Last week, I let a few close friends play Red Planet Tycoon. That was both exciting and a little terrifying. It is one thing to play your own game every day and understand all the weird little rules in your head. It is very different to watch someone else try to figure it out with fresh eyes.
They gave me a lot of valuable feedback, and most of it is already in the game. The biggest missing piece was obvious: the game needed a proper tutorial.
Nova now helps explain the base
The hardest task this week was adding a real guided tutorial. A pilot named Nova now walks the player through many of the early base-building ideas, from placing the first structures to understanding what the game is asking for next.
This was harder than I expected. A tutorial is not just a bunch of text boxes. It has to notice where the player is, explain enough without becoming annoying, and avoid getting in the way of actually playing. I am happy with the first version, but I already know it will need more work. Some wording needs to be cleaner, and future systems will need their own explanations as they are added.
There are also smaller tutorial tips
I also added a second kind of tutorial that I am calling tutorial tips. These appear when the player runs into a specific situation for the first time, like running out of gold, discovering a new resource, or exploring outside the buildable zone.
I like this approach because not everything belongs in the main tutorial. Some lessons make more sense when the player actually bumps into the problem. Both tutorial systems are in now, and both will probably keep expanding as the game gets more complicated.
The game finally has background music
Both testers asked for background music. They wanted the game to feel more immersive, and they were right. Sound matters a lot in a game about slowly building something in a hostile place.
I asked a friend to help me generate a background ambient track in Suno. He is a professional musician, so he was able to guide the process and push it toward something that actually fit the mood of the game. I am very pleased with the result. It makes the whole thing feel more alive without being too distracting.
Lots of small fixes
The rest of the week was bug fixing and UI cleanup. Testers found problems that I had stopped seeing, which is exactly why testing matters. I fixed many of those issues and improved a few screens that were still a little rough.
Hopefully this means the game is moving in the right direction. Next up is proper crater rendering, better wording for some tutorial messages, and probably a dozen other ideas that will appear while I am playing and testing. The more I work on Red Planet Tycoon, the more I can see what it wants to become.
I think this is going to be a really cool game in the near future. I know a lot of people will be excited for it once they discover it.