I Starved! Twice!

[Nels]

Hey guys,I played me some Don't Starve, and despite the name, starve I did. Here's just the brain dump of thoughts.- Sorta confused by the "recipes" on the left that are just sorta ... there. There's no labels on it and I wanting the mouse-over popup to actually stay around, so I could mouse over the components to see what they were. Seeing a small pile of white objects, I wasn't necessarily sure that was just the rocks I'd pick up off the ground or sometime I'd have to "refine" or what.- It's weird that's the scroll wheel controls the recipes menus. I kinda wanted it to zoom. Seems like the recipes would be easier to understand if they were somehow categorized with menus that could expand/contract. E.g. fire objects, structures, tools, etc. I didn't even know there were more than five until I really paid attention to what the scrolling was actually doing. A bunch of small silhouettes all kinda look the same. - Didn't initially realize I could unequip the torch, so I ended up wasting like 40% of a torch's life burning it down during the daytime.- Considering how hard it is to get food early on, the berries seem mighty stingy. It's like 5 "food" each? - Seems like there isn't a lot to do at night. Once the fire's made, I just picked up everything within the radius and then waited until dawn. Did that twice until I starved to death on the second night.- Torch seems like it lasts longer than a campfire does, which seems a little weird considering many more resources the campfire takes, but it's actually less useful, since you're anchored to a single place.- I really want to carry two items at the same time. Not being able to equip the torch and axe at once was unawesome.- Wanted to right-click on stuff in my inventory to eat it. Click, move to dude, eat was tedious.- Tried to pick berries, didn't have any inventory space, the berries just disappeared? I figured they'd at least land on the ground or something.- The radius of the campfire is an indicator of its fuel, I guess? Didn't get that initially, but I suppose it makes sense. The dude saying "I should put another log on the fire" or something when it got low would make sense though.- Inventory seems really small, especially considering it's really hard to survive without both an axe and a pick, in addition to all the fire-making material required.- Both times I died it was starving to death.Broadly, it was fun! The resource gathering thing I quite dug and it was cool just poking and prodding at stuff. Aside from small UI/interaction things, the biggest issue I had was nighttime is really boring. I'll definitely want to play more (when Ninja is more done, anyway ...)!

[Kevin]

Those are some good points, Nels. I fear that crafting interface is going to be the death of me...There are a couple of changes in the upcoming release that should address some of the usability issues with it. In general, the recipe list is going to be the main avenue of character progression, so it will unlock over time. For an absolutely new player, there will only be a single screen's worth of items in there, and they will have to explicitly unlock any additions. My hope is that ramping it up this way will a) make it more obvious how it works and B) provide just a bit more incentive to try building the more esoteric structures. I've also added a bunch of pulses and attention grabbing anims to draw the player's eye when they get enough stuff to build something.The mouseover thing is something that I'm really going to have to do. I watched some new people playing the game and they all (repeatedly) tried to mouse over the recipe components. It looked really frustrating! There is space in the interface for short item descriptions as well, which should also help.