Posted September 21, 2023 by Demeno
This version is mainly about adding touch support and fixing some obvious issues.
While this version did contain some changes to the tutorial, I'm still very much unsatisfied with its current state.
Explaining how to play through a tutorial has not been successful, many players finish the tutorial confused and frustrated, after reading a pile of boring text, and that's if they finish it at all.
I originally had a plan to fix this by dividing the tutorial into much smaller chunks and adding fully playable levels in-between, those levels would only have the "unlocked" tiles available.
However, I recently showed the game to a game designer I respect and he quickly found what I've been doing wrong this whole time.
My thinking was, that the fun in this game is about figuring out where to put the hexes so that they would be effective right now, as well as strategizing about future placements of future hexes. Keeping those challenges in mind, I thought that showing players precisely what would happen if they placed their hexes in a specific location before the actual placement, would undercut the fun challenge of the game.
But I was wrong, helping the player know what would be the direct result of a possible move wouldn't be a problem, and would aid tremendously in teaching the game mechanics. The interesting challenge in the game isn't remembering how the rules would affect the current move, but only planning ahead to future moves!
So, I'll start by prototyping & testing this new behavior of previewing a move's outcome on-hover. This might make the existing tutorial redundant, so I might remove / change it as well. This gameplay "redesign" will probably take a while, I hope I don't fall into the loop of infinite redesigning and rethinking like in my previous game Clority.