Sticky Initial Feedback

I am really enjoying the prototype apart from a few bugs and having to muck about a bit for to understand the controls but after a while I got used to it and it is really easy to play

More controle over the mining area would be great. Being able to pull sideways in all 4 directions and up.

Despite it's a prototype, I spent several hours just building Having fun

Since I can't login into the server I have no idea what the game is like. If I'd know that I would have to login into a sever to play this game I would never have backed it in kickstarter.

This really needs a tutorial. The controls are extremely unintuitive.

And you should've waited longer to release it, it's barely playable.

Once you log in once, you can play it offline, like Minecraft. Not a huge deal.

Don't have much that hasn't already been said, except that I find the loudness of the ambient noise a bit grating. Maybe it's because I'm not a big fan of bugs (to put it lightly), but it sounds like there's a cicada latched onto the side of my head with its awful chirping.

Hey all, I wanted to impart my first impressions with the prototype. First: really enjoying it. It took three play-attempts before I figured out the control scheme and the jobs -- the first I couldn't do anything at all except drop blueprints, the second I managed to mine but no stockpiles, but in the third try I figured it all out -- and when it works the game is very fun. One aspect that bothered me a lot was that if all of my workers were standing still, I couldn't tell if the game was frozen or lagging, or if they had simply all finished their jobs. Perhaps an idle animation (aside from the blinking - which is hard to see from afar) would help so I know they aren't frozen. It would also be great if there was a visible difference between guys who are idle and have no job (or completed it) and those guys who are waiting to do their tasks, like waiting for materials like blocks. They also seem to get jammed up around stockpiles sometimes, or appear stuck or forget what to do. I've found to select the individual then manually move him around until he starts to run on his own again. Or switch him off the job, then into a different job, then no job, then the original job - that sometimes gets him on track again.

Building a castle is great; my mind fleshes out an enormous sprawling fortress while I try to carve apart a mountain to feed my fledgling construction. Haven't gotten very far on my current save, mostly held up by queuing bugs around stockpiles.

I would also like to add that I think the team's doing a great job so far and I look forward to the prototype updates. The construction and city building feels very organic and has a real addictive "one more brick" quality, but I hope to see something compelling that elevates the prototype's sandbox into full game - like a game mode versus AI enemies that you can actually win, co-op and/or versus multiplayer, leaderboards. I don't know, but something, because once I invest 40 hours in one enormous perfect castle what drives me to play again? I'd love to play with a friend (or two) and build a castle, raise an army, and defeat some badguys, and it'd probably take us a month per game - but it'd be fun! And we'd probably like to play that again on another map. And again. And again. Etc. Until we get sick of it.

Looks good, can't wait for more, and I have friends who can't wait for the beta since they didn't get in on the kickstarter.

Let me start out by saying that I am very pleased with the prototype and the potential game that will come of it. I guess my initial reaction would be, besides the obvious suggestions of outstanding problems with this prototype (sound, camera controls, bugs etc), I would love to see a quick select for Jobs. You could either use number keys or function keys to preform the select... Can't wait to see more. now im going back to building...

Absolutely in love with this game. I cant imagine how fun it would be to have another player in the game with me. Cant wait for the beta release. Since this is a feedback thread, here are my biggest issues.

1. Crickets. Seriously, those god damn crickets. Mind numbing, miss out on the soundtrack because the crickets force me to mute the game's sound.
2. Bricktron's pathing and their lack of cooperation with other bricktrons (I tell a group of 10 or so BT's to place 1 block, and all 10 of them go grab a block.) These are things im assuming will be done by beta but im just here to complain
3. Any and all bugs associated with bricktrons. I'm sure you know of these already. (Doubleclick tree = Not gonna work ever again, Cant drop barrels, but can hold infinite barrels at once, etc)
4. Can't load BT's into catapults. (not sure if this was intended to be in the prototype but there is an eject bricktron button so im mad i cant figure out how to load them in.)
5. Controls. It just seems sort of thrown together to me. A lot of it works just fine. Sometimes its hard to get a mine the exact way you want it to be. Camera controls are a little sketchy but they arent lacking too much, could just feel smoother i guess.
6. The fact that everytime i make a new lumbering zone, it makes a new lumbering group. Small thing, but its sort of aggrivating.
7. Load and save features, gives 5 new bricktrons. If you dont have a group for a certain task upon saving (IE lumber group) then you cannot make a group of that type upon loading.

Now i know this game is pre-alpha, so i cant expect it to be anywhere beyond a bug-infested nightmare, but even with it crawling with bugs it is still a fantastically fun game. The concept behind it is just brilliant. It takes RTS to a new height. From saying oh just build the main town hall here it goes to Go dig out every single brick and design your own castle (In the hopefully upcoming multiplayer: Before your opponent finds out where you are!). Just a damn fantastic job i want to congratulate and thank everyone at Sauropod Studios for such a fantastically wonderful experience.

The game is amazing~! Very fun and addictive! There's no doubt that you guys got a real AAA game in the works right here.

Controls: Took some time but to be honest, it's a prototype so I had no worries about not being able to save because I knew nothing was going to be carried over into the beta version. That said, I just pressed every button (and worked with combination of buttons SHIFT & CTRL) to see what would happen. Got controls down after an hour or two but they definitely need work. I'm hoping that you guys will switch to some general/traditional controls. My suggestions would be that arrow keys on the keyboard should pan the camera by default. Holding down the space bar and then have to click and drag is wonky and too much input by the user for something so simple.

