I would like to be able to move the gravestones so that family members' graves are beside each other. My one and only elder died today. Just a few minutes after he passed away, his wife died. Aw... I guess she couldn't live without him. Anyway, his gravestone was the last one on the fourth row and hers was the first in the fifth row. I wanted to move them beside each other, but couldn't. :'(

Here's an idea, and I hope no one's said this already. Since Children don't swim, you could have the adults teach them to swim, or create a danger with the children and the water.

^I love your signature by the way!

I've been playing VV2 again this weekend -- I won it shortly after it came out, then stopped playing, and now I'm playing again.

I have many many suggestions:

1. On the Villager Detail screen, make it obvious when they have obtained a mastery. The progress bars are very nice, but different villagers reach mastery at different points on the progress bar. Either change the color of the bar, or have a vertical line indicating the mastery point for that villager and that skill, or place a M in the left-hand bulb of the bar or something.

I have been trying to get as many Elders as possible (14 Elders with 6 different totem types so far), and clicking out of the detail window each time someone's current favorite skill looks to be near the mastery point to find out whether or not they've actually mastered it gets very annoying when amortized over 100 people.

Alternatively, some way to identify the recently acquired masters such as an opt-in pop-up notification or a way to list all the villagers by skill level in a chosen skill would be nice.

2. Make the sort-by buttons in the detail screen useful. Sorting by age is the default, and it has the advantage of being easily understandable and consistent (the villagers are pretty much always in the same order). Sorting by health is a good way to find those who need some healing soup, but because many of them have the same health (ie, perfectly healthy), sorting people with the same health level by age would be more useful than the apparently random order within health levels.

I have yet to figure out what standard is used to sort by skill. It doesn't sort by what skill is favored. It doesn't sort by the cumulative total skill experience. It doesn't sort by length of a particular skill. What does it sort by?

3. Add a hot key to jump to certain villagers. My doctors are lazy, and wander all over the place. Finding one of very few doctors (generally 2, since I have fairly healthy villagers -- a doc and a spare) out of 100 villagers (2 collections completed so far) is decidedly non-trivial. Either set it up yourselves to jump to the nearest doctor, or let us assign our hot keys to the specific villagers we want, since some folks may have a particular favorite they're following.

4. Provide a mechanism for continued training for all skills. Once all the puzzles are solved, my villagers still need to eat. Someone assigned to farming will farm (taking appropriate breaks) until I tell them to do something else, and will have a fairly good chance, if they aren't near the end of their life and don't dislike work, when I tell them to farm, of achieving farming mastery. Similarly, someone assigned to research will research (taking appropriate breaks) until I tell them to do something else, and also has a fairly good chance of achieving mastery.

If there are not-yet-completed building projects, someone assigned to building will build fairly consistently, and approach mastery at a reasonable pace. However, when all the building projects are complete, someone assigned to building will _very_ desultorily repair buildings in between doing laundry, soaking in the pool and otherwise goofing off, and their skill acquisition slows dramatically. VV3 should have some kind of workshop where builders can practice building. I don't care if they're building children's educational toys (have a small chance of giving a child a skill boost when each toy is complete), hunting kits, trade goods or something else entirely, but somewhere where I can put a potential building master and have them practice building is key. I know I can manually drop someone on a building and they'll practice repairing that building, but really -- 100 villagers, and I'm going to drop someone on a building several hundred times? Maybe for one villager, but that is not happening in bulk.

5. Similarly, let the doctor practice healing in a more serious fashion. Being a doctor is a calling. I don't mind manually dropping them onto healing herbs or patients to get their skill level up to trainee or even adept. At trainee, they should spontaneously study herbs with a low probability, and move toward sick people in a desultory fashion. Once they reach adept, either from lots of dropping on herbs and sick people, or from a long time as trainee, they should study much more intensely (~50% of actions?) and make a bee line to sick people as soon as their current action is completed (as long as doctoring is their preferred skill). Once they reach master, they should interrupt themselves doing a non-medical task to move toward a sick person. It drives me nuts (as a doctor myself) to see a villager doctor go swimming while a sick person moulders.

Even if you don't prioritize healing activities, there should still be a mechanism for doctors to be trained that doesn't require hundreds of villager drops onto flowers, or deliberately making ones villagers sick.

6. Parenting ... why does parenting always mean procreation ("going inside") and never mean spontaneously telling a story or teaching the children? Right now, I can't train anyone in parenting until I have a semi-stable food supply, or else I'll overpopulate and starve my village. Once I have the farm, I can train a woman or two, but I dare not train a man until I have clean oceans and a reasonable number of farming adults. Once a man is trained as a farmer, I'll have every woman in the village pregnant until the population maximum is hit.

It would be very nice if a parent would breed only with (a) someone I dropped them on to, (b) someone with parenting as their preferred skill, even if they don't have any skill in it yet, or (c) someone with a non-zero level of parenting skill. This way my researcher won't be dragged away from her research to be a mother. We can still populate a village with these restrictions, but we'll be less likely to rapidly over-populate, and less likely to drag people away from their tasks.

7. Make that warning "There isn't enough housing to support more population!" only appear once. Perhaps if someone died, and then the population caps again, you can show it again, but to see it every time I tell two villagers to "go inside" together gets very annoying.

