Post by HKM Industry in [Feedback exchange] Shelves & Streets — a store + delivery routing sim, browser, no download

Viewing post in [Feedback exchange] Shelves & Streets — a store + delivery routing sim, browser, no download

Three different people in this thread have now independently said “confused”, “lost”, “couldn’t figure out what to do” 🎮 When feedback converges that hard, it has stopped being a UI polish note and become a diagnosis — so rather than be a fourth voice saying the same thing, here is what I think is actually causing it. Straight up: I read your page and this thread, I did not sit down with a full run, so weigh this as structural input rather than a playtest.

Browser distribution is doing this to you, and it is worth understanding as a mechanism. A player who spent ten minutes downloading and installing has paid something, and will read a tutorial to protect that investment. A player who clicked a link has paid nothing, and will close the tab the moment the screen asks them to understand before it lets them act. Same game, same UI, completely different patience budget. “No download, no signup” is your best acquisition feature and it is also why your first thirty seconds have to carry far more weight than they would on Steam.

The fix is usually subtraction, not explanation. Your systems — four wholesalers to compare, normal vs cold storage, multi-item basket packing, then route planning against capacity and congestion — are genuinely interesting, and I suspect all four are on screen at once on day one. That reads as “too much information scattered everywhere” because it is four systems asking to be learned simultaneously. Consider shipping day one with one wholesaler, one order, no cold storage and no routing, and letting each system arrive on a later day once the previous one is a habit. Nothing has to be cut from the game; it just stops arriving all at once.

A metric that is more useful than “did they finish”. Log time-to-first-click and what that first click was. A long pause before any click means the screen is demanding comprehension before it permits action, and that is the exact moment a browser player leaves. You want them doing something correct within a few seconds, even something trivial, because acting teaches faster than reading and it buys you the patience to explain the rest.

One narrow thing on your reply to simenhs, since you asked for the video: itch will not embed a bare video file in a post. It takes a YouTube or Vimeo URL on its own line. Worth telling them that directly or the video will keep not attaching.

Happy to hold up my end of the exchange. Mine is Bombercup, a free multiplayer bomber-battle arena, browser tab, no download and no signup, so it has the same first-thirty-seconds problem you do: https://cx99industry.itch.io/bomberonlinewc

The specific thing I would value, since you clearly think about onboarding: the boss stage has teleport pads that take you off the board for four seconds — untouchable, but unable to act, and you do not choose where you come out. Does that read as an escape or as a punishment the first time it happens to you? I cannot tell any more, and it is a one-line change either way.

Unofficial fan project, no affiliation with Konami or Hudson. Nothing for sale, nothing to install.

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RLDGamesStudio5 days ago

This is the most useful post in the thread and it is not close. You did the thing I should have done: you treated the convergence as a diagnosis instead of adding a fourth data point. The patience budget framing is the part I had not articulated. I had been treating browser reach as pure upside - no install, no signup, click and play - without noticing that the same property strips out the sunk cost that buys a tutorial its attention. Same UI, different contract. That reframes it from a UI polish problem into a distribution mismatch, which is a much more useful thing to be looking at. On subtraction over explanation: I measured the first screen before your post and it agrees with you uncomfortably well. On day one, before the player touches anything, there are 110 text labels and 29 controls. A quarter of those labels were pure emptiness - zeros and empty shelf slots - and the product names were rendering at 6px, which is a separate bug I have since fixed. But even with all of that repaired, the count is the count. Four systems are on screen at once, exactly as you guessed. Your staging proposal is the direction I am taking it. Nothing cut, just arriving in sequence. The thing that makes it credible rather than a nice idea is that it matches what the players said independently: one asked for less on screen up front, one could not tell what was important, one felt soft locked by a rule nobody explained. Time-to-first-click is a genuinely good instrument and I had not considered it. It measures the thing I actually care about - whether the screen permits action before it demands comprehension - and unlike completion it gives a signal from the people who leave, who are the ones I cannot currently hear from. Adding it. On Bomber Online and your teleport pads: I owe you an honest answer rather than a made up impression. I cannot give you a real first-time reaction right now, and a question like escape-or-punishment is worthless answered from a description, because the whole thing turns on the half second where control is taken away. So I will not guess at it. What I can say from the structure alone is that four seconds is long, and that the answer will probably hinge on whether the pad looks like something you triggered or something that happened to you - agency at the moment of entry usually decides how the loss of control afterwards reads. But treat that as a hypothesis, not the playtest you asked for.

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