Visual Cues: Hopefully this is coming soon but in the final version there definitely needs to be visual cues for input/tasks/etc. For example, when you have a BT selected and you want him to cut down a tree, placing the mouse over a tree should change the cursor to show that a job can be done. Also it would help if maybe a colored outline is displayed on the object that can be interacted with. So if you have a BT selected, you put the cursor over a tree, the cursor changes into an axe (for example) and a yellow outline is displayed around the tree the mouse is hovering over.

Terraforming the Terrain: So by default, the terrain is uneven and building structures on it doesn't look as clean looking as you would want it to be somtimes. Right now there are only two ways (that I know of) to level the terrain. Either by using a mining group but this takes a bit of time as the BTs have to not only dig but then place the stone they gather OR use a group of BTs to clear the terrain using the 1x1 block removal tool. The latter method can take a really really long time. Now I don't mind that it does, it just would be easier to have a tool to select a wide area (similar to mining) and then just have the BTs level an area and NOT collect stone.

I think at this point the prototype has defeated me. I have had literally not a single game that didn't end in a gamebreaking bug (at the latest, 17 Bricktrons just stopped doing anything) followed by an unrecoverable crash. I realise this is just a prototype that's barely even functional, but what I'm saying is I've exhausted everything I can try to do with it. Smaller projects work relatively fine, but larger projects just run me through "dangerous" situations all too often, and eventually I end up with a crash or some kind of gamebreaking bug. I'll stick to game design theory for the time being.

A few suggestions:
1) Allow camera movement by bringing the mouse to the edges of the screen (similar to Warcraft 3 or really any blizzard RTS... also League of Legends). Essentially use a margin of about 10% of the maximum screen width on each side. If the mouse is within the boundaries of one or more margin, move the camera in that direction. This works well because moving diagonally across the terrain is as simple as moving the mouse to a corner -- this is the intersection of two margins, so moving up and over at the same time is easy.

2) There should be a button to delete both a zone and the work group assigned to that zone. It is frustrating to have to remove both of them separately.

3) For the prototype only, there should be a button to respawn the selected unit. Sometimes they get stuck, and it sucks to have to reboot the whole game.

4) There should be an alert of some sort (even as simple as a red "!" floating above the unit's head) if a worker cannot deposit resources because there are no available stockpiles. Likewise, there should be a similar alert if a builder is unable to complete his task for lack of resources in stockpiles. This is something Dwarf Fortress never managed to do quite right, but made up for it with the action log to notify the user when tasks are canceled or held up.

So, you got me.

Sauropod-Studios..., this bug-ridden Prototype...
Is stealing my life! In fact, I played nearly 20 hours in the last days...

I wanted to say you thank you, thank you deeply.
This game is in a horrible state, but I simply love it.

Bugs that occured me were already told (and genererating more Identical Data is simply stupid, you have to read all those!)

I hope you will patch this game soon, I simply love it! Go Sauropod Studios!

It's a lot of fun but mine bricktrons get stuck in every game i play ... Every time ... they just stop working, I tried almost everything to keep them building or mining...

Also , i would really want to play as a bricktron , Firstly i gonna build something , then I want to play in first person camera , it would be soo fantastic..

Also maybe it can be some king of block that will help building bridges ? couse its really hard ... or I just don't know how to build bridges ;D

I have to say, already, with this bugged and "crappy"(no offence ) prototype the game is really funny to play. I have already played it for like 10 hours!


The controlls and much of the gameplay in general is kinda unlogical atm, but that is of course to be expected

But this game has ALOT of potensial! I mean WOW, the skyes are the limit with this game. But, to reach the skyes alone would be almost impossible... So, thats why i mean you allready now should start implementing mod-support to this game. Let the allready huge community go wild and create crazy amounts of gameplay.

I know its early to start talking about stuff like this already, but i would love to see another gamemode thats all about industrialization and is not islands but a large world
i think a RTS gamemode would be sweet!

Pssst, that's what "prototype" means. Contrary to what some folks around here have been saying, a prototype is not an alpha, but a "pre-alpha" if you will. The fact that it's playable at all is decently impressive.

I've been having a blast, personally... as long as you work around the known issues (which granted, takes a little bit of time and work), you can keep going for some time. The controls were a pain in the butt to get the hang of, but once I caught on it's really not so terrible.

I notice it's so hard to complete complex castle projects... I think it's very important to care about building management, showing errors and managing problems, building orders. Sometimes I found some "invibile block" I can't build on... And I need to go around it

Castle Story is one of the most interesting voxel based games I have ever played. Once I got the basic controls down the games was much easier to play and more enjoyable.

Although, there are certain aspects of the game like the background noise those crickets are just so darn loud.

I greatly enjoyed the prototype. It was quite fun and my first little project kept me playing past all the little bugs that would have made me rage quit earlier.

I do agree with most of what has been said so far (tutorials, etc.), but I do have one thing to say about the controls. Although they are not that intuitive, they are effective. The controls work quite easily well once one knows what the controls are.

I agree with, as well, that there needs to be some sort of "goal" like industry or metallurgy (as someone on here mentioned). This would bring an "end-game" stride to the game that would prevent players from getting bored and quitting.

I would also like to see some more construction materials. Currently, I think it would be very cool if you could build fully wooden structures with wood walls. They would be far less protective than the massive stone structures, but would add greatly to the aesthetics of a village.

If I think of any other ideas I'll be sure to post back here.