Why would I be telling two villagers to "go inside" together when my population is maxed? Well, I said I'm trying to get as many elders as possible. Getting building masters when all the big projects are done, or healing masters anytime is very labor intensive, so all my villagers are training on Farming and Research first, and then become full time parents once they're done with Farming and Research. I always bring someone up to at least Trainee Parent manually, so they have some motivation to keep "going inside" once I want them trained as a parent.

8. When I drop someone on the gong and it's been less than 24 hours since the last time I tried to ring the gong, please show a message telling me how long until the gong can ring again. If you don't have a gong in VV3, but you do have some sort of activity that can only happen once per time period, provide some sort of notification when that activity is attempted that it will be x many hours before that activity can be performed again.

That's it for right now for User Interface improvements that I want and that I think need to be fixed.

Now lets talk about things that are more in the class of "it would be nice", but whose presence or absence doesn't significantly hinder my enjoyment of the game...

1. Education -- split out parenting and teaching, or have a toggle to make someone teach over parent. Perhaps set things up so that once someone is an Esteemed Elder, if parenting is their preferred ability, they'll always teach rather than breed, unless dropped manually on a breeding age adult. After all, most esteemed elders are a bit old for breeding, but gosh, I'd love to have them teach my villager children.

I'd love it if one of the possible buildings was a schoolhouse. Once the school house was built, then if someone was dropped on the children, or if an esteemed elder was set to prefer parenting and spontaneously gathered up the children, the teacher and children would all file into the school house for a teaching session.

Even better would be that IF the culture tech was at maximum (or whatever combination of techs you wanted) AND the teacher was a master for at least one skill, each child in the schoolhouse would have a small, but non-zero chance of improving their skills for each skill that the teacher was a master in, possibly including teaching/parenting. Furthermore, at the end of each teaching session, a message should appear in the same place where the "This villager improved at farming." message (ie, at the bottom of the screen, not as a pop-up), saying, "2 children learned Farming. 1 child learned Research." or whatever they did learn.

That would really model the transmission of knowledge and standing on the shoulders of giants and so forth. We could compete for the youngest age someone reached Elder, and we could try to build a character who had mastery in all skills by seeing how much training they could receive while young. *grin* It'd be fun.

2. Customizability. It would be nice to be able to change villagers' "you picked me up" exclamatory sound. Some are pleasant and some are annoying, but I suspect that which is which varies by player. It would be even nicer if there was a documented place to add user sound files and we could create our own sounds. (There is such a place, but it's not documented how to add new ones).

It would also be nice if we could create our own clothes, or mix and match tops and bottoms rather than have a defined set of clothes.

3. Totem display. It would be nice to have a good place to display my collected totems. Anywhere I put them, they won't go (in the ocean, on the forest), or they have a chance of blocking a collectible item.

4. More puzzles. I love your creativity and the interrelatedness of the puzzles.

5. Recipes. I liked discovering the stew recipes, and you folks certainly have plenty of experience with creating multiple combinations (eg, Fish tycoon, Plant Tycoon, etc). I wouldn't have MORE recipe possibilities in VV3, though. This was about the right number.

6. More statistics. We're obsessives, yes we are. How many twin births? How many single births? When did we solve each of the puzzles? How quickly was that puzzle solved relative to other folks?

I'm sure I had other ideas, but I'm tired now, and this is plenty to be getting started with.

Thank you for writing such excellent games. I have both VV's, as well as Fish and Plant Tycoon, and I look forward to your next release.

How about a "Forest" outside the village where villagers get supplies such as foods and woods from? You can get different resource as the game progess? Maybe, a villager who wander into the forest and get lost and we had to find them?

Instead of just a Health Bar, how about a Bar that show how happy the villager is...

Things or options (e.g. Super Hard level) that can be unlocked by completing the game on different Difficulty.

How about collecting different Plants seeds to grow in spots designed for them?

wow Nemyar, that has to be the best idea ive heard yet.

This is a little thing, but I think it'd be funny. I'm playing through VV2 again and every once in a while, there's a small explosion. It's usually when I'm near the Research table. So...what if when the explosion happened, there was a tiny mushroom cloud? Nothing detrimental, just smoke to go with the bang. Or maybe with the explosion, someone turns green, like they got some gunk on themself. Then he turns, shakes his head and "Going to take a bath" pops up.

And villagers doing cannonballs into the pond cracks me up everytime. Keep that.

some good ideas there, Jiapa, and well written! Thanks like the ideas about the building skills (and how it would be nice to have something to continue building, and build that particular skill faster)... and letting you know how long between gong hits... and definitely more puzzles!

In addition to twins and triplets, it'd be neat if a villager could have quadruplets as well. With the quads, two could be identical girls and two could be identical boys.

It would be pretty cool if your villagers get rewards such as, "Caught the very first whale/crab" or "Became master scientists" or even, "Discovered 7 new crops to plant" for farmers. some can be rewarded randomly, or for doing a task, and can come with a experience reward, a new title, and if they get all of the rewards, they can get a golden totem.

In general, I have a lot of the same wants as I've seen listed here. But one I haven't seen listed (lately) is: random choice for chatting, mating, etc. So everyone doesn't always go to the same person.