The Merchant's Guide to the Kingdom

This game has a great premise, and I really want to see it succeed. Currently, it's being made by a small team with with little-to-no education in game development, and no experience with interface design. The interface doesn't use any industry conventions, it's shot-gunned all over the screen with no rhyme or reason behind its deployment; and it's trying to shove too much information down the users' throat at once. It needs a complete overhaul. WASD character control has been around for 20 years, but the movement controls don't use any industry conventions either. I really want to see this game rise to its potential, and I hope these issues are corrected.

good stuff. picked this up the other day and got about 6 hours total through the beggining/tutorial and am getting a feel for the game. so far, the tutorial is great at explaining the basics, albeit in quite a lot of info! luckily they do give lots of opportunity to re-read the steps and have a system in place to show you your progress so you dont get completely lost in the sauce. but honestly, its all in there. the battle mechanics are dope, the raiding/dungeon system is cool. i like the "guild master" concept and combination of game styles. its pretty early/beta access right now and the opportunity for them to flush this out is dope. as the other review said they do have a discord and seem to be available for questions/comments on there, i plan to reach out to them and see whats goin on! good job guys

I really, really enjoy the vast majority of the mechanics here, and the environment and setting are well designed and realized, for the most part. The Merchants Guide to the Kingdom has enormous potential as a compelling management game styled after fantasy MMOs - I think there's a certain niche demographic for which this could have some seriously deep appeal, and I believe it could be made user-friendly enough to find fans in a much wider pool. All of that said, [b]I cannot recommend to a general audience for purchase at this point in it's early access journey, outside of those like me who find the concept and bones especially compelling and would like to support the game's continued development[/b]. There are a number of foundational issues with the implementation which stand in the way of acceptably smooth and pleasant gameplay, most notably in the broad categories of performance, UI, and UX/QoL. Nonetheless, [b]I am inspired to continue to play it[/b] and check in on it's development moving forward. What follows are my reflections on why you might hold off for a bit - and also some speculation on my part. If I am interpreting the issues with any accuracy, I believe all of the problems are reasonably surmountable obstacles. [h2]Performance[/h2] I would categorize [url=https://pcpartpicker.com/b/JtXbt6]my aging system as "high-mid grade,"[/url] but it struggles to achieve smooth gameplay here, at any quality setting. It isn't that far into a session or save that mouse interactions start exceeding the magic 400ms response time, making everything feel just a bit more sluggish. Similarly, animation and movement can appear fairly choppy. But the greatest offender is the game freezing for a bit when you perform various interactions. Most notably when opening different interfaces, and often in item management interactions. In a game where the majority of the experience is interfaces and item management, this is a very accentuated problem, and all those half-to-several-second freezes really add up. I believe there is good evidence of this being a matter of underlying data and entity management more than anything. There are hints that some data is duplicated across several places, and the freezes seem to coincide with displaying, modifying, or filtering/sorting collections. If so, fixing these things may be a considerably far-reaching refactor, but the patterns are well defined and readily available, and would be widely applicable and repeatable... I feel like there's a good chance that some day a release may see most of these particular performance issues disappearing in concert. [h2]User Interface[/h2] The UI needs a lot of love. Apart from lacking aesthetic polish, there's not much in the way of overarching design cohesion, with the way in which you are presented information or interact with things varying wildly and inexplicably from application to application, and often in entirely different styles. It didn't take me too long to wrap my head around most of the game's interfaces - thought there are still a few which I do not understand - but it's a struggle, and some interfaces don't make much sense on the whole. Many lists are lacking useful filter/search/sort functions (and those that have them tend to freeze the game when used, as mentioned prior). The UI elements also struggle with regular and consistent input handling. It is not unusual to have a couple panels overlaid, and hit registration might trigger the foremost element as you'd expect - but it's also not uncommon for it to trigger an obstructed one in the background. Or even buttons in a portion of a list which is scrolled out of view. Or failing to respond at all, presumably because something else is consuming the interaction. All of this amounts to a peevish problem of you sometimes doing things which you did not mean to, and possibly even being unable to discern what you did by accident, and correct the consequences. Lists updating will on occasion change the display in some manner, such as the scroll position, so sometimes you don't click on what your mouse was over a moment before. List updates having a tendency to freeze the game for a moment makes this even more problematic. Ultimately, I could sum up the UI as cumbersome and not intuitive. I think that between the mechanics and the environment and the graphics and the UI, [b]the UI is the lowest denominator, and makes the game feel a lot more prototypical than it might otherwise.[/b] [h2]User Experience/Quality of Life[/h2] There's a lot to be said here, but I think I've already rambled far too long, and about more imminently important things - QoL features in particular can wait, and I'm talking about many things which are likely being explored and subject to change. So, just a couple examples. Most of the interfaces and interactions don't really feel like they're currently designed for the end-user, which makes sense in EA perhaps. A good example of this might be the tutorial, which probably made me more confused than less - each task just obscured all of the UI except for whatever button I was currently supposed to click, without really explaining why I might want to or what it was accomplishing. It wasn't until several hours in that I discovered that there was a textual guide and entries which did a considerably better job at describing what the interactions did. Some of the features behind the interfaces don't make a lot of sense. There's an "item stash" which I have only found to be accessible through the store management screen, but it's not clear why I would want to stash items, apart from weapons and armor which I wouldn't want to leave for my NPC guildmates to use, or keep in my general inventory and risk accidentally selling or destroying them. It could be nice for sequestering materials and the like - but given the rate at which you often acquire items it doesn't make sense without some sort of auto-sorting functionality. It is also irksome that items cannot be marked for sale or destruction while stashed. [h1]Epilogue[/h1] I think TMGTTK is a really compelling concept with a lot of great mechanics, and a nice diversion from my routine niches - I feel it has immense promise. It is not a very pleasant or smooth experience as things stand, but I find myself enjoying it even in it's current state, and I really look forward to what it's future might hold.

