Hello,
This is my first game on steam.
It’s a tower defense game disguised as a management/city building game.
You can find it here:
If for some reasons, you hate steam, you can also try demo on itch:
2 Likes
I really like the idea and visual style is very enjoyable. The controls are simple enough too–I like that the buildings light up once you can buy them.
However, I think you need to balance the difficulty or the building prices, because it seems pretty hard to progress levels unless you spam a lot of the same building. I guess that’s how tower defense often works (you start out putting a lot of the immediately available weapons/defenses), but I think that doesn’t translate so well with the building metaphor. You start to wonder “why am I building so many dollar stores and yet people are still happy?”
You need a way to let the player do a variety of buildings from early on, I think. And maybe add a mechanic where variety adds a bonus.
The other thing is that it’s not really clear how the happiness is being affected since it is not updated until the end of the level. Also it’s not immediately clear what the red/green bars over the visitors are.
Anyway, really cool idea, hope this feedback helped.
Thank you for your comment. It’s really nice to get a feedback.
Happiness is calculated by adding each person individual happiness, so I can only do that at the end of the day. It bugs me a bit, but I couldn’t think of another way to do it.
As for other topics, I don’t have a solution, but I am interested in hearing ideas.
I really like the metaphor, very easy to get, and it goes with the gameplay very intuitively. I was never in doubt as to what I was supposed to be achieving, though maybe not how 
Overall I like the fundamental gameplay, but it could do with a little more depth. I’m not sure if coffee shops do anything different from the shops, for instance - it might be fun to have some effects from buildings. Placement of buildings is also very straight-forward, you could have them influence each other, like letting a high-value building boost neighboring lesser ones, or vice versa. That could also encourage the player to replace buildings down the road (though I don’t think there is a remove mechanic currently).
I write while I play, please don’t be alarmed by the volume of words, or take it to mean that everything is wrong with your game
Notes:
- Sound and music would obviously do a lot, including giving feedback when something happens
- The settings menu is a bit harder to read when transparent and overlapping the main menu
- It would be nice with a visual indication when citizens leave the map, to show the increase / decrease in happiness. Maybe beneath / on the happiness meter, where it’s easier to see than the right edge of the screen.
- Would also be nice with a bar rather than a number to show happiness, to make it stand out as important and easily readable.
- The start of the game (on normal) is very unforgiving, and it’s easy to lose on the first day. Consider easing the player into the game, so they can learn the fundamentals before being really challenged… that’s the only part of the game a new player is guaranteed to try
- Having the normal difficulty target at 100% makes the player overly vulnerable to small deviances, since all it takes is one unsatisfied citizen at the end of the day to end a whole run. I’d suggest having normal be ~90%, and reserving 100% for a hard difficulty.
- I think it would be nice to start levels manually, rather than when the first building is placed
- It might be good to unlock buildings, rather than presenting the whole range to the player from the start. That way the player feels rewarded when one is unlocked, and it could be as simple as only showing the next unbuyable one grayed out, and when it’s bought show the next tier.
- Upgrading seems way too powerful compared to buying buildings, in terms of bang per buck. There’s no real choice in whether to buy more buildings before all the existing ones have been upgraded… maybe that could be mitigated by not increasing their capacity by much, forcing the player to balance them with buying more real estate?
- Conversely, joining two buildings only comes with a small bonus to capacity, although it’s more work to achieve.
- It might be fun with something more to do during the day, like maybe thieves show up, and the player has to click them before they steal from a shop? Or having skills to use, like a shopping happy hour, a mascot outside a shop, forcing rain so everyone stays inside the shops longer… or something
- Mousewheel could also scroll the road area when over it.
Thank you for your feedback, I agree with most of what you said.
The demo version has all the buildings. The full game starts only with 2 buildings and you have to unlock the rest.
Not really. So Coffee shop takes way longer than regular shop, because you are waiting for food to be made and it makes more profit. But it’s exactly the same building as any shop.
I know there are games which do exactly what you say and I hate that so much I was thinking about feeding the birds, but it was not implemented.
I like these ideas. I was thinking about rain/snow, but I couldn’t decide on impact. If nobody comes because of the rain, that is no fun
Thank you for such detailed feedback.
1 Like