A hearty congratulations to all at ldw for an excellent game. It's right up there with CIV III, Black & White and Creatures 2, but for the Palm (hooray!). The realtime aspect is a nice touch too.

Here's the wishlist:
1. Like everyone else, I'd like to be able to click on a gravestone and see the stats of the relevant dead villager and why they died. The amount of memory needed should be pretty minimal. I reckon I could do it in under 25 bytes.

2. The idea of adding the sex and age of a villager to their name line on the main screen is excellent. It would really streamline gameplay.

3. The Details screen has an unused box at the bottom. Displaying what the villager is currently up to would be really handy. Especially if...

4. ... the action box distinguished between the two halves of an action. This would allow me to select villagers without material loss. For instance, if I pick up a villager on the way to "watering the field" then there is no loss, but if they're carrying something, it is lost the moment I move them (food gathering has a similar structure).

5. The ability to change the order of the villager details would be a godsend. Sorting by age or ability in any one skill should be trivial to implement, but again would immensely streamline gameplay, especially when villager numbers get to 50+.

6. Also being able to move a selected villager using the nav button would be very useful. When the village gets big, a villager selected via the Details screen is often somewhere busy (in the middle of a "water train" for instance) and cannot be grabbed via the stylus. I can spend some time waiting for a clear shot or throwing obscuring villagers out of the way.

7. A genealogy function showing the parents, partners and off-spring of a particular villager. Navigable and linked to the details screens. Okay, I admit it, I'm trying to work out if there is any genetic hereditry going on here in terms of appearance and skill aptitudes.

8. Open ended tech levels allowing greater ability to edit villagers directly in decreasingly limited ways. Or continually improving their effectiveness/productivity.

8a) Harvesting. Greater productivity - eventually a single farmer would provide for the whole village!

8b) Medicine. Allow the building of a hospital on the "Sick" field. Weakened villagers could be put under "doctors orders" to stay in the flower field until recovered. Older villagers could retire there! Methuselan longevity.

8c) Fertility. Once you hit 65 villagers, how about the ability to genetically engineer villagers to have a greater aptitude for a particular skill(one skill per level). Or be born with on skill partially (or eventually completely) mastered a la golden child.

8d) Building. Rebuild the huts with better (more storm resistant/ better wearing) materials. Irrigation for the field and an aqueduct to the feeding area. Allow the building of a dockyard/boats (so you can get rid of some of your population if you need to by sending them away). Trade maybe (swap surpless food for luxury items or skills or tech points or vice versa)? But definitely not war. I like the fact that the game is non-violent.

8e) Science. Obviously with open ended tech levels, just increasing the productivity of researchers.

8f) Spirituality. Allow players the option of naming villagers. Allow spontaneous "enlightenment" of devout villagers in random(?) skills. Allow villagers to teach each other skills. Allow the player (eventually) to control this.

9. Time maps for the different skills. Rather than the check box, the ability to assign %/255 (more efficient to implement?) time allocation to each skill which would then be modified by villager aptitude and preference (the tendency to do what you are good at it so human!), producing a probability map which the game then uses to establish what actually happens. This still means villagers won't engage in skills they have not been taught even if you set the time allocation to 100%/255

10. Allow the golden child to grow up. Especially because...

11. ... currently there are no on-going construction opportunities once puzzle 9 is complete, which means that the construction skill has completely vanished from my village population, so I can't complete puzzle 12

11a) Allow saved games. That way I can keep my currently thriving village and experiment with others on faster game speeds and greater difficulty levels. Also, when the time comes, I can migrate my villages to newer versions of the program.

12. Make the temple actually _do_ something! Maybe storms could regularly destroy it, so you can develop builders by rebuilding!

And a few bug fixes, please:
1. Dropping villagers onto objects causes disappearances. I lost two teenagers trying to teach them to forage! Dropping breeders on the hut had much the same effect.

2. The berry bush only ever gets one berry after the initial crop. Could it show its depletion level as it did before.

3. Camera often pans back to where a villager was picked up.

4. Some strange sprite problems occasionally, causing blocks to erase background (even on the map screen)

Phew! This is all a bit longer than I expected. Please take all comments in the context of the first sentence.

Thanks for all your efforts. I hope some of the ideas are useful.

Simon*

Wow, Simon! That's quite a list! The good news is that every one of the bugs in your list has been corrected for v1.1 (keep an eye on the forums for an announcement of its availability). The berry bush thing is really not a bug - it was designed that way. In addition, there have been a few additions of extra "features" to the game, although not to the extent that a lot of people would like to see. The game certainly has a lot of potential for expansion, but there are a lot of people out there with Pocket PCs that would like to play the game, too. There's just so much that a small team can do at once!

These are really great ideas. Looks like you put a lot of thought into this.

A couple of other slightly annoying bugs have brought themselves to my attention in the last few days, so I thought I'd add them here for neatness.

1. When I start the game after a long break, all the adult villagers seem to congregate into two "trains". Normally a burial train and a water train (from well to crops). I've had 27 villagers attempting to bury one corpse (although the effect is quite pretty - once the corpse is picked up the other villagers "burst" akin to an aerial display team like the red arrows.) This massive congregation thing never happens if the palm is left switched on, so it seems to be an issue with the way the world is updated.

2. A meta-related issue. The progress thermometer for "Updating World" slides quickly to 50% and then sticks (now I have a 65 villager village, it sticks until after my palm autopowersoff!). Doesn't that kinda defeat the object of having it rather than an unanimated, polite "Please Wait a Few Moments" screen?

Just a thought.

those are exellent suggestions

I also have the same problem that h3rne mentions (bug no. 4): large blocks move over the screen, erasing the background, looks like some sort of parrallel-universe-world. I get the feeling that sometimes villagers dissappear (this occurs when your population grows).