General Feedback

Greetings, I picked Kynseed as my Xmas game of choice and would like to help giving feedback as I play along, hopefully this is the correct section to do it.

To start with, I appreciate the whimsical and fairy tale presentation of the world. The roadmap, concept, music and art style are very much to my liking and it provides a very magical feeling. I sincerely hope the game can grow to be as renowned as I hope it can.

On the other hand, my first impression besides the above is that I feel the way information is presented to be overwhelming and not introduced in a good way. I consider myself to be an avid reader and I certainly don't mind the fairy tale tone of the writing, however, in the first few days - as I come across more and more pages filled with many lines of text, I felt overwhelmed and started to dread finding these pages at all.

I feel forced to read as I fear missing relevant information that might affect gameplay and yet can't delay reading for later as I'm concerned that if I just add page after page for "later" I might miss out or forget some entirely.

The problem should be in the way the information is presented as a single page of multiple lines of text. The location I find these pages in seem to be mostly unrelated to the content itself. The texts don't need to be shorter as I feel that they are part of the writer's vision as if it is telling a tale of the world through them. What I do hope is perhaps an alternative and maybe a more engaging way to tell all this information?

Perhaps some of these can be introduced as dialogues told by the villagers? Ultimately I haven't thought of a good idea for this but I just wanted to point out the current way the many pages scattered throughout provide information feels uninteresting to me even tho I do have interest to know more of the world.

We will hopefully be filling out more NPC dialogue to help flesh out the history, but we need to have the books, and a lot of people love the books.
It is the same as an other RPG in this respect, who have lots of lore.
What we could consider is labelling or colour coding the books or text, so useful stuff is easily identifiable, and the silly stuff can then be ignored at your choosing.
Ultimately, there will be a lot more books I'm afraid to say, though I will try not to make them too long.

The books are the real deal when it comes to having a rich history imo. Love the books!

For context--I'm a long time fan of RPGs and Life-sims (The Sims, Harvest moon, Stardew, etc. For Kynseed, I'm nearly through the first winter, own the blacksmith shop in Vale, and I think have explored most features of the game available so far aside from dating/marriage/offspring. Some thoughts so far:

1) I love the concept, and am actually surprised by the scope of the game already as well as the expansiveness of the world itself. It could be a good game with Vale alone with enough depth added to characters and things to do, but having multiple towns is pretty neat. I worry a huge world will mean watering down the depth of what is there which would be a shame. Another town with a slightly different layout and different NPCs means very little if it doesn't offer variety of gameplay options or compelling story elements. I realize some areas are still under development, but overall the two additional available towns feel functionally identical to Vale with different looking people and layouts without real incentives for me to expand into them and get to know their people. Maybe make the towns specialized in some way that gives advantages to a particular play style? Wouldn't be opposed to having future areas as DLC just FYI.

2) The variety of ways to make money is just downright satisfying in early game--grow stuff and sit at the stall at the fair, sell at the store town, side quests on the notice board...it feels fairly balanced and rewarding. Businesses may need rebalancing? I bought the blacksmith shop (cool idea and mechanics, fun little mini-game, functional ledger and item order system) and immediately started losing money via exorbitant employee costs. I fired everyone and did it all myself for a while which kept me in the green, but overall ore availability being low even when collected on a regular schedule and low prices on most items ( I can sell a single carrot for 7g at the stall at the fair, but barely get that much for a 3-star tin sickle/shovel/bucket that took time to collect ore for and then skillfully craft) means I'm kind of a slave to my shop. Maybe with reputation gains, perks, and eventual better quality of available ores it gets more profitable, but the rep gains are oh so painfully slow right now, NPCs cost a ton to manage the place, and when that's combined with ordering ore your profits are nil or small at best. I see no way to improve the output of my blacksmith aside from a very very long reputation grind. Things like bought or built upgrades to the businesses to augment that would be nice, or special tasks/quests to greatly boost reputation gains. Right now using all the ore available and running the blacksmith myself or nearly so with limited cashier coverage I'm maybe getting 100 brass a week positive, which I can make in a day of fishing and selling in a stall with no investment. It shouldn't be easy, but right now the thought of actually advancing this business seems super distant and grindy. Could be really good with a little tweaking.

3) One problem with games of this genre that can go on indefinitely without an "ending" is it's really engaging and rewarding up to a point, and then you just run out of things to do. Money becomes nothing more than a number because there is nothing more to buy anyway, and story advancement eventually comes to a halt. This is inevitable perhaps, but it's ok if there's replay value--incentive to do it a different way the 2nd time around and do it better, or some degree of time limited achievements that require you to pursue a certain path (even if it's just within a given lifetime of one of your many heirs in this game). I'm assuming your offspring in this game will inherit your stuff--it would be neat if your extended family had in-game effects/bonuses beyond your chosen heir. It would also be neat if you could eventually aspire to your family essentially running the towns or all of Quill even? Become king via economic, diplomatic/relationship, or combat objectives? Maybe take things a different direction and make it such that over time you can "pay off" your contract to Mr Fairweather? My point is that as much as I like the idea of continuing the game on via my offspring and seeing some bonuses there, if it just goes on indefinitely what happens when I own all the shops find all the lore. I know there will be more as it's early access, but I kinda feel like I'm already seeing the end point and maybe it won't even require me to have multiple generations to get there.

4) Lastly for now--the pacing for days is great. I can get things done, but just like real life there is always more I need to do. The pacing for a lifetime of a character seems off so far. After the prologue I traded my years for all the items Mr Fairweather offers, and I'm apparently now 16 years old. I own the blacksmith shop and if I really wanted to could own that and the store in all towns in another 1-2 years. I've played approximately 17hrs total. So for me to even get to 60 yo (unless I die in combat a lot) I'm going to play well over 100-200hrs before I even have to progress to the next generation. Going back to #3, almost no games have more than 100hrs of content even played as a completionist without lots of repetition. So the major game mechanic it's all based on...doesn't really come into play that much? Hopefully I'm missing something here and am wrong, but even if every in game year is like 10 years in your character's life that's a lot of playing the game before seeing the inheritance cycle culminate. Maybe if every year is a stage of life (prologue=kid and every cycle after that goes to adolescent, adult, elderly) the inheritance mechanic becomes more realistic for most players to experience and utilize? I don't know how the time trading with Mr. Fairweather and pre-mature combat deaths play in if that's the case. Maybe I'm way underestimating the combat aspects and number of years lost to Mr Fairweather in various ways too.

All that to say, I liked the game enough so far and want to see it become the awesome and unique thing it can be enough to write all this. Hope y'all finish it out. Rimworld and Factorio took like 8+ years to finalize and become version 1.0 and are on my all-time favorites list. I anticipate this game also making that list one day.

Fairweather doesn't take the life tax til the year end, so you should be much older if you bought all his items.

Thanks for your feedback!

Quote:

Originally Posted by DrAtrocity

For context--I'm a long time fan of RPGs and Life-sims (The Sims, Harvest moon, Stardew, etc. For Kynseed, I'm nearly through the first winter, own the blacksmith shop in Vale, and I think have explored most features of the game available so far aside from dating/marriage/offspring. Some thoughts so far:

Thank you for your detailed review, very practical!