itch.io

Oh hard questions >.>

So the big one for me I think is, people I know are coming from a background of non-narrative daily puzzles with zero continuity, so they expect to jump into today’s puzzle, which doesn’t work well in this case. I appreciate that on a fresh browser you get shown a “solve this week’s puzzles” button that takes you to the beginning of the current storyline. But I think that still wasn’t enough for some to get the idea that they’re catching a story in the middle. Maybe because people will just click anything on a popup to make the popup go away, without paying much attention to what it says? Maybe there could be more visual cues about the unity of storyline, like some sort of weekday progress indicator for each week? Or dunno instead of “solve this week’s puzzles”, what if each week/story is called a “chapter” (or “episode”, or “scene”, “act”, etc.), and then you’d have instead, “Start from this week’s chapter”?

I imagine you’re trying to keep each week independent so that the backlog doesn’t feel intimidating for new players. It’s a tricky balance to have because I think The Daily Spell really shines going from the very start—I’ve really enjoyed the callbacks to previous storylines as I binged thru the whole thing, and the foreshadowing to upcoming ones. I guess calling it “Chapter 1” or “Episode 1” would nudge the balance towards asking the players to start from the beginning, which could feel intimidating as the game ages and grows ever bigger. On the other hand, if people want a hop-in daily puzzle with no context, they have plenty of options; having an ongoing telenovela to follow is exactly what makes this one special. On your favour, your game is highly addictive, so if you can get them to play the first few puzzles they’ll be hooked anyway and this question becomes moot :)

I’m not sure also about how to balance the tutorial—too long and the tutorial itself feels intimidating, but it’s true that the drop letter format itself seems to give people a blank page effect like, “dang how do I even start here”. If you’re reworking the first couple weeks anyway, and you’ll nudge players to try to start from week #1, maybe the ideal thing to do would be to make week #1 subtly the tutorial week, with a lower difficulty level than the rest of the game. Day #1 would be borderline trivial to solve, then each day introduces a bit more of ambiguity that benefits from some particular strategy. (I’m thinking of stuff like Super Mario 1-1, which teaches you the fundamentals of the game, without you even realising that you’re playing a tutorial level.) I don’t know how hard it is to pull that off, though.