I'd like the game and the concept, but one thing I don't understand. The goal is to get energy, isn't it - but what exactly gives energy? Is food, influence etc. only as a currency for the events? Or are they converted to energy in the end? What exactly is my goal in the game?^^
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Well. I wondered when posting the final version of the game if I had made the goal clear enough in the intro, but now I fear I won't like the realistic answer °^°
The end goal is actually to solve each of the four different problems in each world ; Energy and Etherial skills are a means to achieve the four victory conditions. (three because Oceanic world's events could not make it in on time)
All currencies are only used for event, indeed ; Energy is earned simply by exploring.
Although now that you bring it up, I really like the idea of converting unused physical currency after exhaustion: that would work well to encourage the player to spend more endurance for better rewards, at the cost of possibly less progress for the current incarnation. At first, endurance is really precious since the player doesn't know anything on the map, but the more you learn, the more endurance you can spend in events without worry, creating a natural exploring first into skill later transition. Thanks for the idea!
I played it again for quite some time.^^ Its fun. I like the idea and the concept a lot! Sadly at some point I had a bug, that Events where already used after respawn, so not giving 3 Endurance or other stuff, but only 2 Endurance anymore. When the bug happened, when entering a map it would say that I rest at the start point, although I were just entering the map.
If you want to update the game after the gamejam, I have some improvement ideas, which mostly where smaller annoyances:
- Tooltips for the events, when hovering over a tile - sometimes they use the same letter (e.g. cottage and crevice both C in the snow world) and in general it is hard to remember every letter.
- The blinking icon how much it cost to move shouldn't blink but stay visible - also it shouldn't be on top of the letter so it doesn't hide where you move to.
- Farming energy could be balanced better and be more obvious how you get it - so you can progress faster.
- Maybe some reminder for what is needed to complete a certain event you already found before. "Crevice: 10 food"
Despite my suggestions, I really liked the the game.
Oh thank you very much! I love getting constructive feedback like this!
- Ah, yep, I know that bug, I mentionned it in the "Known Bugs and Issues" section of the game's page: it is caused by the Transcedent Memory skill, which causes the in-tile flag [explored] to stay true even after the map is reloaded
- Well, you want to know the funny thing? There are tooltips for every tile, detailing the terrain cost and event name! Tooltips are one of the first thing I implement in my games because I love what Old World does with theirs, it clarifies game elements so much. Why aren't they visible then you may ask? Because, in order to make the tiles hexagonal, I used a CSS clip-path. Which would have worked fine if I had put it on the tile's background, not the tile element itself. So tooltips are there, just cropped. And I didn't notice until submissions were closed. T-T
- As for the letters, it wasn't even supposed to be letters at first, but a small unique illustration for each event type, so I agree it isn't a good visual clue at all. It was one of thoses "I'll do this for now and change it later" things ^^'
- For the movement button, after some playtesting, I'm convinced it shouldn't be on the tile, but rather on an arrow pointing to the destination tile. Because if you put it on the tile like I did, you're bound to have superposition that hides information, exaclty like you said
- The whole game's economy should be reworked in fact XD I didn't have time for playtesting during the jam, so it is very grindy and way too slow compared to what I initially wanted to have. I even left in a dev command when submitting the game in case player wanted to explore and see the endings without having to bear the slow/grindy parts (I put it at the end of the "In-game clarifications" section in case you're interested)
- Indeed, I though the same thing! If you already visited an event, you shouldn't have to go back to the tile to see the choices, they should 100% appear in a tooltip
Thanks a lot for all of this, it reassures me that people are seeing the same problems as I do, and coming up with similar solutions, that way I know I'm on the right track for improvement.
I have a project of coming back to all my GMTK Game Jams entries since I first participated to try to rework them into complete games, so I will one day update this one, but I'm not sure when exacly it will happen. ^^