Hello,

This was quite a fun game with a nice loop and a surprising amount of content.

I will not comment on polish related things but mostly gameplay since you’ve marked this as an alpha.

Things I liked:

• The sound design is quite nice.
• Music loop is also very fitting and satisfying, never interfering with the gameplay.
• The gameplay loop is quite nice. The rest sleep mechanic adds a layer of complexity to it.
• Many of the things are self explanatory

My gameplay:

I played for around 6-7 days before the big real estate folks straight up won.

I do not know what the win condition was for their winning was.

Played the tutorial. it was nice and made a lot of the things clear. Some minor UI things could definitely be better to understand what was going on.

The first protest initiated with like 18 members and did not work against the big firms.

Before the second I installed a factory bus stop and shopping center.

The sleep cycle was a bit weird, if I turned in early it still made me wake up at 12 effectively wasting most of the day. It would be better if he slept 8 hours instead.

I even built a residential area. The first non -tutorial protest I did was with 27 people. Took down one property and then I tried to protest against the big real estate people themselves. Did not work, I lost all the protesters and promptly lost.

Things that can be improved:

• The crowd mouse-boxes are a bit weird. I have to click them in a specific place to activate their screen. Perhaps this can be done in a different way or a larger one.

• There definitely needs to be more UX work because this game heavily relies on UI stuff.

• More explanation about what building helps with what. Right now the processes are set in place, but I have no idea how the factory I built actually helped with anything.

• More info when buying anything.

• It felt to me in my gameplay that the energy bar exhausted too quickly.

• Movement should reset every-time I place a flag. Essentially there should only be one flag I can place at a time.

1. How relatable/connected do you feel to the character/world. To this I have a counter question. Why is it that relatability is important for this game? Most games are fantasy that are not relatable.

2. How lived-in does the game world feel. Does feel lived in, but for this too happen you would definitely need more polish.

This is a good update. I am enjoying this game more due to the changes; it feels more alive.

Bugs:

The club says "Establish to unlock" and I cannot establish it.

On campaign day, it feels like after the blue bar starts flashing, no matter your crowd size, you cannot do any damage to the BigRealty HQ.

I do not like the character/stats bar being slightly above the bottom of the screen while your other UI pushes up against the edge.

I do like you moving all of the character and crowd stats into one place, as well as adding a portrait image.

I think that the portrait helps the feel of the game though I think the art is not great and could use with a bit more refining.

Something that might be nice is to for your main character have a few different expressions to show a bit more of how they are feeling. Maybe a normal one for normal life, a exhausted one for when you run out of energy, maybe a worried face for when BigRealty gains enough support that the bar starts flashing, and maybe a few others.

Gameplay is harder. Though this did not affect my play-style too much, it was enough to be noticed.

I like the new world art, I think that the shadows look better.

The streetlights look good.

I like the new cursor.

I definitely like the being able to have your room upgraded as you increase your ratings.

Things you Requested feedback on:

How relatable/connected do you feel to the character/world:

You have done a decent job of that this update. The player character having a home that can get upgrades is a nice touch.

How lived-in does the game world feel:

The world feels more alive. The player feels more like a average person trying to make a positive difference to their community.

-R

I'm just starting the game, and after playing so often with the old layout, it is a bit odd seeing things moved around. I think it works, but it will take some getting used to.

The Control Tips overlap the road a bit when there are 2 lines of text, and the first is long. It looks like there is space that it could be moved down a bit to fix this. There is also a blank tip right before "On Campaign Day". With the tips sometimes auto-advancing, I'm guessing this is meant to be used to clear the tip display at some point, before then moving to the Campaign Day tips when the first starts.

I like the new UI for your room. The hover text is very helpful, especially for Sleep not being available before 15:00. The upgradable furniture sounds like a neat concept, though I am just at the beginning so have not yet seen any upgrades.

