Thanks for the detailed review. Some thoughts --
I would perpetually get tripped up with dialogs sticking around or not or clicking on the planet when trying to navigate to the next step, especially as I saw the targets in the tutorial on the planet appearing over whatever window I had opened.
Yes, I think there's still some stickiness here, especially with the tutorial overlay. The tutorial arrows don't render on the right layer, that's a bug that we need to fix post-jam.
Having hotkeys is great, but they should be indicated in the UI as well, especially for the buildings.
Yeah this was an accident, meant to add a tooltip before the jam ended but I forgot. The blueprint UI gets this one right
It was just hard to understand what a city was taking in and what it needed as every resource had a listing even if it wasn't relevant
It's a little tricky, given that cities need a lot of goods right off the bat. But demand for higher tier goods is not there at the start of the game, so maybe we can move that to the end of the list? I didn't really know the best way to organize it because I preferred to organize everything by category (rather than tier). One idea is to add sub tabs but I think that's very confusing UI as it adds unnecessary nesting. Another idea is to add a search bar for goods on the city goods panel, to filter the list. That's implemented for the blueprint UI and I can add it here pretty easily.
Outside that in just the world view a clear toggle switch for resource view would have been good
There's a button on the top middle of the screen to toggle resource view, but maybe we can make it bigger. I think it highlights during the tutorial to teach the user where it is but if we make it bigger then it's harder to miss. In retrospect, using the function keys for the overlays was a bad idea.
making selection its own toggle mode aside all the buildings to make it easier to get back to a 'safe' way to select cities and other buildings.
If you have a building selected, I think q should work in the overworld to deselect, but I'm realizing I never showed that to the player. I think I should make it so that ESC will deselect before it opens the pause menu. You can also click on the building type on the dash to deselect, but imo I just added that behavior because it's consistent with other common game UI even though it's not very ergonomic. I think more visual cues that something is selected could help here. In Factorio, right click will deselect, but we use that for moving the camera.
many UIs these days with just a lot of extra complexity, dense amounts of information, and layers of information
It's tricky, on one hand, this is a complicated game and I don't want to hide important information like "where is my factory sourcing its raw goods and materials from". On the other hand, that's a lot to understand all at once and I agree that the tutorial is insufficient. It's a lot of cognitive overhead right off the bat which is not great. I'm open to suggestions on how to refactor the factory UI in particular, I think there's an opportunity there to make the game more beginner-friendly.
Overall, thanks for the feedback, it's very much appreciated.