Hey all,
I have some minor suggestions/complaints. Some of you may see these as minor or insignificant or even against the spirit of the game itself but I ask that you view this post with an open mind.
1. The UI at its current state is user unfriendly, I believe many of you and the developers already know this but it is important to mention. First, you are introduced into the game in the courser view, this is odd since the new player cannot interact with the world, they must first find the tab key. Then, almost any interaction with inventory or other GUI features (like the create tool tab) will return you to this courser view. You need the courser to interact, but once the windows are closed you are still stuck unable to interact with the world and need to press tab again.
This is made even more frustrating by the player's intuitive response to press esc to close windows and keep playing, which indeed does nothing. You must press tab. This can be easily fixed, you can replace esc with tab in the settings. However, it is unnecessarily complicated in number of steps and clarity of which steps are needed to simply close windows and reenter the world (essentially)
2. second point is also about the GUI. The create interface for almost anything, tools or buildings is essentially a drop down menu. The game is unnecessarily littered with drop down menus. This is the part some of you may find offensive, since this is a sandbox game, hardcore, not made for the faint of heart... but games are meant to be fun, not frustrating, engaging AND user friendly. We need the complexity of options but we also need a user friendly way of delivering those. Drop down menus are not the answer, they are an alpha solution. I propose this:
For example, the first thing you do; make a primitive tool, instead of having a drop down menu of all the tools you can make and below that the reagent section have a series of drawn simple images that represent each one on a menu box. It would read "Primitive tools" and display below, small clickable squares with the picture of the tools you could wish to make. Same with buildings, same with everything. Do away with the drop down, save the player clicks. I believe it is the right thing to want as a developer and even if the player doesn't realize it, it is even the right thing for them.
Thank you for your time,
-N