Sticky Initial Feedback

At first I got frustrated with the controls because there wasn't any help or tutorial, but after an hour or so I find myself comfortable with the control.

The game still has a ton of bugs but its already very enjoyable. This is definitely an awesome game.

PS. Someone on the forum already said it but I'm gonna say it again anyway. I think I would be cool to let the bricktrons be catapulted so we can construct on other islands without using the debug.

I'd have to echo what's been said several times already. The camera controls are not so good. Took me several minutes to stumble upon them, so I'd call it less than intuitive. Even after knowing them, I keep trying to hold shift instead of space.

Block placement and removal (yes it's there, hold [shift]) work alright. It didn't take me too long to figure them out, though others seem to have trouble so it might have to be re-thought. The radial menu, while neat is actually kind of useless. Might be more useful if it was bigger, but the tabs on the side are simpler and more convenient.

Mining and wood chopping seem buggy, but alright so far. More not fully implemented than bad. It is annoying that I have to create a new group every time I try to assign a new work area, but I'm guessing (hoping) that's just a prototype issue, and not an intended feature. I'm sure the removing/cancelling (those exist too) of jobs will be streamlined as well.

The UI should scale up. I play this on my 1600x900 TV screen, and a lot of the text and images are too small to easily read. It's not impossible, but difficult at times.

Another thought was better storage options for the various materials, and perhaps allowing us to designate stockpiles for certain things. This might be a feature already on the way (it seems obvious not to store things in exploding barrels) but it's worth mentioning just the same.

On that same note is bridge building. The ability to connect several logs end to end to make longer bridges would make everything much simple. Again, I suspect this is the sort of thing that's already planned as it seems obvious (and I could swear it's what we saw in previous gameplay videos) but it's worth mentioning.

Most other complaints I could offer are pretty much just bugs that I'm sure will be ironed out even before beta such as strange pathfinding, and other strange AI behaviors. Building, once you understand how to build things (took me 6 or so tries to get a functional building) is actually very rewarding, and seeing the little bricktrons hustle around like an architecturally advanced ant colony is rather satisfying. It's looking like this will be as fun (if perhaps more challenging) as it always appeared to be! Can't wait to see what's next!

I'm frustrated by the fact that I don't know if what we're playing is the current build of the game or something very old. As such, I'm curious as to whether or not the bugs I experience have already been fixed and thus I feel like I'm wasting time reporting any bugs at all.

I expected to be able to do the things in the Kickstarter video but it's rather obvious that, if I'm playing a current build of the game, the video was misleading. This, in turn, makes me sad about the state of the overall game.

What this culminates in is a sort of overall negative feeling about the game in general. We have two states to be in and neither is positive.
1: What we are playing is not the current build, in which case I feel like I'm wasting my time playing it and reporting bugs for it.
2: What we are playing is the current build, in which case I feel like development is so far behind what the Kickstarter video showed that it will take forever for the game to be completed.

The only thing I can positively assume is that we are playing a current build of the engine but not a current build of the overall game. As such, we would be reporting engine problems but not game-related problems. Is this third case the truth?

So I tried the prototype last night and it was very frustrating. After sleeping on it it went much smoother today. I made some cool structures and the mines were much cleaner. I think the main struggle the first day were the controls. First the UI not very intuitive on what each button does and means. Little tool tips would help this and of course this is an early version so I know it wont be perfect but there definitely needs to be some rethinking on the directing of where and what everything does in the UI. Second Issue was the camera. MY SUGGESTION is ditch the swinging motion when pivoting the camera. It would be much better if the camera was stationary and swiveled That way I could point to where I want to go with the swivel and then use the camera move keys to get there.

Overall bugs aside I love this game concept and I know this will be great. Thank you so much for including us in the prototype/alpha process. I look forward to helping shape the game as it develops. We will have a killer version by the time this hits beta!

Really fun (once you get past the learning curve) has just a few bugs (many many bugs) but that is expected on a pre-alpha, and for what I have been doing and seeing others do does not seem to be that huge of a deal and most the time there is a work around for it. (at least for me)

And I agree that building stuff (though may be hard) is in fact very rewarding.

The only thing that bothers me the most is not being able to get rid of mine selections, if you fixed that I would be super duper happy!

Ok as so much people said, I would suggest a camera control tweaking. System requirements are huge for Castle Story, I found so many problems on that.

I think, however, that the prototype gives us an idea of how much the game is in a early build; They have done a really good job since now. What I think is that people (even me obviously) thought that they would had to do with a pretty "finished" game like Minecraft or Terraria, which have far more bugs and bad stuff.

I wish Sauropods perceive that we support them now better than before.

Looking good so far. After a few retry's I was able to get a good functioning build economy.
Eventually I was unable to save but I expected this. So i had pre-planned some explosive barrels into the structure for a nice finale when the game was about to break down.
Fantastic fun.
Cant wait to see what comes next!

I think everything that I could possibly comment on has already been said

Definitely impressed with the game, what a great start so far! The prototype is also a kind of game within a game, I'm havin way to much fun just figuring out how the thing works and all the little nuances in the controls! Heck, just reading this post I learned how to finally delete mining zones! (On the right side of the screen, under the create zones button - it's blank ) And just before reading this I learned that the Delete key gets rid of any debree! no more hassling my builders with turning them to miners and back to fix it!

All in all, pretty much everything that I could think to say has been said in these posts. Definitely appreciate bein able to toy around with the prototype build and i'm WAY stoked to see where this thing goes!

