Who doesn't need a little more child sacrifice in their life?
I liked the spookiness, and I thought it was a very interesting mechanic. But it did feel like it was in an early stage of playtesting--my instinct was to highlight all the words and try them all, so I quickly ended up with hundreds of cards. And since a lot of responses contain the word that triggered them, it's easy to go in circles, multiplying the words every time.
My suggestion: Forego the highlighting (it's well implemented, I just don't think this is the right place for that mechanic) and put all the keywords directly into your inventory (you can still have cards that don't get a response--just have it not generate cards for words like "a" and "the".) Then have the card get eaten permanently, whether it gets a response or not. Also, have words you've already tried not get added to your deck again--I had trouble remembering what I words I had and hadn't used.
Thank you so much for your detailed feedback and suggestion!
You're absolutely right about the hand clogging problem. Our main concern with deleting cards was that how does the player to go back to a dialogue response, if they forget something they've already seen? This would require a different mechanic since the card would be removed after dropping. This issue, as you also mentioned, is mainly due to the "free-hand highlighting" mechanic.
Your suggestion is spot on and something we also discussed. Honestly, the highlighting was what we wanted to test in the jam since it's a high risk high reward kind of thing. It makes the game novel and intriguing but it's unintuitive, has accessibility issues, and causes design problems like the ones you mentioned. Ultimately, its existence depends whether we can get it there or not.
Sounds like you've thoroughly thought through the main issues here. And there may not be one solution that addresses every issue--I'll be interested in seeing the final design that you come up with.
Comments
Who doesn't need a little more child sacrifice in their life?
I liked the spookiness, and I thought it was a very interesting mechanic. But it did feel like it was in an early stage of playtesting--my instinct was to highlight all the words and try them all, so I quickly ended up with hundreds of cards. And since a lot of responses contain the word that triggered them, it's easy to go in circles, multiplying the words every time.
My suggestion: Forego the highlighting (it's well implemented, I just don't think this is the right place for that mechanic) and put all the keywords directly into your inventory (you can still have cards that don't get a response--just have it not generate cards for words like "a" and "the".) Then have the card get eaten permanently, whether it gets a response or not. Also, have words you've already tried not get added to your deck again--I had trouble remembering what I words I had and hadn't used.
Thank you so much for your detailed feedback and suggestion!
You're absolutely right about the hand clogging problem. Our main concern with deleting cards was that how does the player to go back to a dialogue response, if they forget something they've already seen? This would require a different mechanic since the card would be removed after dropping. This issue, as you also mentioned, is mainly due to the "free-hand highlighting" mechanic.
Your suggestion is spot on and something we also discussed. Honestly, the highlighting was what we wanted to test in the jam since it's a high risk high reward kind of thing. It makes the game novel and intriguing but it's unintuitive, has accessibility issues, and causes design problems like the ones you mentioned. Ultimately, its existence depends whether we can get it there or not.
Sounds like you've thoroughly thought through the main issues here. And there may not be one solution that addresses every issue--I'll be interested in seeing the final design that you come up with.