Definitely. I'm hitting my limit with what AI can do for me. For example, I had "cracking" to indicate dry clay soil but the visual kept rendering worse every time I tried to fix it before I removed it all together. There is a visual for mulch depth but it only renders as a small ring of dash-lines which I circled in my attachment. I also tried to fix that things are "clumped" toward the center of the tile but no matter how many times I try to command that changed, it didn't improve much. So some of these things would require a programmer and a visual artist. The goal was to have the whole tile "full" and even "overflowing" the tile. I can keep trying to tweak that a bit more because I agree with you fully. As of yesterday, I had a bug where the observation function fully broke on me, which I think I've fixed.
I've attached an image of the soil profile that shows up in the intro video I added. It doesn't show the stat bars that will also be there once soil science is unlocked but does show the side profile of soil for a given tile.
So, anyway. I'm a designer and not a programmer or artist. I'll keep considering all your feedback and really appreciate it. For example, I'd have to think about your suggestion to add those comments because right now observation comments aren't tied to specific tiles or game functions at all; they're just generic.
By the way, soul shard generation is a base state with a multiplier based on how much carbon you have sequestered and total soil health. Observation is meant to function as an additional multiplier to that, indicating things like life, passion, vitality, inspiration, and motivation. I also overhauled the tournament feature this week which I call "simulated trials." The idea is that the game takes a snapshot of your farm and runs threat simulations like insects, fire, and other risk vectors including social pressure, then gives you "resilience" tokens based on how long your farm lasts against the threat before it closes the simulation and returns you to your normal farm. You can spend on special upgrades that give your farm permanent multiplier bonuses such as a mason bee home for permanent pollination bonuses or you can unlock NPC bots like a dog that visually roams the screen and deters predators. Threat simulators occur once per (real time) week.
Best,
A
