions
Hello. I am finding the game fun and have a few suggestions.
- Market Stall Alignment: The market stall needs to be angled to fit the way all other buildings can be positioned. It is turned slightly askew from the rest. It makes me more difficult to fit it in a matching way alongside others.
- Character Face Icons: Speaking of angling, any chance we could have the icons for our faces skew slightly to match the angle of our character? Many look fine but ones like the skull look a bit off facing straight at the screen from sideways characters.
- Terrain & Road Customization: A way to "terraform" the land around us, to design the type of terrain (dirt, grass, etc). Perhaps additionally allowing us to style the roads near us (like paying to swap nearby roads to dirt paths instead or cobblestone).
- Dynamic Shadows: Are dynamic shadows possible rather than baking them into textures? Flipping buildings makes my shadows look non-matchy.
- Cooperative Features: Any ways to encourage cooperating with others while playing. I'm not sure what this would look like, but I am often with my partner when playing and it would be nice to have some sort of opt in exchange of activities or goods. Bonus, seeing each others placements as they insist their "town" happens to "kick" mines "ass." Doubtful.
A lot of things are already going very well. I've even considered starting a wiki to track the things I learn, so if anyone has an interest then let me know.
12 replies
Hey there!
Sure, I can look into that. Do you have a preference? Like looking at it straight on (might look bad though compared to other buildings) or less of an angle maybe? Hm.. I'm currently reworking the building shop anyway, maybe I could offer variations of the functional buildings (like several designs that all do the same thing), I'll put it on my todo list :)
I'll take another look, things have been a blur the last months, so the quality can be hit or miss on some older parts of the game.
This one is genuinely tricky. I thought about offering patches (like grass, snow, dirt, ..), but they'd have to render underneath the road layer. And placing them could be a huge chore. Generally the procedural generation is split up into regions, so in theory it would be possible to switch a region out for a different one, but again, it's randomly generated (and very performance heavy, tons of time was put into making the game run smooth). For roads maybe I could offer different styles, but currently road style equals road type (in the real world, a highway looks different from a hiking trail). Open to further suggestions here!
I did try to keep most buildings flat shaded, but as you noticed some look off when flipped. Dynamic shadows on 2D art doesn't really work unfortunately (would be much easier if the game was 3D). Maybe it's possible if I fully redo the rendering pipeline, like making the base texture unshaded and adding some kind of shading overlay to each one for dynamic shadows, similar to how I handle light right now, or having two shadow textures, one for normal and one for flipped. But yeah, tricky.. maybe for the 2.0 version of the game (:
This one is unfortunately a no-go, the game is fully designed to be offline and privacy first. No user accounts or outbound connections (except when downloading a street map once). In theory something like Bluetooth could work, but that brings other headaches and issues (Data handling/privacy, Play Store/App Store permissions, ..). What does work right now: You should see what they see. Same map, same resources, same merchants, same events. Sharing towns/buildings would be a nightmare, if you live together and you both place a building near each other, I can't simply overlay them. Keeping both your games in sync would be tricky too.
I hope that gives a general idea of things, I'll look into some of the suggestions if I can do something about them 💚
Here is what I meant by market stall alignment.
Ideally it would twist a wee bit more so it faces like the buildings do.
Ahh, got it, I'll try to align it more :)
Regarding the wiki: you are welcome to join me at https://wanderingalchemist.miraheze.org/ :)
Disclaimer: this is the first wiki I ever contributed to. So any help, tips, restructurings/refactorings etc. are highly appreciated!
I am also currently working on a calculator for Potion prices for each Factionᕕ(ᐛ)ᕗ
I had no idea there was a wiki. I've been thinking I need to start writing down the potion combinations to keep track of them.
Thanks for putting together all the information! I'll definitely be using this more often and try to contribute where I can!
The Potion combinations (I called them Demands) are listed here: https://wanderingalchemist.miraheze.org/wiki/Factions
I drove like 45 minutes by tram and screenshotted all merchants' requests (☝︎ ՞ਊ ՞)☝︎ so there may be errors/missing combinations.
Thx for the kind words! And even if you do not have the time or capacity to write full articles or do not want to make a miraheze wiki account, you can help: just send me the pages/topcis you'd like to see added, or bullet points of information you like to add to the wiki etc. Worst I can do is say No ಠᴗಠ
PS: English is not my first language. So any comments/fixes on spelling, grammar, style etc. are also highly appreciated ಠᴗಠ
I also wonder if there is any way to incentivize having buildings in different areas? I frequent some spots daily but I don't really have any reason to build anywhere other than all in one spot. Maybe it exists and I have missed it?
Not yet and unsure if I want to add this, except you have a really cool idea for it?
Generally there are people playing the game who live in one spot, or two, or travel a lot, .. that's why if there is a timer it's quite short (12h and you can shorten / instant finish things with the faction buffs). And you get 100% of the cost of refunded buildings back, so in theory you could even play if you're sleeping one night in a hotel room.
But as you say, it might be fun to give incentives to buy buildings outside your home (besides decorating).
as of now, it does not matter where your buildings are. Place them where it is most convenient for your daily Alchemist Business.
I get that. I’m asking for incentive to do things certain ways.
Seconding the stall alignment request!