u/Live_Bus7425

I'm a solo dev building Red Planet Tycoon, a free browser Mars colony tycoon idle game.

You explore a hex map, claim land, build factories, manage power, sell resources into a market that reacts to oversupply, and try to expand before dust storms wipe out exposed buildings. There are daily contracts, server-side leaderboards, boosters, 20 levels, 25 buildings, and 16 resources right now.

It plays in the browser on desktop or mobile, no download needed:

https://redplanettycoon.com/play/

I'm mostly looking for honest balance feedback:

• Is the early game too slow or too easy?
• Do contracts feel useful or annoying? I've revamped them after some feedback from a friend...
• Does the economy give you enough strategic choices to keep things interesting?
• If you like this kind of game, what does it feel like it's missing?

I'm actively adding features. Next big things I'm planning are new map types, prestige/permanent buffs, alliances/friendly competition, more buildings, more levels, and a lot more balancing.

Thanks if you give it a try. Even a quick "I got bored/confused at X" would help a lot.

I really like the idea of PWAs.

I'm a web dev, so being able to build something once, ship updates instantly, and not wait on app store reviews is extremely appealing. I've made a couple small PWAs before for family/friends and that worked really well.

Recently I wanted to build a mobile game I would actually play while traveling. Something chill, idle/tycoon-ish, with Mars colony building, exploration, contracts, resources, markets, supply/demand, etc.

So I built it as a PWA with PixiJS. Technically, it works pretty well. It installs, it runs on mobile, updates are easy, and I can move way faster than if I was writing everything native.

But the hard part is: nobody discovers it.

I also wrapped it with Capacitor and made an Android build. That works fine, but then I'm back in Google Play land with policies, testing requirements, store listings, review delays, and probably being buried in the store unless I spend thousands of dollars on the ads.

So I keep coming back to this question: Are PWA games just a tiny niche right now? Where do people actually discover good PWA games? Do they discover them as "PWAs" at all, or do you basically have to market them as regular web games first?

I'm not really trying to monetize it right now. I mostly want real players, feedback, and maybe a small community before I build the next phase. The next part of the game only really makes sense if people come back and play regularly.

For people here who have built or used PWA games - what worked for getting anyone to actually try it? Also curious: would "install this PWA game" sound normal to regular users, or is that still too weird of a pitch? Honestly, any advice would help at this point...

Hey guys, I am an experienced solo dev building this as a hobby project. Red Planet Tycoon is a game I am building for myself to play, because I love games like these. I've only had two friends play this game and I need more people to give me feedback, especially people from this subreddit (because y'all are nice and know your games very well).

https://redplanettycoon.com/play/

Here are some cool things about Red Planet Tycoon:

• Hex based layout (I just love hexes, even if they make everything much more difficult for development)
• There is a nice tutorial.
• You start small and eventually build a huge factory that produces a lot of resources
• There is a lot of room for exploration and it should feel rewarding.
• Dust Storms - they happen every hour after a certain level and wipe out your buildings that are built outside of the protective areas.
• Adjacency bonus - you get bonus for clustering buildings of the same type. This should influence the way make your decisions.
• Outposts - you can build more area for you to build, but you have to connect it with outposts. I will soon add ability to upgrade buildings. Outposts will have an optional upgrade (increase radius by 1, increase all output by 20%, allow it to work without road connection)

I have huge plans for this game with Phase 2 involving terraforming, which revamps the map, expeditions to asteroid belts and even limited pvp.

What I am looking for in this post is the following:

• See any balancing issues?
• See any bugs?
• Anything confusing and not clear at all?
• How does it feel?
• Any suggestions given your expertise of playing games like this one?

Thank you so much!

AI Disclosure

I used AI to generate most of the visual assets. I manually edited most images in GIMP after the generation.
I used AI for most of the coding. I have 15+ years worth of full stack software engineering in various languages and I feel like that gives me ability to come up with good architecture and write very detailed prompts to speed up code generation.
I also used AI for some mockups of UIs, but this is where I ended up spending a lot of time tweaking CSS and some UI related JS. I think I need to improve my AI workflow to get that done better and more efficiently.

https://preview.redd.it/g2amjqnjqw8h1.png?width=413&format=png&auto=webp&s=882a97b0ff4dc6c96609c540b6ef914de2546c10