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.Hey, thank you very much for playing Moku! Your video was probably one of the more valuable ones I've seen, and I got a lot out of it.
- Due to your video, I'll be adding an option for gamepad players to lock movement to the 8 cardinal directions.
- I will absolutely be adding a sound for there being not enough bag space while in the chest.
- It took you a bit to recognize that you needed to access the chest to change your equipment. It made me realize I should show crafted items going to the chest when you craft them, much like how picking up the rusty pan at the start shows it going into the chest.
- You ran into a bug where the lock-on was refusing to work when the enemy was close to the bottom edge of the screen. I'll be fixing that soon and making lock on more generous, so it takes a few seconds to unlock you from an enemy if they go off screen.
- The bug you saw where you had 4 Kō Salves on the belt but only one of them had 10 is a bug I'd been unsure how to reproduce and then fix, yet miraculously you reproduced it multiple times and I now understand it. Thanks!
- At one point you were fighting a big axe guy on some platforms near lava, and you'd noticed he would take 10% damage from falling like the player does. After picking up the obsidian you tried to dodge back across and ran into something, causing you to fall. That was actually the axe guy's collision box you hit, meaning you didn't go as far. That's a bug I was 100% unaware of until I saw you do it, so I'll be fixing that.
- You also didn't really know what switching the lever did at first, so I'll likely be adding a bit of text saying something like, "You change the flow of the pipe."
That was just the notes I took while watching. Honestly you did pretty well to get as far as you did, especially considering there were some materials you didn't find and some items you didn't craft before entering the dungeon. You can find iron and Olonā (a plant used in rope crafting), allowing you to craft armor, a crossbow, a shield, and rations. You also missed finding Taro, which would have given you two different ingredients to cook with, one of which makes it so you don't lose your EXP on death. You also missed a pamphlet that would teach you about the stab attack, which is really useful to avoid hitting walls. You would have had a way easier time with the double spike arm guys if you had a shield and could just block their wild charge. Not explaining what you missed to rag on you, just giving examples to explain my thought process on the game cause I figure you might be interested.
Moku at its core is a game about exploration, discovery, and mastery over environment. Aside from a few games, I kind of hate modern survival games due to their focus on grinding for materials, and I'm much more interested in the kind of survival you see in survival horror. In survival horror games, you learn how to best deal with enemies whether you fight them or run from them, you learn how to navigate potentially complex environments, and you manage resources as you explore. That's the feeling I'm trying to go for with Moku, where you need to plan what items you'll bring with your limited bag space, manage getting hungry as you traverse the landscape, and push yourself to go further than last time you set out. This game is 100% inspired by The Legend of Zelda on one hand (mostly by Link's Awakening on the Gameboy), but mechanically it also takes a lot from Dark Souls, including attacking with the shoulder buttons and the general difficulty.
One small mechanic you complained about was the injury system, which I completely understand because it's not tutorialized at all. When you get hurt, enemy attacks include an injury modifier, usually 10%, which makes it so 10% of the damage they do is applied to your health cap, meaning you can't heal it back unless you rest at a tent. That was the chunk of your health bar that was striked off with the black diagonal stripes. Being on fire has a massive injury modifier at 50%, making it incredibly dangerous. This mechanic is to add another layer to the health system, making it less feasible to just bring a bucket load of healing items to damage sponge your way through the game.
Another mechanic you complained about was wall hits, which I am of two minds about. On one hand, I want your weapon and attack choice to matter beyond just going for the most damaging option. Hell, normally that option is grab attacks because they do massive damage, but doing grabs when facing multiple enemies is a huge gamble because you can get hit and get stunned out of the grab before it completes. You also might choose a stab, because it won't smack against walls. But you also might want a swing, because it can hit and stun multiple enemies at once. So I like the mechanic for those aspects. On the other hand, it's 100% true that enemies straight up ignore hitting walls right now, and that's something that will be fixed later on. Everything is test enemies right now, so there's a lot of details they lack, such as their own attacks hitting walls, causing them to need to pick attacks suited to the space they're in as well.
There was another funny little thing that I'm not actually sure how to fix. When you crafted the Leiomano (which are real Polynesian swords, pictured below,) you of course immediately went to cut the bush to pick up the Koali ʻawa (which is a type of Hawaiian Morning Glory). You then proceeded to move on instead of going to the crafting table to craft the Kō Salve with the Koali ʻawa. The crafting table sparkles any time you can craft something, because any time you can craft something, you just should, because of course you don't lose the resources for crafting and there's zero downside to crafting everything immediately. That fact is far from intuitive with most games having crafting resources be finite though, and the sparkle is the most obvious thing I feel I can do right now without downright dragging players to the crafting table by the ear. That all is fine, players should realize before long that the sparkle means go craft. But that does occasionally lead to a scenario where a player is able to craft the Kō Salve, but doesn't, and then gets the tutorial for the Kō Salve and gets confused. It is 100% an understandable mistake, and I have no idea how to solve it yet.
Moku still needs a lot of refinement, and I will be getting there eventually, including even the font stuff you mentioned. Once again, thank you. I'm glad you were able to see part of my vision in the time you played.
74 days ago (+1)
Thanks for taking the time to write all this out. This is all very interesting to me.
I like the overall concept of the game, I think it's a good one and the reasoning behind your ideas for it make plenty of sense.
Moku at its core is a game about exploration, discovery, and mastery over environment.
