General Feedback

[FistfulOfZen]

Overall, I've been really enjoying the game so far. The price is good and the game is coming along nicely. There have been some issues in the game that have caused me a little bit of annoyance, and I want to air them out.

 

1) The User Interface is getting in the way of the game. Every time I have to open up some crafting panel UI, I'm no longer controlling a person who's trying to survive the zombie apocalypse; I'm being me, a player, trying to navigate a very stiff and unintuitive user interface. This takes me completely out of the game. Is it really crucial that I, the player, add a banana, an apple, and an orange, each individually, to a fruit salad, that's going to be consumed immediately? The more I play, the more transparent the 4th wall becomes, and it's largely because of I keep getting hit in the face with the UI.

 

2) Some things in the game are unnecessarily complex. Cooking, for example, feels too much like a cooking simulator, which would be fine if this were a cooking simulation game, but it's out of place in a game where the character (not the player) is the one that's supposed to be controlling the qualify of food. This is less about the UI and more about the philosophy. Other games, for example, handle cooking interactions in different ways, some simpler, some more complex. As far as PZ is concerned, the food is obviously a crucial challenge to a survival game, but it shouldn't become a "game" in and of itself. In my opinion, the acquisition of ingredients (via fishing and trapping and ... hunting?) is really where the challenge should be at, not what you do with the ingredients after you get them.

 

3) Finally, the characters come across as borderline incompetent. For example, my survivor just died after killing 175 something zombies... She didn't die because of bites or scratches or being overwhelmed, mind you. She died because I was trying to dispose of a pile of zombies, and she caught on fire while I was trying to put corpses on a campfire. It was a very anticlimatic death and 100% the opposite of fun. Insult to injury, the zombie I was trying to burn didn't even catch fire, instead dropping to the ground beside the campfire. So, obvious question, why is it assumed that grown adults (age 27) are about as competent around a fire as a three year old? Seriously, if this is the case, she'd have decapitated herself with a butter knife a long time ago.

 

4) Carpentry is very kludgey right now. I get that you want the game to feel "realistic", but I don't see any reason that the characters must actually "equip" a hammer and screwdriver in order to take anything apart. Isn't my character smart enough to pull the hammer out of the hiking back when she needs it and put it away when she doesn't? It really should be enough that the character has a hammer, screwdriver, and saw in their hiking bag. I, as the player, shouldn't have to LITERALLY, open up their bag, dig it out, put it into their hands or their working inventory just to interact with things. Again, it's 4th wall breaking and it doesn't make the game any more fun. In most cases, it actually is less fun.

 

Anyhow, I realize that there are many things you're working on, but I do hope you take these things into consideration. The game is really interesting and refreshingly retro. I just think the UI and meta-inventory mechanics could be dialed pretty far back so it'd be less an inventory management simulation and much more a game. Also, characters shouldn't be dying in ways that could only be described as stupid (dying of burns from a small camp fire, for example). Unskilled? Sure. Grossly moronic? Not so much.

 

Anyhow! Thanks for your time and for what is a very promising game.

 

-Fist-

[Andros]

Although I think you are right regarding the sometimes unhandy user interface - especially the need to transfer items from bags to your main inventory - but the devs have made some of these parts more easy already. Especially regarding the cooking system where it is now possible to add ingredients from nearby fridges/storages into your pans/bowls etc.

And I certainly don't share your opinion on a easier cooking system. Supplying yourself with food must not be just all about getting ingredients through looting/farming/foraging but really about cooking itself. Having a fridge full of looted/farmed/foraged food should put you in a position to individually select the items you want to have in your food. Such you have the ability to manage your stocks quite well instead of having just six types of meals with the need to actually having all needed resourced in stock to actually make it (just as an example).

For my part I really like the ability to select exact the types of ingredients I like to have in my salad/soup whatever and to save other ingredients for a later time. The recent addition of considering the nutritional values of edibles is a vital part and important enhancement for the immersion imho. Im thinking of Andy Weirs "The Martian" where the protagonist is in the situation where he have to calculate the nutritonal values of his potatoes to make it to day X, eating only that much to render his daily activities possible. Of coure his environment is even more perilous than a zombie apocalpyse but I think you get my drift.

