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(1 edit)

That's really good you want to try to improve 

Stefan's style of making games is not actually within the realms of everyone, he is a very gifted writer, well beyond anything I personally would be capable of, and I think at this stage, in this jam, that studying Hibernated is perhaps too large a task.

i would say that you should try to make your game puzzle, barrier, and object centric.  Your game should have a short scenario but I'd focus on game mechanics over story if I were you.

1. Puzzles. Try to make it so that there are at least 1 puzzles per 3 locations. A puzzle is something where you have to type a specific been noun pattern to change the state of the games (destroy an object, find an object, swap an object, change a boolean, increment a number, etc). If you make a large map with few puzzles, the game can feel empty. On spooky adventure, every location has a puzzle,  on cave of magic, there are two locations where there is something to do (out of 3 non ending locations). In your previous game there were 25 locations but I think you had about 5 puzzles. Examining things is not a puzzle, but every location should have something to examine and contribute.

2. Barriers. It's kind of boring to have access to the entire map at the start of the game. Players want to feel rewarded for solving a problem or they just want to feel a connection towards the world with "busy work". Manual unlocking and opening of doors is one way that you can shut off access to a location or group of locations. The "barrers" section of the adventuron manual should be used here. 

Anyway, try to build your map around a central area and other areas that are blocked off. You need to solve puzzles to remove those blocks, and inside those blocked areas there .at be puzzles or objects that will allow other blocked areas to be unlocked.

In Hibernated, one of the early puzzles is to gain access to an id card to be able to get through a security door. At the beginning of the game a very small locations are accessible until you find the card. This is generally known as a "pre game" and it gently guides the player to solve their first puzzle without getting lost in a huge environment. The door is a barrier that stops the player from accessing the remainder of the game. The beast, one of the games I have ported to adventuron has a pre game that involves discovering a story for a newspaper article and gathering all the items required to go outside into the cold and catch a bus. The first part of the game is just 3 locations but there are many things to do in those 3 locations. Once you are in the full game there are 80 more locations. It's typical to make the player earn access to the map.

3. Object centrism. In this jam, it's probably easier to make an object centric game. Rather than scanning through a lot of text for the location description, just make the location description short, one or two sentences then putting scenery in the room so the player directly knows what can be manipulated. If you discover something create a new object or new scenery. Youll find your game logic becomes very easy if you treat everything as an object. Object centric games often change the state of the game and are easier to display on mobile too. Spooky Adventure is an object centric game.

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Reasonable targets (there are not jam rules, just guidelines for a reasonably interesting game):

10 locations 

4-8 puzzles

3 or more barriers

20+ objects or scenery. (All should have an examine message and some should do something to move the game forward if examine). Others must be present or carried whilst typing a verb and a noun to change the game state).

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I'm not a great game author. These are just my personal opinions. There is no one right answer.

Chris