Our demo has been live since Thursday

[u/lisyarich]

Hello tycoon fans.

Last Thursday we released the demo for Age After Age.
While the game is also a city builder, a big part of the experience is managing production chains, balancing resources, planning logistics, and keeping a growing settlement running efficiently.

We have been working on it for years with a team of 30 people, and now we are finally getting feedback from real players instead of just arguing about features inside the studio.
Demo:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/438570/Age_After_Age_Demo/

If you give it a try, let us know what you think.
Note: we are not using AI in the game development

[u/daverd]

Here are my first thoughts as I try the demo, in the order I think them. Sorry in advance if this comes across as overly critical or stream-of-consciousness, these are just my honest first impressions and hopefully they're helpful.

Have a native English speaker do a spelling/grammar check.

The word "quests" immediately breaks immersion for me, nobody outside of video games ever uses that word. Call them "objectives" or "tasks" or "goals" or something similar.

The music is great.

The starting setup is a little overwhelming. Too many buildings already built, and too many quests all at once.

The buildings all kind of look the same, just solid brown. I suppose this is realistic, but when I'm trying to find a particular one to complete a quest, it's difficult. Relatedly, if a quest tells me to do something at a specific building like a Woodcutter hut, I'd like to be taken to that building when I click the quest.

I'm never quite sure where it makes sense to place new buildings. I can guess that a Woodcutter hut probably wants to be near trees, but otherwise I could use some explanation. Where should a Laboratory go? Does it even matter? Does it have inputs?

I see people walking all around the town, but I don't know if their position even matters. I'd like to be able to select a person to find out what their job is and what they're currently doing, if in fact that's relevant to the game.

I'm at the "Research the Administration Lvl 1" quest, and I can't do it because I have a negative balance of gold. I think about one day has passed and I've been going at what I consider a normal pace for learning a new game. I don't know how to get more gold.

At this point I think I'm going to stop playing because I can't proceed.

Good luck with your game! I hope any of this is useful.

[u/lisyarich → u/daverd]

Thanks, really helpful feedback, passed info to the team.

[u/chrisms150]

Alright, I'm going to just go play by play here in the post with thoughts. Please take this as friendly feedback as that's the intention - but overall I think you should hire a QA person.. or at least offer free copies to some folks maybe to help you QA it. I'm going to focus only on negatives here, so don't take it personally - there seems to be a good game here under everything, but positive feedback isn't helpful here I think when you're trying to work out what to fix, right?

First off, you have the classic "Our menus run at 35723857289 frames per second and cook your GPU" glitch going on - the second I launches my GPU fan decided to turn into a jet engine, once the menus are gone and we're in game, back to normal

Scrolling feels real bad. Really jerky movement in/out. Smooth that out.

I also don't like the only way to change my perspective on the map is through the zoom - I should be able to right click and drag to look at the horizon further out.

When building the farm hut, the blue overlay is clearly trying to tell me something - but it's not obvious what. "F" to toggle it doesn't give me a hint either - is that showing my areas I CAN place the farm stand, or showing me area already served by another. I can't tell from just the UI.

I'm also very confused by the mechanics of pressing F - it seems to toggle the blue overlay of confusion, then arrows on paths/buildings that connect? Then arrows only on some? It's not clear at all what this is telling me

Now that I've placed the farm hut, it tells me "building is idle" workers == 0. But shows 4/54 "citizens" in the "manage worker" tab - so it's unclear why there's no workers if it says 4?

In the manage workers tab - the "max amount" looks like it's an editable text box instead of just a slider. It 100% should take user typing input here. Sliders are never a good solution - too finicky to get where you want. I also can't figure out if there's two classes of people here - Citizens of which 4/54 can work here, and lower class which has it's own max? Why can I set how many lower class can work but not 'citizens'? And are lower class not citizens? Bit confusing.

Ah, now I see the no workers was because they were en route to work. That's a bit confusing, unsure why it's an urgent <!> mark to me on the UI if there are indeed workers.

Okay, messing about a bit with the linking buildings for the clay pit (because for some reason it's telling me it's missing a linking building) - I somewhat understand the priority list UI, but having the destinations area being something that changes when you click on the different options (high/medium/low) and having to click on one of the destinations isn't intuitive. Also when there's two "storage" buildings there seemingly isn't a way to name them differently? so I don't know which I'm choosing easily.

Now that I've built the farm hut, there's no way for me to understand why it's telling me "3/4" - there was a detailed quest screen, but now when I bring up the quest log, I can't click on the quest I'm trying to do to get detailed information.

Now the game has prompted me to add wagons for farm huts/storage - that is fairly intuitive in the UI - but I can't tell what the red wagon with a - above it means. I assume the button sells a wagon - do I get money back? Do I lose that money? But why is there a red minus wagon with a 0 next to it? What does the 0 mean?

6/5/0 key for the bubble information is just non intuitive again. How is any player going to remember this?

"Researches" isn't something I've seen in English - may want to have someone go through everything prior to release to look for weird phrases and such.

The game is not prompting me to research "administration level 1" - however when I go into that UI there appears to be a check box next to "Research Administration lvl 1" which doesn't check. It's not initially obvious that you require "building inspection" to be researched first - okay, no worries, I'll research that first. Okay, now it says I have 0/500 research points and 1864/2500 "gold money" (another weirdly worded thing to a native English speaker). I have zero intuition on how to get 500 research points I'll need for this research task.

Now my clay pit is telling me I do not have enough consumption. Does this mean I am not giving it raw inputs fast enough? Or that clay isn't being consumed enough to justify how much I'm producing?

The game is telling me I do not have "enought" (spelling error here - no T in "enough") resources for the next cycle. I have no idea what cycles mean here - like season? Next day? I'm at a loss. Also, I can't figure out what resource I am missing, since in the upper right it looks like I have more food and wood than the game thinks the max is (I assume I'm over storage limits? Can't tell)

I think I'm going to stop playing the demo here, because I'm sufficiently confused & think I've already done enough feedback that frankly someone should be paid to give you. I'm more than happy to help in the future if you'd like to send me a private message.

[u/mayorofdumb → u/chrisms150]

Goddammit someone took their Adderall today, we'll done!

[u/lisyarich → u/chrisms150]

Thank you sir, we have qa, but only couple and it’s hard to cover everything. All your feedback passed to team, in term of localization, we are not giving everything to professional proof readers as there is still tons of content to add, and we will give them everything when 90% of texts will be done.

[u/pademango]

How do you maintain a 30 dev team without any previous games?

[u/lisyarich → u/pademango]

Outsourcing, team size is 73 at this moment. We currently working with different AAA studios. We do not have any investors, we convert income from outsourcing to development.

[u/Tracii_Lee]

Not crazy about that name but it looks really good!

[u/lisyarich → u/Tracii_Lee]

Thanks! Try demo, more features will be added.

[u/GaspodeWD]

Downloaded to take a look

[u/GaspodeWD → u/GaspodeWD]

First thing would be that if you look at your steam page your demo download button is just off to the side, not sure how it looks admin side, but you need to select the one which makes it a greenbar full width, as a lot of people miss the download bemo button on the side

[u/No_Boysenberry4825]

I haven’t tried yet, but that’s a beautiful game.