First off, I'd like to say that I love what this game has accomplished so far and I'm excited to see what's next. The art style is beautiful and this style of game is something I’ve actually wanted for a long time. One of my favorite games when I was young was SimTower. Hotel Galactic is it’s own unique game, but definitely satisfies similar vibes from SimTower, while having a Studio Ghibli-esque appeal. Checks all the boxes for me 😊

Here are some personal criticisms and requests for smoother gameplay (in my humble, non-developer-based smooth brain opinion)

1)Allow ESC key for advancing Dialog, Exiting Interaction Wheel
I understand this game is being made with game controllers in mind, but that doesn’t mean keyboard/mouse users shouldn’t be able to capitalize on the plethora of buttons at our disposal. The ESC key is the natural “get me out of here” key. Please Allow us to use ESC to cancel out of anything.

2) Interaction Wheel
Right now when the Interaction Wheel is brought up, if you click outside of it, you will inadvertently select the action that is at that same angle of your mouse. When I click outside the ring, what I am expecting to do is exit the interaction wheel, not activate the selection. Please only have selections made when the mouse is clicked on the wheel item.

3)Chat Bubble/Task Alerts
As the game progresses, we are introduced with new alerts in the form of orange chat bubbles. I can expect in the final game, we are going to get pretty busy(at least I hope), so micromanagement will by high. Tasks will need to be able to get handled quickly. It would be nice if new alerts showed up on screen in an alerts section of the screen, or with alert arrow near-off screen in the direction of the task(like how in FPShooters, the direction of damage). Then to make the bubbles clickable to activate the task interaction. My Intuition was that they were interactive. I was surprised to see that they weren’t.

4)Staff – Quick locate.
With glitches lately.. I’ve lost a lot of Staff.. like playing where’s Waldo
In the Staff menu, allow for quick locate staff by double-clicking staff name or something similar. I figured out that [TAB] key cycles thru staff, but sometimes, if the staff is walking, it just updates to their new position. So, I’m not sure if tab cycles staff or goes to next nearest.

5)Drag Select items.
It would be nice to be able to drag-select a bunch of items (like logs/twigs/rocks to set them to disable/enable Auto-collect. Or to tell one Staff their job is to collect all these items (until crates are full/or task completes). So that we don’t have to necessarily tell staff to completely ignore all gather tasks in the staff menu

6)Item Placement (snap-to-grid)
It appears you have a grid system. Can we have snap-to grid. Be nice to make room alignment neater.

7)Stairs
This is more of a feature hope, than demo critique.. As it is the elevator gets major congested. I tend to max out the amount of rooms and beds the hotel can have in the demo.. I feel like a stairwell could fit nicely in the backdrop of the elevator room. That way if someone is waiting, and doesn’t have something they’re carrying, they can just walk up/down the stairs as a backup. I’m sure you have staff elevators, elevator upgrades and the like planned for feature release. If not, hint hint 😉

8)Crafting vs building
Sometimes, I want a staff to just craft furniture, but it would seem construction of rooms and crafting are bound. Can we separate these skills? If not separate, maybe add a pause function to the crafting bench, and pause function to construction sites. This would force staff over the next task in the category.

9) Unpack AI
Please allow Player to disable Unpack Location guessing. Right now I can’t seem to have it go to the right expected room. It just goes to the same place every time. But the jarring camera movement is what gets frustrating. Turning this off would be great.

9b)On the topic of placing items:
The place item view is horrible. I’d prefer staying at the same view as I am when I selected the box and clicked on “unpack”…Maybe its assumed that the player is moving the box to the location and then “unpacking”. I unpack the item at the bench to bypass the extra micro. I’d like to stay zoomed out, move my screen to the unpack location and then zoom in. The bird’s eye is definitely needed for final item placement, but maybe allow it only when unpacking and when you zoom in past the normal zoom/in point. I feel like that would feel a whole lot more friendly to the player’s interaction.

9c)Guestroom assignment.
This might even be a cause for the guest glitching at the front-desk. Checking guests in feels off at the moment. Right now you have to maintain a click on the guest and drag them to a room. From a zoomed out perspective it’s not so bad, but zoomed-in is tough. And as hotels get really big, it sounds like it might get pretty tricky.
Here’s an idea: Click on a guest, select check-in option. Player is presented with a simple floorplan(like those guest maps they give you at real hotels to show you where to go) of the current hotel layout that appears on screen. You don’t need to maintain a click and drag anywhere, you can ESC out at anytime to cancel. Now Select an available room, confirm, the map fades away, the guest is checked-in and walks on.

10)Access board
When selecting “staff only” during the access board quest. The choices scroll uncontrollably. When Mouse is moved above or below, only allow the selection to move ONE position. It is frustrating trying to set that board sometimes.

11) Dry Laundry Task / Dining Guest waiting
I realized that this icon is actually an hourglass. It doesn’t read very well. I thought it was an X.

12)Player custimazation settings: Keymaps/mouse sensitivity
I would love to see the ability to have Keymaps for game speed. I’d like to set PAUSE to spacebar, fast forward to “E”, Slow-down to “Q” (while not placing items). Keymap “C” for Crafting Bench, and “B” for Build Construction.

13)Cannot select Dining Guests
This has been a big problem. I feel that this issue is due to the location of the guest’s hitbox. It appears as though the 3D model of the guest is misaligned to where the game registers they are. The player wants to click the model, but you end up clicking through to the furniture. When a guest is seated properly, seems that the 3d model is all clickable. Zoomed out, mis-clicking a Pington is easy.
If the Chat Bubble were interactive, that might help.

4Plant Sway
The plants sway a bit too much on the buildings outside. They sway through the wooden beams or move out of sync in location. The general amount of sway feels too much.
Sway for plants inside also feel excessive. The sway is as much as outside, which feels a little off if you don’t see open windows everywhere.

15)Bathroom hallways
One glitch I’ve come across is due to the placement of doors in bathrooms. An idea to alleviate this could be if bathrooms were built with a hallway in front, like guestrooms. Then we also wouldn’t have the functional obsolescence of having to walk thru a structure to get to another.
In Real Estate: A home with a floor plan that requires you to walk through a bedroom to get to a main part of the house = functional obsolescence