Hey, first off I wanted to say thanks for undertaking such a huge amount of work, the game is coming along nicely and the thought of playing Outpost in a less broken state is really appealing to me. I've got a bunch of questions and suggestions, but please know that I raise these because I like what you're doing and want to see it get better, it's not a criticism by any means.
Thanks for posting! Constructive criticism is never a bad thing -- in fact I find it to be extremely helpful. I very much appreciate you taking the time to post your thoughts -- without users like you it's hard to know where I need to focus my efforts.
On the first page, the "how to play" link should point to https://wiki.outpost2.net/doku.php?id=outposthd:how_to_play
Good catch! Seems the link broke after we forced HTTPS rewrite rules on the server. This has been fixed.
As far as the game itself, I'm a little lost on the interface.
I think it might be a good idea to add a "tips" feature to help give the player some in-game tutorial on the basics, just things like "land the seed factory here" and "build an agridome and CHAP before you bring down colonists" or whatever. The lack of clear direction on getting the basics was a problem for me in the original, putting in a little bit of handholding for new players will go a long way here.
Understandable. The interface needs work; I suppose that's part of the "work in progress" aspect to this. I very much agree with your suggestion -- it's something I'd like to see in the final product though I wanted to at least get resource management and research going before I spent time on it.
Does the lab have any research options yet? I see no menu to do anything there.
Not yet. See the
GitHub Milestones page for my planned development route. It's slated for v0.9.0 but I think I'm going to switch that to v0.8.5 and move structural integrity decay to v0.9.0 instead -- the game is playable but there's a distinct feeling of lack of progress atm which I think technology improvements will help to alleviate.
I'm not sure where to find the Master Reports, if it's not implemented no worries but if it is you may want to document how to do access them on the wiki.
There isn't really a master report ATM but there are main report windows for Factories. You can access this by double-clicking on a factory. Pressing F1 will also bring this up though for now this is a debug aid, not sure if it'll stay that way or if I'll add a button somewhere to the HUD or just have double-clicking on a Command Center do this.
For the Morale, it would be nice if the game gave me an indication of why my morale is changing (i.e. +2 from residential, +2 from park, -3 from police).
I hadn't considered this but I think it's a really good suggestion.
I'll slate this for the current release being worked on.
For population, it would be good to have an indication or tip on how to get more workers or scientists, and a little bit of context as to what the classes of colonist are.
Good point -- there's a bit of an assumption made that someone playing the game is familiar with the original game. I had opted for the wiki/manual to sort of explain this (at least for now) but in-game explanations are also a good idea. This is something I'll slate for a later release.
With Factories, I get an indication that it's on "Turn 5/5" for a long time. Is that because I don't have enough materials, or another reason?
This happens when the factory is producing a product that doesn't have storage space. Either it's a robot but there is no additional robot command capacity (e.g., you have three robots already and haven't yet built a Robot Command Center) or you're producing a product, say clothing, but you either have no warehouses or the warehouses are full. This isn't well indicated in the current release. I'm sort of scratching my head on how to indicate this well to the user -- it could just be a note in the Factory Inspector Window, the Factory Reports screen or both.
Ultimately I intend this to be a 'beginning of turn' notification type of deal -- e.g., you have an indicator appear on the screen alerting you to issues like this. It's talked about a bit in
this thread.
For resources, having a dialog showing me where they are being consumed would be great, I'm having resources seemingly disappear and have no idea where to.
Similar to the Morale suggestion you had, this is also something I've been thinking about. There's the current resource breakdown which shows changes over time but nothing that indicates where resources are going. I'm not sure where to put the details though -- I've though about the Mining Master View (naming is inconsistent here, I apologize) -- but basically the full-screen UI.
I'm open to suggestion on this, of course. As I've stated in other threads (and in the first post of this one), I'm really bad at UI and interface design. This is evident in the minimalist approach that most of the interface takes. I use the excuse that "I'm the developer so I don't really need to focus my time on the UI" but the reality is that this thinking does a disservice to the potential users. Sure, the game is a work in progress but it's the users that need to be heeded here. The last two versions of the game that I published were heavily driven by a user on IRC from SimTropolis (I'm unable to access the website for months now which is a crying shame as the user was very helpful) who provided a great deal of feedback. This feedback pushed me to make the UI changes that are now present in the game.
Anyway, long story short, I'm open to suggestions about the overall design of the interface. Having a mockup that I can look at helps me to actually develop the underlying code. The coding isn't really the hard part (even though it's sort of tedious), but knowing what to put on screen is a real challenge.
I also got "you have failed, your colony is dead" without any clear reason why. I had enough food, energy, housing, and materials, morale was around 300, and game over. Having some sort of alert like "your people are dying fast" or "morale is too low, people are air locking themselves to escape this existence" would be great.
Yeah... that's an on-going issue. It's almost always due to a shortage of a critical resource (usually rare minerals) that lead to the CHAP facility shutting down which causes everything to collapse immediately and very suddenly. Part of the notification tasks I linked to earlier will be to warn users very loudly about critical resources getting too low. ATM resources that are reaching limits will start to glow red. It's a start but it's not the really loud "You're about to lose your colony because Resource X is dwindling -- bulldoze a structure or two NOW before this happens" that needs to happen.
Basically, I'm working on it.
I'm also a developer, usually FPS stuff but I've worked on a number of different mod teams all over. I'm not a C++ guy, but I can give you some time around doing documentation and other non-coding non-artistic stuff.
By all means! I could really use help with in-game tips and help text and help with the Wiki 'manual' as well. I'm not a great writer and the task is often daunting to me.
If you'd like to help on the Wiki, let me know and I'll PM you temporary login info based on your username here. We had a lot of issues with spam there so I have the wiki locked down.
So... apologies for the wall of text. I hope I answered your questions. If you have more thoughts or questions, please post! I really do love getting bug reports and feedback from users. I've said it many times before and I'll say it again, without user feedback I can't make this game great. So again, thank you!