It looks like after a certain time, 21:00?, you can no longer just Rest, but only Sleep is available. This will certainly alter my strategy a bit. As a person who is a night owl in real life, my gameplay involving nighttime activity felt natural to me, though I know it is not the norm, and may not reflect your standard politician. I'm acknowledging in writing this review that I view your character as a politician, maybe a mayor. More on this below.

Due to not being able to be as active at night, and my normal gameplay using the night to do several things, I was not as prepared this time for the second campaign day. I will be needing to rethink my strategy for this new limitation.

By the third Campaign Day I had enough of a crowd that I put 10 to block agents along the road going down, and then protested at each of the BigRealty locations before moving on to finish off their HQ. My blockade did get overrun at some point, but it didn't matter. I had a total of 73 Residents. I got SAF and LOG to Marginal, but the rest were still at Poor. I forgot to look at how large my crowd was to start with.

Having now played through, I think the new UI works. I did regularly find myself glancing to the top first out of habit to look for things where they used to be, but then looked down to the new location. Any major change is going to take time to adjust to, so it didn't feel problematic, just will need to play a bit more to get used to the new locations.

In your devlog you comment "Because the game has a top-down view, it has the impression that it is a city-builder game where players act as an omniscient God placing buildings and whatnot.". I don't think it is just the top down view. A core gameplay mechanic is city building. You may be controlling a character who moves around the map, but you are picking the zoning for areas and selecting what buildings to place in each location. There is a small delay as you build things, but you are still building large structures that would normally take months in reality, in hours. The map may be smaller and have more predefined elements than most "City Builder" games, but there is a lot of overlap and similar feel that goes beyond the top-down view. Even the goal has overlap. In this game you are focused on pushing out BigRealty, but to do so you need to build up the "city" (neighborhood) to get enough resources (gathered crowd) to push them out. You do not have "omniscient God" powers to instantly reshape the land, yet even there in games like SimCity you are managing earthmoving projects that are simply done unrealistically fast, just like the building construction is. There are some other limits that are not common in most city builders, such as preset roads and zone areas. Still, at the core this is about building up your city to the point where you have enough of a resource to overcome the negative element/challenge. The new features you are adding are focusing on improving the city further. Eventually the player will fill out all of the available building space, and it will be more about interacting with the buildings, but even there you are building up your city's stats. Your character may not have god-like powers, but they are a very powerful person. We have the afore-mentioned speed building (which is needed for gameplay feel), but also your character is making unilateral decisions for the city. You may need to move to a spot to interact with it, and have a limited amount of energy to do things, but many of the things you do are classic city builder things. The player needs to rally support from the community to gather the crowd, but that feels more like a politician doing a PR campaign, rather than really being a part of the community. You may not be playing as a god-like character, but you are playing as a power who doesn't really answer to anyone.

After writing this I am now viewing your character as a mayor, or other local authority over the community. They have a lot more power than a typical mayor, being able to direct the construction of all individual buildings, as well as the zoning, which does make them feel like more than your average person. Not god-like, but super-powered in their authority. With my viewing them as a politician, I now have to look at my biases and question their motives. We come back to my above comment about the rallying feeling like just PR and not a real commitment to the community. Corporations are problematic and big corps buying up land and housing is a serious problem, but viewing the PC as a politician, I now have to question what their motives are. Are they kicking out BigRealty with the plan to replace them with their donors who will do the same? Please don't take this paragraph too strongly. With everything going on in the world today, and politicians and their corp donors being behind most of the world's problems, now viewing the PC through this lens automatically raises questions for me. To be fair, the room you are showing does not look like the mansion of a wealthy politician, but that does raise the question of who are you playing as that has so much power and influence? Maybe fleshing that part out will add a missing piece to help bring the player into the world more and feeling connected to the PC.

