First Day Playing Impressions and Ideas

[theevilhippi]

This game is so. damn. cute.

now that I got the obligatory fact out of the way I can get down to my original impressions. What strikes me about this game is how immediately engaging it is. It seems to be very about just figuring it out through exploration, which is my absolute favorite way of experiencing a game. The over world is large enough to get an idea of scope, while metering out the content that is laying in wait. The actual AI for the slimes are strange enough that the way they interact with your equipment is unknown. This game has enough in it to speculate on how different techniques may work, and it gives enough information to the player that they can actually hypothesize which technique might be best.

the cons are incredibly particular for me, and are all very picky stuff

Range Exchange
A look at the forum thread asking about who used the range exchange, and also my own
experience with it, pretty much showed that it isn't very efficient or worth it to use.
Possible Fix
Make it more market-like. The offers that come through are beneficial to you because the
ranchers on the other side need the stuff that you have. But also give the player the ability to
request supplies

Plort Market
The second system that could use some help is the plort market. As it stands now it doesn't
have much interaction. I love the idea that the market fluctuates, and you could save to make
more money later. As it stands it just feels like a random either benefit or disappointment. I
was going to sell them regardless so the change in price was little more than something to think
about as I shot all my plorts into the port
Possible Fix
There is a real opportunity to allow this market to not only be effected by the player, but also
have an effect on the player's strategy. If the player could somehow predict the changes in the
market, they might change up their current strategy. If the market reacted to your supply, and
the prices dropped because you flooded the market, the player might go after more diversity.

The rest are general ideas that popped up while I was playing.

IDEAS

Domestication
being able to domesticate any of the living creatures in the game could add a whole other level to the interaction the player has with the environment, and while the AI coding that would come along with this creation would be extensive, the result would be worth it. You could have multiple pets roaming around the ranch that need to be fed to live, but do not produce plorts. Instead they would provide services for the player. They could collect stuff in a limited fashion. they could be a replacement for the scare slime upgrade. They might be able to herd slimes into their pen. The player could even choose to have one of his pets follow him through the wilds, helping along the way. Balancing-wise, this should be incredibly difficult to do, and take a lot of steps to do correctly, but having a slime companion would be incredibly cool.

End Goal
After finishing playing this game all day, my friend and I felt like we knew the game. We beat it, for the most part, by fully understanding it's systems and then making the most efficient, fully upgraded ranch we could. We got to the point where we had a ridiculous sum of money, and nothing to spend it on. I propose taking a design choice similar to that of animal crossing. Allow for upgrading the size of your ranch, but make those size upgrades ridiculously expensive. Create the idea of an end goal, but obscure the amount of time it will take from the player. In short, I want to play this game for a long time. It seems to be an excellent stress reviler/ time sink and I would love to have goals that are not self imposed that could keep this game going on for a long time.

Anyway those are my thoughts. I want to stress that I have no professional experience making games, so scope may be the issue with some of my ideas and worries. I am a game design student though, and love indie games for their ingenuity. Thanks so much for making this game, I am really excited to see where this is going to go.

(holy text wall batman)

[LaDestitute]

The market already reaches to supply and demand, at least the supply, partially. If you flood the market with +30 plorts of the same time repeatedly in a short timespan (a day?), as in something near 90-100 plorts in a single day, all plort prices (or I think just the one being flooded in?) end up getting locked at the former value they had before the supply flood.

[theevilhippi]

That might be, but it isn't nearly enough to change player behavior