First and foremost, thanks to Paul Soares, Jr. for demoing this game on his YouTube channel. It looked cute and fun, so I jumped right in and gave it a spin.
The game is surprisingly polished and smooth, and I'm impressed with the features that are already present. I think there's a lot of potential to make this a deep and intense survival game that will appeal to lots of people.
I took a quick peek at the roadmap that Cairn4 has posted for the game, and it looks like he's got some good ideas in the pipeline. I'd like to offer a few more suggestions, based on a few different themes.
Theme the First - Long-Term Sustainability (keep the character alive indefinitely)
As I see it, there are theoretically enough renewable resources (fruit plants and rain collectors) to keep a player alive basically forever. But constantly going out to pick fruit will get old after a while. And as other posters have mentioned, the seed drop rate on plants seems to be less than 1:1, which means that they will eventually be exhausted.
I'd recommend several ways of expanding this:
- The seed drop rate be increased to a rate slightly over 1:1 (to allow for endless replanting, given sufficient water resources).
- Allow fruit plants to be dug up and replanted (and/or have seeds).
- Create some sort of pipe system to allow rain collectors to feed directly into your hydroponics tanks, for more automatic farming.
- Create a well/pump resource, to collect water automatically.
Theme the Second - Upgrades and Improvements
One thing I saw on the roadmap was a mention of being able to research upgrades, to allow for better blueprints and the like. I think this would be an excellent feature, although how to "measure" the progression might be a little complicated (experience points from harvesting/building things, perhaps?).
Here are some things that I would like to see able to be upgraded:
- Power generator items (RTG, Solar Panels) and batteries.
- Player suit (increased oxygen and power capacity, movement and interaction speed).
- Production items (increased build speed, queue capacity, maybe the ability to "connect" to a storage for materials?).
- Storage items (increased capacity).
Theme the Third - More Stuff to Do!
Just some generally cool stuff that I'd like to see added:
- Some sort of wind-based power generator, like a wind trap or windmill.
- Water biomes - and maybe a ship or submarine to navigate them.
- A harvesting drone, that could pick fruit and harvest roots/grass for you.
- Improved HUD/UI, with things like base power visible and a picture-in-picture minimap.
- More things to do with less-used resources.
- Rocks could be made into external walls, maybe melted into glass to make domes.
- Scrap metal could be refined into random electronics, with a low-percent chance of success.
Overall, as I said, I'm very impressed with the game so far, and very much looking forward to see what else we'll get to do. I hope my suggestions are useful in deciding what else can be added.