Continuing with previous thoughts, maybe you could add something where the community tells the player what they want. You currently have the Goals on the side, but they are just a general list and don't feel like the community asking for these things. Maybe they could get some flavor text associated with them. As new ones are added there could be something talking about why the community wants this, and more of a reason for who gives you the reward and why. I'm thinking of city builders where as the game progresses, the population grows, and start demanding the things that have been unlocked by the growth. You could have something where the people say what they most want to see built, with limits on how soon after a demand the next can show up. Maybe it could be posted on a Community Board so the player has to go check on it from time to time. Or maybe it is just in the UI somewhere and shows up automatically as they want something, to simplify things and make sure the player sees it. If the player builds what is requested, or otherwise meets the request, then it could give a boost of some sort. This doesn't just need to be money and fame, though those would be an obvious choice. Maybe if it was for a building, the building gets a boost for a short time. Similarly, there can be negatives from not meeting demands in a reasonable time, such as the community has a negative view of you, making it harder to rally, or them showing more support for BigRealty. I think this actually leads into another point. Before you added Campaign Days, there was always a bar showing favorability between the 2 sides. Maybe you need to have something like that which is always active. The largest impact can be made on Campaign Days, but allow other events to influence it over time so that on Campaign Day you may not start at the middle. Maybe you do have the Campaign Day bar start at the middle, but it is separate from the non-Campaign Day bar. The non-CD bar will show your favorability with the community and will influence how effective you are at rallying (how much it costs to rally a building), at gathering a crowd from rallied buildings (how many people you get for the crowd when gathering), at protesting (how effective is each member of the crowd), and so on. You would need to do more in the community to earn their support, with their demands continuing to grow as the number of residents goes up. Right now with the support only mattering on Campaign Day, it is easy to just do what you want, as long as you build enough residential buildings and rally them, to have enough support to win.

I've played the game enough that I know how the mechanics work and that the most important thing is to build residential buildings to increase your crowd size, along with free buildings of the other types. I think that if you want to encourage building up the town more, you need to limit residential growth. Going back to the above comments about how the player makes unilateral decisions, maybe there needs to be community pushback if you do things not good for the community. As I'm fleshing this idea out I am acknowledging that it goes even closer to core city builder concepts, but you may need some of those mechanics for balancing different zones and buildings. If you build a bunch of residential, but don't have anything else, then people won't move in and you won't gather enough crowd. Currently, you don't need to really build anything other than the free stuff for unlocking a zone and reclaiming a lot.

The game currently feels balanced toward taking advantage of the free buildings. Making enough money to build things, especially residential, is slow and time consuming. It is far easier to just spend $1000 to unlock the next zoning area and build some expensive building. Sure, that is limited by the available zones you can unlock, but you can quickly get the 3 residential buildings that way, which goes a long way toward having enough population. Then go unlock each of the remaining zones you can, collecting the free cash around the map to unlock more. This gives you a pretty good start on building up the town very quickly. Add in the free buildings from reclaimed lots, which allow more residential buildings (I pick apartments), and it is game over by the 3^rd Campaign Day.

To build up the town, once you have enough residential buildings, you can just let BigRealty build, then each Campaign Day you gather a large crowd and protest at each of their buildings, except the HQ, and use the reclaimed lots to get the additional buildings. I rarely do any jobs, beyond when it is to complete a goal. I rarely get beyond the first bonus for completing goals, and the reward cash from that one is used to build another house. As much as it is nice to get the free building from reclaiming a lot, it makes it feel like that is the main way to build things, as it is so much quicker and easier than earning money to pay for things. By the second campaign day there are enough buildings to protest at, that if you built your 3 free residential buildings, and maybe 1 more, you should have enough crowd to be able to reclaim enough of them to make Campaign Day 3 be victory. Maybe instead of a free building, each should give you some money, such as $1000. Enough that it is helpful, but not enough to simply build anything you want.

Sorry if this is a bit rambly or going off on a side path that may be to full of feature creep. We're not getting a lot of sleep this week, so I'm a bit tired, and I'm not sure if I'm conveying things well. I think you have a good core here. It is just a matter of what you want to present to the player. When you start, the game tells you that your goal is to drive out BigRealty. It does mention building up the neighborhood, but it feels like it is part of how you get to the main goal and not a goal in itself. With that focus it feels natural to try to protest and defeat them fast, which then ends the game.