[FistfulOfZen]

Yeah, I get what you're saying, but The Martian was, as you said, in a completely different position, where he had relatively fixed stores and precariously limited assets without the ability to create or procure more. If, as a zombie survivor, you get put in that position, you're already dead.

 

Right now, the game is already dangerously overly complex. If that's the game they want to make, more power to them, but I'm already having a hard time trying to get other people to play the game as it is for the price it's at. And, to be clear, these are people that play sandbox survival games, including a title where the game very clearly orders players to "not die of malnutrition". That game also has a fairly robust food system, but the UI for it is a lot cleaner. A player isn't interacting with a clunky UI, they are interacting with a cooking apparatus. I've put my fair share of hours into that game (over 500 in the original game and the multiplayer game combined). Characters don't have a meta "cooking skill" in those game, it's all on the player. If it's me, the player, that's doing the cooking, then the skill is a bit redundant. If it's the survivor doing the cooking, then the survivor needs to be doing the cooking.

 

These question you ask could be answered with a different set of mechanics, however:

1) Players can set "default" nutritional goals for food, such as "highest nutrition foods" or "lowest nutrition (junk) foods" or "average nutrition foods"

2) There can be a robust set of recipes that appear at the stove or campfire that display their nutritional content (if the player has a sufficiently high Cooking skill or the Cook or Chef backgrounds).

3) Players could learn specific recipes in a certain order or maybe randomly from a possible set of recipes for their skill while they cook or study books, and could "grab" the ingredients they need for this from their food storage.

 

I do not see the present UI scheme ever being conducive to a "drag and drop" UI. This is perfectly fine, because the other games I'm thinking of have oversized inventory management systems with big, object oriented items that depend on their physical representations to be identifiable. They are much too childish for a gritty game like PZ. And, at present, such object oriented items would be largely impossible given PZ's retro isometric format. As a compromise, simply having it so players could select all of the ingredients simultaneously for a salad, for example, instead of having to add items one at a time, would significantly reduce the amount of time a player is forced to interact with the UI, instead of actually playing the game.

 

Either or, interacting with the UI as it is is kind of "not fun", which make it hard to pitch this game to my Discord group, who are presently looking for another game to play, while the server that we usually play a different nutritionally challenging survival game is on hiatus.

 

Thanks for the reply!

 

-Fist-

[EnigmaGrey]

Can you name the game you're talking about?

 

Most of the food complexity can be ignored in Project Zomboid unless you're specifically trying to min-max happiness/boredom (which itself can be avoided in other ways).

Right now, the only thing that matters in the system is the number of calories you eat and expected and whether the food is "nutritional." Nutritional food simply provides a slight energy boost, for some reason.

[FmanR]

1. While I don't think the example does it justice, I do agree the UI could use some work. At the moment it feels more like a document than a piece of game (probably a better way to express that, but w/e)

 

2. As far as cooking goes, I actually like the depth it goes into. It could be my bias as a former chef, but something about having complete control over how your meal turns out just gives me that extra slice of satisfaction I don't get from other survival games.

 

3. lmao that's awesome. Not gonna lie, most of my characters die very, very dumb deaths. On a good day it's because I got bored and tried something stupid, on a bad day it's because I lost focus. To address the question, I think it's because most adults really aren't all that competent in the case of fire. Again speaking from experience - Had a grown man try and put out a pan full of oil fire with the dishy's tap - we all laughed at him before checking to make sure he was okay (that's TWO counts of being dumb around fire)

 

4. Yeah I agree it should be an automatic equip of the tools needed to build "X" structure. I understand the point of filling your hands with things that aren't weapons, but streamlining the process would be much better in the end.

[DresdenBBQ]

The only one of these i can say i agree with 100% is the fire one. You should be able to step around, or even jump over a camp fire, without lighting your head on fire and getting a crap ton of 3rd degree burns.

