In Dorfromantik, you spend your time building a little world by placing hexagonal tiles onto a board and developing farms, forests, cities, and more! You earn points for putting these hexagonal pieces together with matchꦍing sides, and your goal is to outdo yourself by earning high scores!
Indie games are often built by small, passionate teams working hard to produce something they care about and think their audience will enjoy. In this case, they've done an excellent job! However, we can't help but wonder: if we could change a thing or two about this game, what might we pick?
5 ﷽ Clearer Creative Mode Tools
A Creative Mode is a genius idea for a little city-builder game like Dorfromantik. The tiles can be placed to create beautiful maps with sprawling cities dotted with gardens,🍌 vast fields occupied by a few loney farmers, and ocean islands isolated by the waves.
Unfortunately, we haven't found the tools available to do these things to be very user-friendly. When you boot up Creative Mode, it looks just like any other game of Dorfromantik, except you suddenly have godly powers to skip any piece you don't like, use infinite tiles without worrying about points, and change the probability of a certain feature appearing on the fly.
While it does technically allow you to build anything you want, it still relies on the generator to give you what you're looking for. Anything to make this Mode a little less daunting would be welcome, like the ability to save tile designs you want to return to repeatedly on a map, or the ability to add and remove features from a tile you're holding already.
4 Little People To Enjoy Your🤡 Map
Dorfromantik's adorable graphical style is one of the best parts about the game. It's sleek, it's pretty, and it's easy to understand. Only a few things will move around in the world, like the blades of a windmill or the locomotive on your set of tracks.
The only problem? Well, when your map begins to grow to a significant size, everything starts to feel the same. Your eyes glaze over all the farmland pieces you've put together and only the edges of the map really register in your brain. While there's an argument to be made for why that's beneficial, we also feel there's a case in the other direction, too.
Our proposed solution is to add little itty bitty people to the map who interact with the various elements of it as it grows. Maybe they appear when you place a house, and they have a set radius they can walk in, so within that area they could herd sheep, till the farms, read a bo♛ok, walk through the woods... Anything that a little person with no cares ought to do!
3 𝄹 Let Us Change The Angle Of View
There are two major things we'd change about Dorfromantik's controls.
First, it would be awesome if you could look at the map at different angles. You can move the map in every other way, you just can't change the angle at which you're looking at the map. We find this pretty limiting, especially when your map starts to grow in size and you need to be considering more of it in order to make an informed decision about where to put a particular tile. It's not as bad of a problem on the PC version as on the Nintendo Switch version, where you might be playing in handheld on a tiny screen. There are even buttons going unused that could be set to this task! The triggers (ZL and ZR) and the bumpers (L and R) are set to the same task; why not set them to do different things?
That brings us to our second change: the Nintendo Switch controls. While it's incredible to have this game on the go, the button mapping doesn't feel natural. It feels like they could be laid out in a more sensible way. Right now, A perfect example of this is that the game's menu is opened with the '+' button on the right joycon. However, the indicator for the menu is in the top left of the screen (you can even tap on it with the touchscreen). Why isn't the menu opened with the '-' button on the left joycon, then? It's little things like this that instinctively feel wrong to the player.
2 More Detailed Biome Chang💫es 🌃
The biomes in Dorfromantik are slowly unlo🅠cked as you get more experience in the game, and they're totally adorable. It's nice to see multiple biomes appear in one big map, giving it a sense of space and diversity. You🎃 get new col✨ors for the farms, trees, grass, water - basically everything!
However, we do have to admit that some more detailed changes would have been cool. At the end of the day, the biomes are basically just shaders. There are a few small exceptions, such as the Sakura biome, exclusive to the Nintendo Switch, which provides slightly more drastic changes, like adjusting the shape of the Water Train Sꦑtation, and the Enchanted biome, which adds jack-o-lanterns to the villages.
How neat would it have been if, in the Enchanted biome, the houses all looked like castles? Or, if in 💫the Sakura biome, the trees were all reshaped like🐲 bonsai? Or, if in the Midwinter biome, there were sometimes ice fishing huts on the ponds? The possibilities are endless!
1 Sharing C👍ustom Mode Presets In-Game
Dorfromantik's custom mode is a fun way to spice up your gaming experience. Basically, it just allows you to customize the rules that the randomly generated tiles will꧙ follow. You can set the🍰 likelihood that any given tile will have a house or a tree on it, or how many tiles you get at the start of the game, or how hard the quests you get will be - among other things.
There are so many creative minds in the world, so people are bound to come up with wonderful custom settings worth being enjoyed by all Dorfromantik players! To be fair, the game does kinda allow you to do this; when you make a new configuration, you're given a seed that will allow others to use the same rules.
This is fantastic - we just wish it was a little easier to see other people's configurations! Indie games have pretty small communities, so anyone who wants to try out a seed is going to have to go hunting for it. Anyone who just picks up Dorfromantik on the Nintendo e-Shop or something probably isn't going to spend the time, and even dedicated fans would rather not if they don't have to.