Everyone is saying they want camera controls changed, but no one is making any solid suggestions so far, so let me suggest a tried and true 3D camera scheme (Sorry, but citing the Starcraft/Warcraft camera isn't very helpful for a dynamically 3d game like this).

You can mirror the camera controls of the Myth engine--one of the first actual 3D games. Pan was linked to WASD, as it is already. Q and E orbit the camera around the focus of your pointer. Z and X sweep to the sides away from your focus, turning a bit more as if you were turning your head. C and V zoom in and out. You could also make R and F raise and lower the camera. This covers all major key binding for the camera with just the left hand, allowing you to comfortably use your mouse at the same time.

Additionally, Myth made it where you could link panning, orbiting, and sweeping to mouse-scrolling when your cursor reached the edge of the screen. If you moved your cursor to an upper corner, you orbited in the direction, and if you put it in a lower corner it swept in the appropriate direction. In the options you could switch off mouse orbiting and sweeping if you wanted to use the cursor to pan diagonally.

Divorcing camera control from clicking the mouse should allow other commands to be streamlined much more easily. Another camera control solution would be to make the camera control binding a toggle instead of a hold + click function.

I'm really loving this prototype and can't wait to get the time to actually build something involved.

The art style is good.
The concept is good.
Not taking into consideration the bugs in the prototype its fun and I like it.
Considering how much more content and just more better the game could get between a concept and a finished product, you have the potential to make a very popular game.

For me personally what I would like to see is some sort of multiplayer element, its a great game and I'm going to want to play it with my friends.

Despite the bugs the prototype is oozing with potential and I still managed to play for several hours just clearing away a whole hill, just because I could. Of course all the Bricktons then decided to bug out so I couldn't build my castle then, but still a lot of fun. I could certainly see me playing this for many many MANY hours

Key focus areas for bugs for me would be -

• Load/Save mechanics
• Brickton bugs (getting stuck/refusing to work etc)
• More intuitive controls (right-click instead of space bar would make so much more sense!)

Other less key areas -

• Tutorial (or once design has settled a bit more this can be covered on the wiki)
• Audio controls
• Graphical glitches (see through scenary, explosions causing issues etc)

hold down shift and click on misplaced ghost blocks and placed blocks to delete them
sadly deleting placed blocks leaves chunks of stone lying around which gets annoying

As others have said, the camera controls are very clunky, and some of the game mechanics are also very clunky (since they could be bugs, I will not detail it here). Other than that, visually it is appealing, I like the art style, but beyond that I find it impossible to comment since there really isn't that much in the game right now to comment on.

Overall my first impressions of the prototype were not positive, far too much clunkyness everywhere in the game. Obviously that will likely change as they shift into alpha, beta and final gold code so I'm not too concerned about it at this point in time. I'll wait until the middle of beta and if things are not looking too good, then I'll start to get overly concerned about it.

It would be nice if the bricktrons prioritized nearby stockpiles that was already filled partially.
Also being able to refill dirt (but I think you have that planned already)

Initial feedback: love the game, few annoying bugs, but most can be solved with the help of this forum. Thx to everyone making videos/how tos/etc.!!!

I had tremendous fun once I figured out how to harvest, mine and build. It took much work to figure out the controls (more than an hour), but once I did, controlling the bricktrons started to make sense. Even when I was really into it though, I kept tripping over the clumsy camera controls. I see alot of people have mentioned the camera controls, and I agree with most of them. Aside from that, I didn't really encounter anything that could be considered a bug or glitch except for sound. It seems to me like you guys put a ton of effort into giving us a game prototype with almost no bugs in the currently implemented features.
Its just too much fun right now watching them build a mine and making their little staircase inside.

i like what i have been able to do so far, as many others have said the camera controls need to be improved, suggestions would be the wheel mouse for zoom not up and down, the cursor keys or wasd to move the camera and also moving the mouse to the sides should move the camera and middle mouse could be used if you had to have a button to make the camera move, i dont understand how to use the beams or planks properly so better tool tips would be good, the chop trees tasks are buggy as in sometimes it makes two groups and none can make a chopping area, also the chopping area thing either doesn't work like it says or the area selection thing is invisible, bricktrons get stuck in stockpiles if they are close to each other or something, i started to get new bricktrons but i don't know why not complaining but some in game indication of why would be good, and a 1 square stair would be soo useful and also a way to build down, and perhaps the most important thing is to add a delete phantom and real block button because it is very annoying to misplace a block and have to redesign everything just because of a bad click of the mouse.

totally glad i bought the game and am looking forward to it improving

I have to say once I grasped the basics of the prototype it was a joy to play (well watch). My little bricktrons were working seamlessly and I had a good system going on, I even thought I would test the lovely physics engine by exploding a few barrels next to my tower. I played out a battle in the debug mode but the corruptrons won and killed all my workers. Although everyone has been complaining about the camera I actually like it, it might have taken me about 5 mins to work out how to move it at first but after a while I think it is rather effective but the scrolling isn't the best.

For a while, I was confused by the controls, like how to cancel actions, or remove the active tool.
Except a few bugs like BT getting stuck between objects or the ground, I enjoyed playing the prototype. The main feeling was that it wasn't efficient enough to allow playing fast and react to an hypothetical attack.
At that point in the development it's hard to say if things are bugs, unfinished or just thought wrong in the first place.
Anyway, love it so far, it's kind of what I expected.
One disappointment was the presence of an editor in which I couldn't do anything.