[FireOnAsphalt]

40 minutes ago, Queen Glory said:

The only one of these i can say i agree with 100% is the fire one. You should be able to step around, or even jump over a camp fire, without lighting your head on fire and getting a crap ton of 3rd degree burns.

1. The UI is hard to talk about. I love it in some regards and despise it in others. It's flexible and allows for tons of manipulation... but navigating it leaves something to be desired.  I can't really say exactly how I'd change things, because each implementation has it's strengths and weaknesses. Given the level of detail in Zomboid... How else would one navigate but context menus?

 

2. Correct me if I'm wrong, but when you create a new dish, can't you save the ingredients used in the dish as a recipe, with name and all, so that you can later select it from your context menu to auto-create when you have the ingredients in your inventory? It doesn't make creating the initial dish any easier, but subsequent dishes would be easier. While click-click-clicking through menus can get tedious sometimes, it's just the virtual equivalent of actually chopping your meat, dicing your onions, cutting up lettuce and mixing it into a bowl. At least that's how I perceive it. Weird, huh?

 

3.  What, you guys don't walk on your hands when crossing over a camp fire? And here I thought that was the normal way to do it... (But in all seriousness fire is something I have an issue with. Just look at my username if you need proof of that )

 

4. I have no comment on this. It's something I'm ambivalent towards; I like the requirement for tools to be ready, but sometimes I'm not in the mood to equip them. I just chalk it up to, again, the virtual equivalent of picking up the boards and actually hammering the nails in.

[FistfulOfZen]

14 hours ago, FmanR said:

1. While I don't think the example does it justice, I do agree the UI could use some work. At the moment it feels more like a document than a piece of game (probably a better way to express that, but w/e)

 

2. As far as cooking goes, I actually like the depth it goes into. It could be my bias as a former chef, but something about having complete control over how your meal turns out just gives me that extra slice of satisfaction I don't get from other survival games.

 

3. lmao that's awesome. Not gonna lie, most of my characters die very, very dumb deaths. On a good day it's because I got bored and tried something stupid, on a bad day it's because I lost focus. To address the question, I think it's because most adults really aren't all that competent in the case of fire. Again speaking from experience - Had a grown man try and put out a pan full of oil fire with the dishy's tap - we all laughed at him before checking to make sure he was okay (that's TWO counts of being dumb around fire)

 

4. Yeah I agree it should be an automatic equip of the tools needed to build "X" structure. I understand the point of filling your hands with things that aren't weapons, but streamlining the process would be much better in the end.

1) Exactly. I understand that it's a work in progress, so I'll tolerate it. It just simply can't look like this at 1.0. I think they know this, though, so I won't belabor the point.

 

2) I hate cooking. LOL And the problem with cooking is that it eats up time that could be used elsewhere. Also irritating when I pull a cabbage out of the fridge that's "okay", and it turns out that it's rotten, though that's kind of a different issue.  I just think that it's out of place for the 90% of survivors (or more) that don't pick Chef as a profession. Klei's survival game has a fairly robust food system, which works really well. One of the better ones, really.

 

3) Yeah, I've seen some crazy situations with fire, though the point remains, you didn't have to call a coroner to come pick up your coworker (at least I hope not). Burns bad enough to kill someone are going to be a LOT larger than a camp fire... except in PZ, where apparently everyone's clothing is drenched in gasoline.

 

4) Exactly.

 

Mainly it's Quality of Life concerns. I don't personally find fiddling with minor crap like that "fun". I just find it tedious, so I'd rather not deal with it, or, more specifically, have the game handle it for me. It's the sort of thing the character is supposed to be figuring out on their own.

[FistfulOfZen]

8 hours ago, FireOnAsphalt said:

2. Correct me if I'm wrong, but when you create a new dish, can't you save the ingredients used in the dish as a recipe, with name and all, so that you can later select it from your context menu to auto-create when you have the ingredients in your inventory? It doesn't make creating the initial dish any easier, but subsequent dishes would be easier. While click-click-clicking through menus can get tedious sometimes, it's just the virtual equivalent of actually chopping your meat, dicing your onions, cutting up lettuce and mixing it into a bowl. At least that's how I perceive it. Weird, huh?