I think it's hard to make a game like this "about exploration" without having a world map. Not only is it just harder for the player to keep their bearings, but they can't really make decisions about where they should go or explore next without having that information available. A map also informs players about the structure of the game, which is something I didn't get while playing. Each time I encountered a new camp it felt like a step forward, kind of like reaching a new level, and I didn't think much about the idea of backtracking, whereas in a Zelda or Metroid game the idea of going back to previous areas feels natural and expected even if I've encountered newer save rooms already.
You missed (various items)
One question I think can be asked is, do you expect, or want, players to find every item before continuing? Clearly it's at least possible that they don't.
You also missed a pamphlet that would teach you about the stab attack, which is really useful to avoid hitting walls. You would have had a way easier time with the double spike arm guys if you had a shield and could just block their wild charge.
It seems like it's something inherent to your design, that players may not have all the tools that are potentially available to them. They are not required for progression like in Zelda and Metroid games. So the ideal might be that things are designed in a way that it's always still reasonable for players who may not have this item or that item. But that is also limiting on how you can design things. Broadly speaking, this can be tricky. It follows logically that the more important something is the worse it probably is if a player for any reason doesn't have it. There's a reason why so many games are structured in such a way that you can't continue without getting an important item or upgrade or even tutorial; it usually requires too many compromises on the kinds of mechanics and interactions you can do with items and upgrades if you can't ensure the player will have them. But that's not to say you can't have any interesting items or upgrades without them being strictly required. You certainly can, but it does require a lot of careful thought about the case in which the player just never picks these things up, and balancing that against the case in which they do. If there are certain things you 100% want every player to encounter, you might want to figure out ways to enforce that it happens at least for those items, even if you don't do it for all. (I will also point out that having a map will likely lead to players collecting more of the items.)
...different ingredients to cook with, one of which makes it so you don't lose your EXP on death
A word of warning: I have seen some games make unfortunate mistakes with these kinds of forced compromise upgrade systems. I'll give you an example: in the game Ori and the Will of the Wisps, you have a bunch of unlockable upgrades but only a limited number of slots to equip them, though you can swap them out as you will. Early on I found one that lets you stick to and climb up and down walls instead of sliding down them. I found this to be a nice QoL improvement, so once I put it on I didn't want to take it off again. But that meant that now one of my few slots was basically permanently out of the picture. Later I would keep unlocking some interesting new things, but the other one I had equipped was too strong so I couldn't justify taking it off to try the new ones. So in spite of having all these cool unlocks that were meant to add interesting wrinkles to the game, I couldn't really use them, or if I did I would be forced to make other compromises I didn't want to. It's easy to make this kind of thing an annoyance to the player instead of a choice that keeps things interesting.
I haven't played enough of your game to know, but I could imagine someone seeing that an ingredient makes it so you don't lose EXP on death, and deciding that's something they want to have all the time. Then maybe some point later in the game if they found some other thing they wanted or needed enough to replace that effect with, they might find it frustrating that now they have to live with EXP disappearing on death.
The kinds of things I think DO work well for this that are relevant to your game are the things like certain resistances, things which could apply to preparing for a certain goal the player might have in mind at that point in time. Things that could be more or less relevant depending on the situations. If it's something the player might ALWAYS want, especially if it feels like some kind of QoL improvement, I think that's something which you should think twice about. The EXP on death thing, if you're thinking about making that possible through items, maybe that should just be how it works by default instead.
One small mechanic you complained about was the injury system
To be clear I didn't complain about it, rather I just didn't understand it, or what was causing it. Now that you've explained it it makes perfect sense. I think a more graphical Status screen could help communicate more of these important details, and maybe renaming the "Health Cap" to something related to injury would help.
...the sparkle is the most obvious thing I feel I can do right now without downright dragging players to the crafting table by the ear.
A pattern I've noticed with a lot of devs is they are overly afraid of tutoring the player. It's certainly true there are better and worse ways to do so. But in my opinion, the first rule is that if there's something the player needs to know, then you need to tell it to them, and clearly. The second rule is to do it in a nice way, and everything that entails. But the first rule comes first, even if it's at the expense of the second, instead of the other way around (which is how it seems like many amateur devs do it).
One thing that came to mind, which is something I've seen that works well and suits the flavor of this kind of lone survivor type game, is that you could have some text pop up that shows the player character's thoughts to themselves. There's a lot of things you can communicate that way. But for example, in this case when the player picks up the item they could simply say to themselves "I should see what else I can craft with this." Something like that.
Thank you for your further thoughts. I think you're right about the map thing, and I'll add overworld maps to my to-do list.
You are also correct about me being fine with people missing many items. I'm not sure if I'm alright with players missing pamphlets, as those are supposed to be both story related and tutorial related, so that's for sure something I'll think about more as I continue tweaking this test area and dungeon, and going into eventually crafting the actual game world.
The taro one is an interesting thing. You do make a good point about players picking something and potentially sticking with it, so it gives me more to think about. The reasoning behind the taro being so useful is actually a cultural thing, funny enough. The game in its current state is leaning heavily into Hawaiian culture and mythology, and ancient Hawaiians ate taro mashed into a kinda wet goop known as poi. This was their staple food, and they ate it all the time. In trying to lean into that, I made it so poi is an incredibly valuable food to eat, and swapping off poi could be a risk vs reward thing once players get better at the game. I'll need to think on it more to see how I can continue to incorporate poi without making it a required item for a lot of players.
I'll also add a little text pop up to let players know when they can craft something new.