Hi Y'all, I'm pretty new here but I have a number of ideas about what can make Virtual Town better. It's a fun game but there are clear areas for improvement.

I. Character Limitations
a) Family and Lineage
I find it very strange that a game which features a couple on the icon has no option for marriage and natural birth. One of the most fun parts about the virtual villagers series, for me, was being able to produce offspring that carry some of the parents' traits. Even in the simplest form of the virtual games, there is always some mechanism for this. Yet, in this game it is strangely absent. The basis for this is here. You have a relationship system that could very easily be extended to marriage (i.e. the "Will you be my Best Friend?" proposition), a home for doing private activities well...privately, and a need for descendants. Why can't we marry and have kids then? It's pretty frustrating to build these meaningless relationships that'll disintegrate in the next generation (which doesn't even make sense since the townsfolk will have seen the child grow their whole life...).

The other frustrating aspect about characters, for me, is that although you can change their outfits there's no way to change their hair, or to TAKE OFF GLASSES!!! I would love a way to do this, even if it's just changing the style and not the color.

There are also almost no characters of color. I think there may be an Asian one, but besides that I haven't seen any variety in skin color which is sad because I have little sisters who will grow up playing games like this and thinking they're not good enough. What kind of message does it send when there's a game full of happy people and none of them look like you?

b) Dialogue Options
The characters say the same thing over and over, and almost all the dialogue options are rude. I like a rude character now and then, but a) it's inconsistent, like saying they have an "evil plan" but not actually doing anything evil (an evil plan would be really cool in this game, I'm all for it!), b) If everyone is rude there's no variety (or impetus to actually help these ungrateful little simulations). It would be cool if there were some traits underlying these characters, or if their likes and dislikes actually played into their dialogue. It also seems majorly inconsistent that the very formal, task-oriented secretary would give me the send-off of (That is all u r dismissed, lol bye!). I also

c) Health
Although the assistant CLAIMS that I keep the town in perfect health, there's no way to measure the health of my citizens or even myself. I wish there was, and that sickness could also make its way back into a town. This would add a more realistic dimension to the game, and also make getting herbs and flowers more of an important mission. It would also make the bugs (like the 'scary spider' more impactful, and give me motivation for solving those problems in a timely way (so my citizens don't get bitten) other than just another annoying task to complete.

d) Skills
Your child watches you do things and learns to help, and for what? They're useful, yes, sometimes when they do things alongside you, but they don't have any actual skills. In the other virtual villagers games, their skills made an impact on their performance, time it takes to complete projects, and final yield. I don't see why we can't have the same? The "charm" and "speed" elements are cute, but they're so limited and also can't be improved upon. It would make more sense to me if you could improve your charm skill by completing more tasks with/interacting with the townspeople (OR BY SPENDING TIME WITH YOUR PARENT!!!), and if you could improve your speed by following behind your parent and helping instead of playing games.

II. Gameplay Mechanics
a) Mayoral Role Inconsistencies
Farming and cleaning up the town are pretty fun once-in-a-while, but having to clean the town every day both doesn't make much sense and can be very tedious. It doesn't make much sense that a mayor would be doing all of this manual labor. It would make more sense that, for a lot of money, you can hire workers to complete that task for you every day (or maybe, like the other games, you can hire gardeners and public workers to do this for you).

b) Townspeople and projects
I think some projects should be able to be completed simultaneously if you have enough people. If you have enough (healthy) people in your town it doesn't make sense that you can't hire the others just ambling around to work on another capital project you've got going on. Also, the townspeople need new things to do. I like a lot of the things they do (going to stores etc.) but there need to be more stores and careers they can undertake, to make the game more immersive.

c) Trees
I really don't get the usefulness of chopping down trees except for building your own house. It would make sense if you could later build other peoples' houses, but you can't...the wood just goes to waste and the wood-chopping mechanic is only useful for one other thing (no spoilers).

d) Beauty Bar
It's kind of hard to interpret this bar. Another thing that makes it difficult, is that there's almost no way of knowing how much a given activity contributes to your town beauty, and thus budgeting your activities. I.e. should I plant a tree or a flower? Does watering these flowers even help with my beauty score? How important is it to cut down the weeds? How much do those town statues and so forth contribute? Do the more expensive ones mean more beauty? I just don't know a lot of things about the way beauty is added to and/or detracted within the game, and it's not told to us. Also, just a fun idea, it would be funny if bugs like flies and cockroaches started spawning more when your beauty level is very low, and if townsfolk actually disliked/ran away from them.

e) Missions
There need to be a greater variety of missions. WHO ARE THESE PIRATES WHO PILFER THE SHOPS EVERY DAY?!!?!?!?!? And why do they just bury their treasure in the ground? They've been doing so before the beach was even navigable! Bug catching missions are pretty fun, but I sometimes wish we could save them after we catch them!

III. Random Ideas/Qualms
-I barely see the impact of buying my 1000 coin gold-level bug net. I thought for sure it would allow me to run whilst holding the net, which was the major limitation of the silver and brass level ones. But it doesn't...It would've even been nice just to EXPLAIN in the descriptions what the advantages and limitations of each tool level are.

-It's easy for things to get hidden behind trees and buildings because of the lack of rotational perspective in this game. Perhaps if the items have a higher fade distance it would help, because important things are very easily obscured from view.

-I wish the townspeople had story-progression too (i.e. they make their own little families and generations, and my adopted kid can have someone to play with!!!)

-You never have to re-fill your watering can, although that would be the one thing that could make the beautiful water actually useful.

-You can neither swim nor fish, although there's lots of water and you can see the fish there, mocking your poor, starving citizens

-Food is almost too easy to come-by. I did a ton of gardening on my first 2 days and haven't planted crops (except for the ones I randomly dig up) since! The townspeople don't have enough food autonomy, and thus those few little crops I planted a week ago have sustained them for the entire week and could still sustain them for 7 more days! It would be super cute to see them pick up food and eat it, and/or buy food from the store

-I wish that the items we buy to implement in the town could actually be used. I never see the townspeople getting water from the well or looking at my beautiful new statues. Making the trash cans reduce the amount of waste on the ground would be another cool, functional decoration.

All-in-all it's an extremely cute game and I play it very often but can see myself quickly getting bored of it (and never ever spending any money on it) if there aren't more things to do.

You have some nice suggestions. I've wanted to see a lot of those things, too. I hope they really do update the game, like they said.

Some things on your wish list are already in the game, though. You can remove their glasses.

You can also run with any net (if you have Run With Tools selected in settings). Just equip your net and double-tap on the spot where you want to swing the net. The blue dots should show up, and the mayor should run to the spot you tapped on and swing the net when he or she gets there. You might need to practice a bit to get the hang of it. Also, if the bug you're trying to catch is skittish, it will probably run/fly away when the mayor runs up to it.

I didn't have the same experience as you did with characters of color. I found many characters of various skin tones. I attached a few of them as examples. Maybe you didn't look at enough mayors to see them.

Thank you! You've shown me so many things I've wanted to know for a long time! And I'd shuffled through a lot of mayors but hadn't gotten them, but to know they exist in the game is nice!!

The no-glasses is a GODSEND,now I can finally see my mayor's pretty face!

I'd love it if the game would remember the zoom level I set it to outside so I wouldn't have to constantly keep zooming out every time I walk out of a building or talk to someone. I almost want to smack it with a newspaper and say, "Leave it!" just to see if that would work!