Impressions

[iseeall]

First impressions:

Great music in starting cutscene and builds up the feeling well, but the action is too slow (and too little is shown). Maybe need to extend the cutscene and add a male (or female) voice over. The voice should be talking during the animation and not before. Too many text lines before the animation.

Cheap looking GUI. Just plain black dialogs and dialog title bars. Needs some small details, like small power cords, wheels, cogs, power circuits or something (see Deus Ex 1 GUI design as possible example).

Ruin in Sight dialog: the image of the marine is blurred. "Now, looking AT them with our own eyes.. " (typo).

Just reading the text in all those story-related dialogs is boring! Need a nice English voiceover. At least for some events. That's one of the small things which made Alpha Centauri so atmospheric.

Colonizer textures are ugly! (because too monochrome). Actually for most other units too.

Tooltips over the terrain tiles are great! Also, the iPad-style map scrolling.

"Click the build city in the selection panel AT the bottom left" (typo). Need to highlight the buttons which need to be pressed during the tutorial more distinctly (in red? with a red circle around it?)

Music switches too abrupt when dialogs are shown (e.g. building the city). Needs to fade in/out.

The 3D faces of faction leaders and advisors are somehow bland (too little detail? too plastic-looking? not enough saturation?). They add quite a lot to the low-budget feel of the graphics (especially the 2D graphics of the GUI elements).

In the units encyclopedia, all units share the same image, and all aliens also the same image. That looks too low budget and strange/confusing at first because I see the same picture for a trooper and a terraformer.

Overall, the graphical design lacks saturation. It's just mostly shades of black and dark gray. Alpha Centauri had more colorful palette, with more blue shades.

Terrain textures all look very dull (too little saturation). Though at second look and when zoomed in they are pretty realistic. But zoomed out they are like a big gray mess.

In tooltips, you're using "per month" instead of "per turn". It's not immediately clear that a turn lasts 1 month, so maybe it would be better to use "per turn" everywhere.

"Power proportionally lowers with missing health" -> (change to) "Power decreases proportionally when the unit loses health"

Good: can play with mouse only, instantly see the total power of the unit stack above the unit.

Bad: not visible where the unit can move when you select it. First need to right-click down at some tile - and only then the possible moves show. What's the meaning of the yellow highlighted hexes when showing movement range? Last tile where you can move? That's not really that important so as there were a need to use a separate color.

(Mistaken first impression!) Not clear how to lift a farmer from one hex and place on another. Left-click just closes the city management screen - that's confusing. "Return to map" button is enough.

There should be a tutorial tooltip some time early in the game explaining the new mechanics about the minerals accumulation and then conversion of minerals to production - since this mechanics is new to the genre. Also that food is NOT needed to grow (and surplus food can't speed up growth) but instead to just sustain population.

In general not clear where the "natural" growth comes from.

Not clear at start if the accumulated food and minerals are civ-global or per-city (show the tutorial popup about that before 2nd city is built).

Newly created units in workshop should get auto-generated names.

It took me at least an hour to guess that farmers and miners are automatically placed on tiles around the city (and under it), but more than 1 citizen can occupy a tile! That's a new feature to the civ series and needs to be explained in a tutorial popup. Also, this explains why forest is now not the dominant strategy of terraforming, because any citizen working on it will only produce just 1 point of either food or minerals.

Not immediately clear that forests set minerals and food output of the tile to 1. Yes, there is a + sign for other improvements (mines and farms) and no + sing for forests but there could be a tutorial popup about forests clearifying this rule. Not immediately clear that pollution is reduced by a forest even if no citizen is on it (and that fungus increase pollution even if there is no citizen on it).


After playing 2 hours:


Bad: need to scroll reply options during negotiations! Either make the dialog larger, or just shorten the reply options to just the ones you have in gray color. It's tiresome to read all of those long replies anyway. You never read them more than once in the beginning of the game, and after you know them, you will never read them again. So why have those wordy replies in the first place?

Don't understand the purpose of "praise" and "denounce" in diplomacy. A cheap way to make relations better?

Actually, you could make those civilopedia dialogs full screen since there is lots of scrolling involved and the dialogs don't occupy even half of the screen (or it is dependent on the resolution? mine is 1366x768).

FPS dropped suddenly in Feb 2115 (played without exiting, alt+tab'bed a lot). Then it was suddenly normal FPS again after alt+tabbing back. Nvm


After playing for 3.5 hours:

Ok, so this game is something like Civ 5 but in Alpha Centauri setting. Plus the new interesting mechanics with the production and minerals. The game plays pretty much like Civ 5. It's very streamlined, so turns go pretty fast. There is not much to optimize, so it feels almost casual, which is probably good. Quite frankly, I like the original Alpha Centauri with all it's multitude of tiny details a bit more, but I haven't yet seen the whole game.

Here is what I would give if I were a gamespot reviewer:
Overal score: 7/10 - the game is good already and could be brought to 8/10 with some additional polish and improvements to 2D graphics of the GUI. Still, need to see more of the game.
Graphics: 6/10 - i know it's an alien planet but it's just too dull. Need to increase saturation, at least in the GUI!
Music: 6/10 - it was good at start but gets pretty boring after a while. Just too relaxed all the time. And together with the dull graphics adds to this overall "shades of black" feeling.
Gameplay: 8/10 - I must say I forgot to drink for all the 4 hours I was playing until my wife finally tore me away from the computer, so this is a good game with a good mechanics and some very interesting features. I haven't seen it all but it can be on the level of Civ 5 or close to it in terms of gameplay. But with all the simplifications, it's just too simple compared to Alpha Centauri - but that's words of a 32 y.o. guy, your younger audience may think differently.
GUI: 8/10 - many nice additions which you would otherwise also find in Civ 5, so it's much more friendly than the original Alpha Centauri.


So, the main advice: please sprinkle some life into your presentation. Get your 2D artists to work, add some bright colors.
That said, this game is an amazing achievement for your relatively small team.

Will keep playing and sending more feedback.