Just finished my first village! Wahoo! Some things I'd like to see... some have been mentioned before but in case there's a "vote" rating to requests... ;-)

- old person characteristics... when all 90 are running around there are repeats and hard to know who is your old scientist you're looking for without going to the list and sorting through it
- additional clothing and hair graphics... even if you just add more color variety it'd be great. With only 90 villagers the repeats stand out really badly and it's hard to distinguish them, especially as with 90 they're still individuals as opposed to a faceless mob so the tracking becomes difficult. Even just 10 more hairstlyes, change the color and look, and 10 more clothing styles (look and color) would spread the recombinations out by quite a bit
- the list... seemed like it was listing people by age at first, but then after my population grew it descended into chaos. Toggling madly through 90 entries trying to find my 63 year Jomo farmer in the bunch etc
- obviously a bigger village and more land to explore etc. When I began the game I was excited to imagine eventually having the whole area a thriving community, with a market, many more houses etc, filling up all that bald land around the main starter huts. Eventually they could expand through the cave to other colonies, begin trading etc. I'm not keen on social classes (too fuedal for me personally) and I think the diff skills work okay, so maybe just additional skills (barter, merchant etc)
- I was a bit turned off with the GC being so needed in some puzzles. Like here I've played this game for almost 200 hours and then 3 puzzles depend on the GC, sort of felt like it took away from my own input into the game and solving the puzzles. I liked the frustration of trying to solve them, but would have liked maybe 1 fun final climax thing for GC, but the rest are all up to me to solve. GC wrapped up the last of the game so fast that now I have nothing to do but chase butterflies and do laundry. ;-)
- interface design -- I find the "Play" and "Start Over" buttons being right next to each other in the main menu an undesirable choice... usually you have the go/save/play buttons placed far away from quit/don't save/redo etc, to eliminate any possible slippery fingers clicking the wrong one. I'm sure there's a 'are you sure' type thing to save us from ourselves, but just good form to separate the two very obviously and definitely (I worked on PC game of the year Dark Age of Camelot, doing some graphics for them, and other d20 RPG games, just my opinion/suggestion on it). Anyway, maybe just my paranoia of clicking the wrong one, but with such possibly bad results it just made me nervous having them beside each other. Same with the player name list when you change players... having the 'delete' buttons there begging to be pushed, right beside the name... maybe my own fear from sending off too many emails by hitting the wrong key typing too fast, so just my opinion
- bee keeping! I don't know what my obsession with bees was in the game, you don't see any in the cove but my husband and I were sure somehow bees would come into play (what with some of the players liking bees etc) and these bee lovin' people would become beekeepers for our village. Anyway, I used my people to chase those goofy butterflies around for hours, trying to herd them over to the flower field or something... regardless bees/beekeepers/beehive hut etc might be neat and another skill. Honey may have some added mental benefit for the villagers, like swimming or relaxing does
- along those lines I thought the GC icon in the puzzles was a slug or something similar... then decided maybe silk worms would grow from the butterflies if I could just get the butterflies to do something on the berry bush since berry gathering at that point wasn't a huge food source (as opposed to fishing). From the silk worms then the berry bush would convert to a silkworm bush, and then looms could be built and then my people could weave cloth/clothes. I guess I had an obsession with the butterflies. ;-) But anyway, still might be neat ideas, and a tricky way to take something the user thinks they've already figured out (the berry bush) and turn it around into another use and puzzle...they might not think to reexamine the bush because they've already grown berries there etc.

Anyhow, loved the game... I won't order my OSX mac until later this fall (still on OS9) so I have been kicking my husband off his macmini every 6 hours to check on my villagers, and we competed lightly with who had more babies at once etc. Tons of fun! I told my husband that this was my killer app for moving to OSX... ;-)

-Cari Buziak