Hello! Great game n' all, I just wanted to leave a couple suggestions... and also two 'oh please dev please!' begs. Because what is any communication to the dev if not a plea for what I want.
For a one suggestion... I notice that NPC's keep asking me 'where are you from' and 'what brings you to Silverpine', or something in that vein; it happens every time an NPC decides to try and ask unprompted about my character to fill conversation. It is my total conspiracy that you have in some way weighted the LLM with a 'when you meet the player try and ask them where they're from and what brings them here' lore prompt somewhere. Dear god please get rid of this if it exists or fix it, and if it doesn't exist add a negative bias to this question or some check... however you want to do it to make it stop. This is like.. 4% annoying so I'm LITERALLY dying.
An easier suggestion would be to add scroll wheel support to dialogue boxes, specifically when an NPC gives a response larger than one text box. I know this is extremely minor but as one of the core elements is talking to NPC's I think, I know it would go a long way.
And a last suggestion... more of a criticism... Sorry. This is a long and kind of philosophical one that touches on some fundamental ideologies of game design. You've been warned. By definition I would consider this game an 'immersive sim' and a 'sandbox game' so please consider this criticism through the lens of someone playing an a-typical game in those genre. And now to put it horribly bluntly I find the game unintuitive. To give an example; when I went to cut down a tree with an axe I was only given a sapling and no wood, upon further investigation it appears you ONLY get saplings from cutting down trees, my intuition that I can get logs from a tree is shattered, nor is it subverted in a meaningful way. As a result I find the axe a sort of useless item because it failed to work as expected nor does it have a subversive use. There are many other examples like this, like how I don't find it intuitive that the shop keeper Aldric won't buy most items despite being a merchant. Like how its unintuitive that, from what i can tell, the intended way to get an NPC to stop following you is to talk to them again and then just walk away. Now I also have basic reasoning, I can with confidence guess as to why things are the way they are, axes are meant to move trees not collect wood, Aldric only peddles in tools and equipment to not make the other vendors redundant, and talking to an NPC twice to have them stop following you is really the only option you have and the player is just expected to kind of pick up on it. Maybe I'm wrong and those where not the reason but the point I want to make is that this though needs to be exercised from your end to the extent of thinking about what the average player might do/think. WHY on this green earth is this important? I'd say because it breaks immersion, not the immersion of my character or of the game world but a more... fundamental one, the immersion that I am playing a game, because for a brief moment as a player its like hitting a roadblock and I'm reminded just how limited I am. Very subjective but, again, I believe this is more so a fundamental view on how one should approach the construction of a game, the absolute idea that upon adding an item or feature to a game that one must ask themselves "how will a player use/interact with this" and If you think the answer does not align with your intended use case then attempt to remedy, clarify, or subvert within reason. Sorry that was long winded. Even if not for this, I hope you keep this in mind.
After all that I'm still obligated to beg for content/features.
It would be. Really. REALLY. Cool. If... You exposed more of games files for editing before mixin such as: 1. Character/world text that will be fed to the LLM. and 2. Character sprites in the same vein as how the custom character is handled.
After all this I'd like to say that I really do like most of what you've made. And I say all this because I care, the concept of engoodening is a thing.
I know the limitations of LLM's, how information needs to be summarized and compressed to be stored, how information is often lost in the process, and how this affects the user experience. But all that aside when it works it works. I had Gareth get giddy at explaining the brewing process of ale and when I purposefully made a mistake he picked up on it and was excited when I did things right and remembered what he had said. Once Darian said offhandedly that his watch tower isn't actually his residence despite sleeping there and technically he is roommates with Hayden and somehow despite that clearly not being the case it has become cannon to my save. When I first met Orina she was very dismissive of me, I immediately told her that she didn't have to talk to me if she didn't want t, she replied that she just doesn't like small talk and now if I'm ever with a group talking with her in it I'm the only one she'll speak to and she only speaks directly with zero filler chatter. My favourite interaction was when Hayden refused to go to his shop so I was stuck in early morning starving, probably a bug, but instead of reloading I went to Rosaly and basically begged her to cook a meal which she provided, I gave her 8g and she said it was unnecessary but accepted it if it meant I though that I wasn't abusing her kindness.
I had my clothes break after punting slimes in the woods. Aldric didn't have any to sell so I had to run around naked for days. During this time I expanded the shed I bought from Gareth, he sold it to me dirt cheep since my character helps him run the inn. He asked to see the renovation and so I took him over, he gave me a chair to commemorate and I put it down in the wrong spot, when I went to pick it up I accidentally stripped the flooring out instead. He... somehow detected the wood and nails now on the ground under the chair and commented that I have a hole in the floor and he felt obligated to tell me. He then proceeded to say something along the lines of 'listen kid, you're running around naked and you live in a shed with big holes in the floor, just move into the inn until you get yourself steady' and I deadpanned In real life so so very hard. Immaculate.
I like the bones of this game. Even for as crispy as it can be its very fun.
