Hi,
Game seems really fun, but really hard to get into. And that’s not even a fault of the game, but of the documentation that comes with it, and the lack of a working tutorial. I’ve been playing the stable version.
First, the tutorial is just broken. The information is shown out of place and out of order, and there is no obvious endpoint, which gives the impression that something broke. This isn’t easy to fix, but the main page of the website says that the game has a tutorial, and doesn’t mention anything about the state it is in. It should mention that the turorial isn’t working properly, in order to manage a new player’s expectations. Otherwise, they might immediately get the false impression that the game is dysfunctional and stop trying to play it.
Second, the help sections are not written as best as they could be, but this would be very easy to improve. Sections «Hunger, thirst and sleep» and «Healing and medication» are difficult to read with their awkward grammatical structures and misspellings of «than». Also, when it talks about the importance of bandaging and disinfecting your wounds, I assumed it meant «bleeding wounds» – I had no idea that disinfecting limbs increases their normal HP regen even if they’re not bleeding, for example; you wouldn’t disinfect a bruise in real life. Adding «even if they are not bleeding» or just saying «damage» instead of «wounds» would make a huge difference.
In the section about morale and learning, it says «Training your skills by reading books decreases your focus rapidly» – but that doesn’t appear to be the case at all, at least not when your focus is already low, so perhaps there should be a «if you have high focus» caveat included. Also, in «Crafting», the text implies that if you have a book with recipes on you, the recipes would also appear in your crafting menu, but they don’t, at least not always – I’m not sure why, but I’m guessing it’s because I don’t have the required skills to craft them. If that’s the case, the text should say «if you have the required skills» – or, better yet, just show them in the crafting menu anyway, like the construction menu does.
The «Survival tip» section mentions that finding a pillow and a blanket helps you sleep, but I have no clue whether they need to be in your inventory, on the same tile as you, or on adjacent tiles of the bed. Pulping corpses should also be mentioned, because I didn’t know it was even possible until I saw a NPC do it. I also think there should be a paragraph about reading books. I had no idea how to manually stop reading a book. While the game does tell you how do to it in the message log, several turns pass immediately, so that message is already greyed out and very difficult to spot, and by the time you want to stop reading a book, it’s no longer on thre screen. Also, I was surprised the game didn’t prompt me to stop reading even as a zombie was banging on my door until it actually broke through.
On a small side note, it’s really annoying that some menus use the right key to select an item, while others use the right key to switch between menu columns.
Hope that helps,
Fusha