Maybe there needs to be more to the game after beating them? Perhaps just an option to keep playing to build up your neighborhood. It would probably need some other mechanics added in. Perhaps every so often an outside group, or parent of BigRealty, will show up and try to gain a new foothold. Later ones may be stronger, to account for your increased growth and having beaten the previous one(s). You may need to reserve some spaces for these to be placed. Or, for gameplay simplicity, you simply cannot build on the HQ spot, so it always goes there. They would also need to be able to do something to claim a building location from an existing structure and turn it into one of theirs. I'm pretty sure you mentioned eventually having additional maps and moving on from one to the next, which would help to add more game length. Still, that doesn't get to the core of what is the intended gameplay for each map. Is it all about quickly pushing out BigRealty from each map, or about the community building? If you want more focus on building the neighborhood and players having a stronger connection to each neighborhood, then I think BigRealty needs to spread more slowly, and the player should be encouraged to make money in other ways to pay for buildings, rather than having so many free ones. It may also help to make it so that a basic protest is not enough to defeat BigRealty's HQ. You need to build up the community to unlock the additional protest options before you get the one that can fully defeat them.

I do enjoy the game, and overall like the changes you have been making. I'm just taking a step back here and asking, "What is the intended gameplay experience?". I like city builder games. I like strategy games in general. Right now I look at this game as a strategy game with the goal of defeating BigRealty. Any city building is done solely for that end goal, but it is a core part of reaching it. With this in mind, I play to win quick. Nothing in the game really makes me feel invested in building up a great neighborhood first, and with the speed BigRealty expands, it feels like the best thing for the neighborhood (if it were real world) would be to get BigRealty out fast, then let the community building be the focus.

I think this is a really cool concept and game worked smoothly on Windows. I've never played a game like this before so it was not intuitive to me what I was supposed to be doing, what buildings  did what, what was the goal of building recruiting, ect. Eventually I did figure it out but a tutorial explaining the systems would honestly be really helpful. I could easily see characters discussing the world and what needs to be changed as a way give this information in story form. I see lots of potential for this to be a really good story and great game, liked it overall, good job. 

This is quite a charming game, I enjoyed playing it!
I did the tutorial and won my first game relatively easily.

Few things stood out:
There is so much information on screen. Too much of it.
I mostly looked at cash, energy and fame when it comes to the UI, not sure what the rest of the information is for.
If the information doesn't need to be checked out constantly I would add a stats button that opens a popup with that information.

I didn't realized how you make cash, as a result I tried to gather the cash that was on the map and when there was no more of that I simply waited. In the end I found how you get it, but my run probably was not the most optimal because of that (i was close to losing at some point).
I am not sure if the tutorial showed me that piece of information and I ignored it or if there was no info about that.

The other thing that was a bit weird to me is the movement system, while is intuitive enough to master relatively fast. I kept forgeting to double click when I want to walk to a spot.


1. How relatable/connected do you feel to the character/world.
To me felt like I was a politician trying to take out a competitor. It reminded me of some of the people I know that get involved into politics.

2. How lived-in does the game world feel.
This is a bit of a weird question for me because felt more like a warcraft/startcraft type of game where I should be more focused on preparing for the next fight rather than anything else.

I did not look at the objects in the room at all (probably should have read the devlog before playing)
But I am not sure I would even bother looking for them unless I really struggle with the economy and need any help I can get.

I guess I didn't really see the social aspect of it, to me it felt more like a combat game.
But if you really want to do some improvements I would recommend to look at the old browser game ikariam. There, the map changes based on the level of the Town Hall, and there are a few animated little people that walk around to give the player something to look at while he is waiting.

After playing it, I felt like it wasn't  enough to get a proper feel of the game and that I should play more. But I wanted to give you my first impressions in a raw form hoping this would be better.

Are you planning to release this on steam or other platform?

This already seems to be a good game even without more polish, I am sure it will only go up from here.
Good job making this and Good luck!

P.S. Played it on windows, everything seems to be working fine.