Solid baseline, just needs improvements to the UI and more content

I have 11 minutes of game play, and the entire time I had to continue to spam the escape button every time I clicked a button to get the game to do anything. I had to restart my computer twice as the game decided to lock up the entire computer. I rarely do any reviews, but I felt the need to do this one to hopefully stop anyone from wasting their time or money on this game. Fastest game I have ever refunded, and I had such high hopes as this has promise to everything I have been looking for in this type of game. I could not recommend enough against this game in its current state.

This game is a lot fun. I found myself being able to quickly get invested in the game and the development of the city and the heroes. Anyone who is interested in city/empire building games should definitely give it a chance. The game is challenging, but it's rewarding watching your city and heroes grow.

The game has a massive potential, but the UI makes playing it impossible. You can't click on items, and sometimes your clicking on a totally different item than where your mouse is. No options to resize UI, and changing resolutions does nothing to help either. As it stands the game is designed to be played on a very specific monitor size, but no idea what size that is. I'll update the review if it ever gets fixed, but right now its a waste of money for anyone not using the exact same setup as the dev.

Absolutely love this game and playing from the perspective of what would typically be an NPC! The game does a good job of guiding you through getting started so that it quickly immerses you. Fun world to explore and a clever idea, def recommend!

This isn't my typical play but the art style was too cute I just couldn't help myself from getting a copy. While I only have a few hours so far the quest are really fun and I can not see where the devs take this game. Bearplane has a lot of potential and this is their first stepping stone to making their own genre.

A really well put together game for early development. i enjoyed the beautiful scenery yet simple gameplay. anyone who likes dnd would like this game. its very easy to play, low file size, no lag that i've experienced, while running it on a omen laptop. its not too complicated to understand, and a good game to capture your mind and enter that grinding levels state. overall, i loved playing this game, was a real joy to play a game that has developers that really put their best work in. for being such early development, im pleasantly shocked to see how good this game is, i expected big bugs or errors and glitches but i was relieved to find out that it runs smooth and i can rest assured this game has a delightful future ahead.