Backlog Bloggery: Trading Towns

Posted on January 10, 2025 by Aywren

Trading Towns Steam Page

Trading Towns is a pixel graphic economic game where you expand the lands around your town, discover the resources there, and work to make it prosperous. There’s actually a nice game idea to enjoy here, and I really wanted to like it. However, some UX design flaws and the overall unoptimized gameplay put me off after a short time of gameplay.

There’s not much of a tutorial for the game as it is pretty simple. However, the last bit of what tutorial just tells you to basically “mess around an find out.” Oh, and feel free to restart if you make mistakes.

And boy did I make a mistake that ran my town into a hole not even 20 mins into the game. But not because I made a bad choice, but more because the user interface didn’t give me clear enough information to make a good choice. I’ll get to that later, though.

Game Overview

Let’s talk about the fun things – you start out by choosing a couple of heroes from the different classes available. This is cool, I thought, as you can try different things should you replay. You drag and drop hero icons to different hexes on the map, and they automatically take care of whatever there is to do there.

So, if there’s baddies to take out, they do that. If there’s a location to explore, they do that. If there’s resources to gather, they do that.

You can just drag them to another place if you want to change what they’re doing. If they complete a task, they return to an idle state, waiting for you to place them somewhere else.

Once you unlock and build a specific building, you can assign heroes to automatically explore the map and unlock areas. Think like explorers in Civ.

The music is nice, the graphics are fine for what they are. It seems laid back and chill to play. There’s even a research tree, something that looks like spells to learn, and new buildings to unlock.

All the while, your town is gaining gold from resources and residents. Eventually, you can set up trade. That’s where the game fell apart for me.

Trading Issues

The little intro quest list told me to trade with another town. You get to choose from some trade options. However, this screen doesn’t give you a lot of info. You see an item to trade and a green or red arrow in the corner of the box. Hovering over the icons tells you what the item of trade is and if the town sells or buys item.

Well, one would guess “town sells item” with a red arrow pointing up would mean you’re exporting it, right? Red meaning you’re losing some of that item by selling it. And the green arrow pointing down (towards you) would mean you’re buying and obtaining a number of that item.

Nope. Turns out to be exactly opposite. I’m not the only one that got bit by that, either as there are questions about it on the community forum.

Well, crud. I suddenly realized as I watched the number of wood logs in my storage increase and my gold begin to drain that I’m importing wood logs instead of exporting them.

I guess I can just cancel that trade, right?

Er… wait. I don’t see a way to cancel it.

I can PAUSE it – but when I close the game and restart it, the trade starts back up and I have to pause it again. So, this means I’m stuck with this trade on this screen with no way to change it. To make matters worse, I accidentally clicked the money button and that INCREASED the amount I was paying per log with no way to change that either.

Maybe I’m missing something. Let me look…

Nope. Poked through every menu and option and there’s no way to cancel the trade. You can’t even take the number imported down to zero.

Well, there’s that.

Optimization Woes

The other trouble I have with the game is that it’s poorly optimized for what it is. It’s responsive enough when I click on menus, but the game’s automatic animations – such as gold popping up when you earn money – looks extremely lagged and like it’s running underwater.

A tiny little pixel game that I’ve hardly uncovered land in shouldn’t be running that poorly only 20 minutes into the game. I wonder what it would be like should I uncover more of a map, put down more buildings, have more heroes, and just push this game harder than the introduction state.

Again, I’m not the only one who is having this issue. There’s a post about it on the community forum.

I could start over and continue with the knowledge that I earned from the first time through. But the truth is, if the dev wants to tell the players “just start over when you make mistakes and learn from them” but the mistakes were made because the game’s design didn’t give me the information to prevent it, then I’m not sure I want to put much more time into it. Especially not with a large backlog of games waiting for me to try them.

It’s a shame, though, because I feel like it could be a fun little game with elements I enjoy. If only it ran better.

My ultimate choice here is to put this game in my “Return to This Later” folder and see if the optimization is fixed somewhere down the line. I’d give it another try if that was cleared up.

I believe I got this game for free from Steamgifts, but it sits at only $2.99 at full price. Should it get optimized, and maybe get some UX improvements, I’d say it could be worth that price, especially with a single dev running the development.

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