I tried out Lacuna last week, when it seemed like half the Perl community was buzzing about it. My first impression was very favorable, but I dropped it after a few days for the reasons given below.
First, a couple of implementation details:
- Rather than giving myself yet another username/password combination to remember, I chose to use Facebook Connect for authentication. It worked flawlessly... but the next time I checked Facebook, I discovered that I'd been unwittingly spamming my friends with "I just built my first water extractor in Lacuna Expanse!" messages. I realize that sort of thing is typical of Facebook games (which is one of the many reasons why I don't play them), but I didn't expect it from a conventional browser game which just happened to be using Facebook as a user authentication method. You might want to add a "post badges to Facebook" or similar option during account creation when using FB auth so that users at least know that you'll be spewing messages onto their Facebook stream and, ideally, will have the ability to easily opt out before that starts. (For anyone else who wants to use FB auth with Lacuna, you need to go into your account settings to turn off the "post to FB" and/or "show badges for the first time I build everything" options.)
- I came out of the tutorial with my two probes, but never seemed to be able to get them to work. I somehow managed to get the first one sent off to a nearby system, but, after that, every time I clicked on a system to send a probe there, I couldn't find any ships to send there - both my "available ships" and "unavailable ships" lists were empty, even though the probe-related building on my homeworld said that I had two probes (one in my home system, one in the nearby system that I'd sent it to for the tutorial). I initially thought this may have been a readiness issue[1], but, at the time I quit, it had persisted for two days and I can't imagine that fuelling a probe would take nearly that long.
The biggie for me, though, was a question of design vision vs. actual implementation. Lacuna Expanse presents itself as a space empire building game, but it takes way too long to be able to actually start building a space empire. The last time I checked on Network 19, there were about 350 active players and the number of inhabited planets was four more than the number of players - only about 1% of users even had a colony, never mind building an empire! Granted, this was only about a week after public release, so you can't expect much in the way of vast empires that quickly, but most space-empire-building games have you coming out of the tutorial with at least one colony and/or a minor combat squadron. A couple days after finishing Lacuna's tutorial, I had neither. Nor, it appears, did 98.5% of the other users.
I think I'd been with the game for 4-5 days when I looked at my Happiness growth and realized that it would be nearly a month before I'd have the 100,000 Happiness to found a colony[2]. Once I realized that, I decided that I wanted to build galactic empires, not spend weeks micromanaging production on my homeworld in order to, eventually, be able to create my first colony, so I left. This was also exacerbated by the knowledge that, in a few days, my resource production would be dropping significantly[3], slowing everything else except Happiness growth down, but I wasn't sure by how much because the interface was only showing net growth in resources, not total production/total consumption, making it impossible to figure out how much surplus production I'd need in order to stay in the black after the production bonuses expired.
My bottom line: If Lacuna is a galactic-empire-building game, then players should be able to quickly get into the business of building a galactic empire. If it's not a galactic-empire-building game, then you need to make it more clear up front just what it's actually intended to be.
[1] I'm assuming that was why I wasn't able to send out the first probe immediately after building it, by analogy with the extra "training" time that you have to wait after building a spy before you can assign a mission to him. But that's just an assumption, since I never found any status indicator in the interface stating that the probe was unavailable or why.
[2] Admittedly, I didn't take into consideration that I could build/upgrade various structures to increase my Happiness production and reduce that time somewhat.
[3] Because the one-week production bonuses purchased with... umm... Essentia? paid credits, in any case... during the tutorial would be expiring.