Thanks for the tip. I'll try it out.

[FmanR]

On 11/04/2017 at 10:56 AM, FistfulOfZen said:

 

3) Yeah, I've seen some crazy situations with fire, though the point remains, you didn't have to call a coroner to come pick up your coworker (at least I hope not). Burns bad enough to kill someone are going to be a LOT larger than a camp fire... except in PZ, where apparently everyone's clothing is drenched in gasoline.

 

Coroner, no. That said, watching someone take a pan full of oil fire to the dishy's sink, struggle to turn the tap on because he was still holding his tongs, finally using his elbow to turn the tap on then flipping out because his face was on fire, was a situation that could have been prevented had at least one of us stopped him instead of looking at eachother and saying "is he actually going to do that?"

 

I get what you mean though, fire is a wee bit problematic in the game. I like it that way but that's just because I like to destroy things in this game more than I like to build things

 

EDIT: The dude was fine by the way, just lost his eyebrows

[Storm6436]

Honestly, what I'd call a "Master customization menu" would probably work better. 

 

 By that, I mean:

 

 You're standing at your fridge and just cut some bread.  Instead of an endless line of "Add X to Sandwich," one gets a single "Make sandwich" option that leads to a window with a grid of all possible ingredients you can reach along with information on how each might affect said final sandwich...  Just click the checkbox next to the ingredients you want to add, click finish, voila sandwich.   Make it to where you can add more (if space available) so that way if your jar of pickles is on the other side of the room, you walk over to it and then "Add pickles to sandwich." 

 

 At least, that's what comes to me when I think time-efficient but useful crafting.  Heck, if you have enough ingredients to make more than one of the currently customized noms, have a "quantity" option.  Need to make a big batch of grilled cheese and tomato soup for unannounced dinner guests?  Np! 

 

ETA: If one was inclined to make it "artsy" you could do something similar to how the pizza place's Internet ordering works and have a mock-up of what it would look like. 

 

 Maybe a waste of time / resources, but it does add a visual bit and feeling to it.  Bonus points if one somehow models the plate/table it is on to mimic your living conditions.  Dust, dirty, flecks of blood on the table... If you're carrying a weapon, it's on the table near the plate

[thiosk]

On 4/10/2017 at 6:26 PM, FistfulOfZen said:

 

2) I hate cooking. LOL And the problem with cooking is that it eats up time that could be used elsewhere. Also irritating when I pull a cabbage out of the fridge that's "okay", and it turns out that it's rotten, though that's kind of a different issue.  I just think that it's out of place for the 90% of survivors (or more) that don't pick Chef as a profession. Klei's survival game has a fairly robust food system, which works really well. One of the better ones, really.

 

OK theres a bug here. I am 90% sure of it. Ive encountered it in multiple ways.

 

Maybe @butterbot can help us. I see this a lot with items that are in the freezer but when you use them in a recipe they come into your inventory as rotten and do not contribute to said recipe. This appears to be circumventable by first transferring said items to your inventory and THEN incorporating it into the recipe.

 

Another way i see this emerge is in unpleasent bread. "stale" bread seems to make inedible sandwiches "-20 -20" stats, despite being nonrotten and using fresh ingredients with it. I havent found circumvention for this one. 

[BumWhipper]

16 hours ago, thiosk said:

OK theres a bug here. I am 90% sure of it. Ive encountered it in multiple ways.

 

Maybe @butterbot can help us. I see this a lot with items that are in the freezer but when you use them in a recipe they come into your inventory as rotten and do not contribute to said recipe. This appears to be circumventable by first transferring said items to your inventory and THEN incorporating it into the recipe.

 

Another way i see this emerge is in unpleasent bread. "stale" bread seems to make inedible sandwiches "-20 -20" stats, despite being nonrotten and using fresh ingredients with it. I havent found circumvention for this one. 

I have noticed as well sometimes immediately after thawing in main inventory or a stove(to thaw quicker)they go from fresh Frozen to Rotten. Certainly a nuisance

 

Since latest build, you cannot use frozen foods in recipes period till they thaw, so seeing many items go immediately rotten sucks.