itch.io

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.