by Krakob » Mon Dec 21, 2015 10:39 am
I've encountered a very problematic bug today. After moving my largos to new corals in the cave to prevent chicken accidents and giving them more space by reducing the amount of largos per coop, I've lost all but one pink tabby and one honey tabby.
I've sent bug reports from within the game explaining how I believe it's reproduced. Basically, having largos in the furthest corals and sleeping or just leaving and waiting seems to make them despawn. My roosteros also despawned, although they were in coops in the main area of the ranch. I believe the reason is either the same, or a bug relating to capping out on 12 hens.
This kind of sucks but it won't be a huge problem since I saved up a ton of plorts while waiting for the market to improve. Nevertheless I think I'll resume testing if this is fixed in 0.2.2 as I'm assuming it'll otherwise just keep on happening and I won't really be able to get further for now.
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On to feedback:
I'm having a blast with the game. I love working on the ranch with upgrading and improving. The exploration is fun albeit a bit incomplete given that there are few areas. The jetpack kind of breaks it, allowing you to get on top of the high walls and flying between areas, sometimes to places which only have their geometry and textures; no entities at all. Currently I find the jetpack to not really add much, it kind of feels like throwing in a moon jump in Super Mario 64. Maybe that'll change with time and changes to the areas.
Regarding learning the game, I feel like it's poorly executed. It's a case of telling over showing in a lot of cases, e.g. with the slimepedia. I don't think I'd ever find out that honey plorts attract slimes strongly if the 'pedia didn't tell me, nor would I realise that water was the way to defeat tarr. I'd usually just try to throw them into the ocean if applicable or just shoot them away or run until I learned that you could water them. I also think more creativity should be encouraged. For example, I tried both shooting rock slimes and exploding slimes on tarr but neither worked, despite feeling like a very natural solution to the problem since these things after all hurt me.
So, instead of having a single solution presented through the slimepedia, I think it would be better to implement several solutions that the player can discover themselves. Given that exploration should be a large part of this game, I think it should be in terms of mechanics as well as with the world itself.
Regarding the ranch itself, I think the game could do a better job by showing the features of it as opposed to having letters (which are currently quite bugged it seems) about them. I didn't pay a bunch of attention to the letters and while I do think one of them mentions the shop for character upgrades, I didn't find it until Scirio pointed out that there is one and I started looking for it. Ironically, Scirio did not realise you could upgrade corals until I told him how.