"Elven City Simulator" by IndieGo team

[YgorVasilenko]

Hi, could you please check this and give your feedback? Pun intended :) Demo is free and available https://store.steampowered.com/app/2261150/Elven_City_Simulator/

[michaelplzno]

Thanks for adding this to the list, happy to oblige!

[michaelplzno]

Recorded, will edit tomorrow.

[michaelplzno]

Ok this game was too hard to figure out how to play to make a good video, please let me know where I can send some written notes about our struggles to figure out this game.

[YgorVasilenko]

Hi, I'm still here! Feel free to just flush struggles here. Did you pass the tutorial section? Do you fetch latest updates from steam?

[michaelplzno]

The biggest issue is that I'm on a 4k monitor and the font was about 9 pixels high, which meant it was a struggle to read anything your UI showed.

Also some of the text was white on light green which made it even worse.

Just generally it was difficult to understand that I was supposed to follow what was in the text in order to progress the tutorial. You need a lot of visual communication that tasks in the tutorial are being cleared, so for the first tutorial request, press X, I did a ton of other stuff before realizing that I had to press X. Then when I did press X I did it without realizing I had advanced the tutorial, because the tutorial text was so small it didn't read that there were changes there. Also building the stone mine, I didn't understand that I had to build it on the pillar. I got far enough to build sleeping quarters, but once I got the trees enchanted (which was difficult because I didn't understand how to get the enchant button to work.) then I guess I didn't have any way to collect the wood.

We downloaded whatever the current steam build was yesterday. One way to make this clear is to put a version number in the splash screen so players know what build they have.

I recommend getting a YES and NO sound effect that buzzes when the player does something correct or wrong in the tutorial. It doesn't have to be a really abrasive sounding NO effect but just tell people that they are doing something wrong somehow.

[YgorVasilenko]

Hi, judging by what you write resolution and hence lack of visual feedback are main problems. We don´t have 4k monitors ourselves, and indeed even from currently supported resolutions (2k and 1k) I see that 2k font is picked actually smaller, than font for 1k. Could you please send screenshot of how it looks on your end? Also, in options - was there 1920x1080 resolution selected, or bigger one? UI itself (other than font) should be adaptable, so I assume you had really big buttons in 4k. In tutorial those should be highlighted, and in case of "press X" should looks like this - button in lower-left corner should be highlighted

Anyway, thanks for 4k testing!

[michaelplzno]

it looked pretty similar to what you have here, I picked the bigger resolution, but in windowed mode, and then scaled up the window to full screen, otherwise it was messing up my other windows. I'm happy to give this a try again if you want to rework the tutorial.

[michaelplzno]

my main monitor is 3840 x 2160 idk if that is 4k or 2k or whatever, I thought it just went from 1080p to 4k directly.

[YgorVasilenko]

Yes, 3840 x 2160 is exactly 4k! We are going to adjust font size for bigger resolutions. Still, could you please share a screenshot from 4k? :) Just so we could understand roughly how much we need to increase font

[michaelplzno]

[michaelplzno]

I would say the font needs to be at least twice as big if not 2.5 times bigger.