In no particular order, here are this month's entries...
#21: Playable offline
'Restaurant Story is an online game. Your device must have an active internet connection to play.'
This is well known, and we've probably all suffered at some time with a lack of a connection resulting in food being spoilt.
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| No internet connection notification |
But the purpose of the internet connection is to allow communication with other players and their diners. It isn't necessary to be online to serve your dishes. So I'd like TeamLava to make the game playable offline, just with certain features disabled, namely anything involving interaction with fellow gamers.
This would be particularly relevant to me as a member of a minority who play via an iPod Touch and so are reliant on having a wifi signal.
#22: More to unlock at higher levels
In last month's Suggestions Box I voiced my concern that there aren't enough levels in the game. We need something to motivate us beyond level 99.
Previous Suggestion Box posts
Well now I'm going to expand on that point (with input from regular contributer Fat Bear). Because there is a limited appeal to having more levels - after a certain stage at present, there's no more to unlock. This begs the question of why worry about moving up the levels? And with this current predicament, why worry about adding even more levels with no extras for reaching them?
So it would be nice if the gamemakers could add new content available only at the upper echelons of the level pyramid. Of course this isn't something that can be done overnight and would take a lot of work, so here's a compromise - spread the unlocking of content across the levels more evenly. At the minute there are some levels where two or three items are unlocked. By having only one new piece at each level the unlockables can be distributed across the board and low level players don't feel left out as they're still getting something new. And crucially this solution doesn't involve the hard work for the game's developers of having to design and publish brand new content.
#23: Less pop-up notifications
It's after half past seven and I should really be leaving the house to live my life, but here I am manically loading up Restaurant Story to put on some Lemon Scones for the day. But before I can do that there are several pop-ups that appear, usually trying to coax me into accidentally spending some gems.
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| Examples of pop-up notifications |
I've fallen for this previously on Bakery Story and it's soul destroying (well, not quite). So I call on TeamLava to reduce the number of pop-ups that keep polluting my screen. I can understand the need from a sales perspective to advertise gem sales, but I only need to see the notification for an update the once to know there's new stuff on the go. The limited time offers fall into this bracket too.
Likewise I don't want to be pestered by a request to rate the game, and I daresay this message doesn't stop appearing even after you've taken the time to provide feedback.
#24: Better sorting of gift list
The gift list could be better organised. It makes perfect sense to have the food gifts and the regular part gifts listed first, but the rest of the components could do with a shake-up.
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| End of gift list including often used Red Knob |
In particular, I think the non-regular parts which are required more often should be grouped together closer to the front. Here I'm referring to the likes of the Paint Brush and Red Knob which have been integral to building recent goal appliances.
It can be a real pain to have to scroll though the entire gift list to find these common parts, so let's make life easier for everyone. We could even have goal parts moved to the front of the list temporarily for a couple of weeks!
#25: Add Easy Drink Machine
The Easy versions of the Stove, Oven and Grill were added to the game in June 2011. That's more than two-and-a-half years ago. The Drink Machine was added only a few weeks after this. At that moment it must have felt like only a matter of time until an Easy version of the Drink Machine joined the others.
But here we are now in 2014 and an Easy Drink Machine is still nowhere to be seen. It's really good to have Easy appliances as they do reduce on the number of taps and thus reduce the risk of falling into a gem trap. Personally I also like the appearance of the Easy appliances - the gold and brown give an upmarket feel to my kitchen.
We could do with an Easy Drink Machine to complete the set. I'd also prefer it to be in the same style as the others rather than the overly bright red regular Drink Machine. Then my kitchen would feel truly complete!
Well, here I go trying to catch up on missed comments...
ReplyDeleteOh, an easy drink machine... What a beautiful dream! And of course, it would come after I spent ~1 billion parts a few weeks ago building the regular drink machines. So if you want to introduce it AND make me sad, TL, now's your chance. Do it!
The sorting of the gifts just feeds into one of your earlier suggestions (number 4): better sorting of the recipes on the appliances in general. In your screen shot, you can see that the gifts get the "same" sorting that recipes do, into breakfast/lunch/dinner/dessert, which is laughable considering that only 6 of the 49 possible gifts could even possibly fall into that category. Better sorting, TL, please!
And additionally, it would be nice for new recipes to occasionally get added or swapped in as gifts. We've had the same 6 recipes as gifts for forever. Would be fun to see seasonal recipes get swapped in, instead of giving out valentines cupcakes in July.
I heartily support #21. The worse is when you have a spotty connection and you can't even tell if your cooking has "taken" and then you have to do it multiple times; so much risk of hitting the "finish this dish for gems" button. Oh course, that might just encourage TL to leave it in, as a gem-trap "feature". Ugh... Sorry I said anything, actually.
My only connection about #22 is how you'd see such a thing playing out. Would they take the current recipes/decorations and evenly distribute them over the levels? Or would they just take new content and spread it over multiple levels as it's implemented? I think spreading the current content out would be a bit odd, as it would mean that, for instance, a level 70 account that currently has access to all the content would lose a bunch of it and have to gain access to it a second time.
Adding new content spread out over the high levels would be fine, though it would take quite a bit longer to fill up the top levels. And, in fact, they are slowing filling these levels; the twisted stuff from a few weeks ago is the new level 65 content but before that the top content was at level 64. So they're doing it, just very slowly since the holiday content generally isn't level restricted because it's temporary. So that means in the holiday-heavy Halloween to Valentines run, they haven't added a ton of permanent stuff.
Also, sorry! Apparently putting this comment off for a few weeks means I came up with a LOT of stuff to say!
Regarding the unlocking of content in upper levels, I guess I never really considered the implications of changing the level of unlock of existing items!
DeleteThat would be messy, and so it seems only feasible to attach new content to the upper levels to fill in the gaps.
But then we're back at the problem of lower level players being left out of updates. So the compromise looks to be having only some of the items in each update unlockable at high levels. But as you say, this would take some time to do. I doubt TeamLava have the patience for that, let alone the players! :)
Definetly the offline idea is genious ive been looking for a game like restaurant story that is offline but no luck, I bet if they do that they will have more fame lol
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