This was so fun, I can't wait for more. Any critiques are mostly about expanding the game, which im sure will happen as you keep developing. I love the art style. I think it'd be nice to be able to have more ways to assign workers to do specific tasks, especially early game with the builders and Backpack carriers. To be able to command them to collect specific things or prioritize certain buildings would be nice. Adding an enemy, maybe a warrior class could keep things a bit more interesting
The control question is the one I keep circling around. The whole point is that dwarves decide for themselves and you shape those decisions through what you build and where you build it. But there are clearly moments, especially early on when you have two builders and one carrier, where you can see exactly what needs doing and have no way to say it. I don't want to turn it into a game about selecting units and issuing orders, so the answer is somewhere in between those two things. It's high on my list and I've been sketching at it.
On enemies and a warrior class: there is work happening on what's further down, and it isn't just more of the same tunnels. The game isn't called Crown Below by accident. I'll leave it there for now.
And thank you for the art especially. I draw all of it myself and pixel art is the thing I've been doing longest, so that one lands differently.
Hi there. I think this is a great start! I dug to floor 14-ish and then figured there wasn't anything else to discover yet. I did find the font in the tutorial modals a bit hard to read, and the blueprints and ruins were really hard to spot - they blend into the background so I was thinking there wasn't anything else to do pretty early on. I found it a bit slow to unlock other things (perhaps related to not spotting the blueprints etc) and then blew through buying them. Not sure what the plan is for deeper levels, but after opening the deep delve I thought something might be different - even just the art style changes or has different details to indicate a change. I think there may be a bug with the benches, I figured they would go to the closest one, but they consistently went to the first one I built even if that meant passing unoccupied ones. Great work!
The bench thing is a real bug and it's fixed. A tired dwarf was walking to the first bench you ever built instead of the nearest one. That went out in the build I uploaded today, along with the same fix for tools, drop-off points and which side of a building a dwarf walks up to. All of it was measured in straight lines before, which doesn't count for much through solid rock.
Floor 14 is genuinely the current edge. There's nothing past the diamond seam yet, so you didn't miss anything, and filling that stretch is the next thing on my list. The pacing problem you describe is probably the same thing from the other end: not enough to spend on, then all of it at once.
On blueprints and ruins, the selection outline was drawing black instead of white and that's fixed, but you're pointing at the bigger issue, which is spotting them at all before you click one. That's still open and I don't have a good answer yet.
You're right about the deep delve, and that one is already underway. I'm drawing the art for it at the moment, so crossing that threshold will actually look like crossing it.
The font is the second time I've heard that now, so I'll look at it again.
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This was so fun, I can't wait for more. Any critiques are mostly about expanding the game, which im sure will happen as you keep developing. I love the art style. I think it'd be nice to be able to have more ways to assign workers to do specific tasks, especially early game with the builders and Backpack carriers. To be able to command them to collect specific things or prioritize certain buildings would be nice. Adding an enemy, maybe a warrior class could keep things a bit more interesting
Thank you, that's a lovely thing to read.
The control question is the one I keep circling around. The whole point is that dwarves decide for themselves and you shape those decisions through what you build and where you build it. But there are clearly moments, especially early on when you have two builders and one carrier, where you can see exactly what needs doing and have no way to say it. I don't want to turn it into a game about selecting units and issuing orders, so the answer is somewhere in between those two things. It's high on my list and I've been sketching at it.
On enemies and a warrior class: there is work happening on what's further down, and it isn't just more of the same tunnels. The game isn't called Crown Below by accident. I'll leave it there for now.
And thank you for the art especially. I draw all of it myself and pixel art is the thing I've been doing longest, so that one lands differently.
Hi there. I think this is a great start! I dug to floor 14-ish and then figured there wasn't anything else to discover yet. I did find the font in the tutorial modals a bit hard to read, and the blueprints and ruins were really hard to spot - they blend into the background so I was thinking there wasn't anything else to do pretty early on. I found it a bit slow to unlock other things (perhaps related to not spotting the blueprints etc) and then blew through buying them. Not sure what the plan is for deeper levels, but after opening the deep delve I thought something might be different - even just the art style changes or has different details to indicate a change. I think there may be a bug with the benches, I figured they would go to the closest one, but they consistently went to the first one I built even if that meant passing unoccupied ones. Great work!
Thanks, this is really useful.
The bench thing is a real bug and it's fixed. A tired dwarf was walking to the first bench you ever built instead of the nearest one. That went out in the build I uploaded today, along with the same fix for tools, drop-off points and which side of a building a dwarf walks up to. All of it was measured in straight lines before, which doesn't count for much through solid rock.
Floor 14 is genuinely the current edge. There's nothing past the diamond seam yet, so you didn't miss anything, and filling that stretch is the next thing on my list. The pacing problem you describe is probably the same thing from the other end: not enough to spend on, then all of it at once.
On blueprints and ruins, the selection outline was drawing black instead of white and that's fixed, but you're pointing at the bigger issue, which is spotting them at all before you click one. That's still open and I don't have a good answer yet.
You're right about the deep delve, and that one is already underway. I'm drawing the art for it at the moment, so crossing that threshold will actually look like crossing it.
The font is the second time I've heard that now, so I'll look at it again.
Latest update notes are here if you want the full list:
v0.1.0.8645: The Hauling Update