what a lovely and meditative experience… really liked the 2.5D style and how the mechanics show the power of reframing words
Viewing post in Haiku Hike jam comments
Since Josep mentioned wanting constructive criticism in the Discord server, I’m going to drop a couple of my thoughts from my playthrough here:
- I was surprised that “haiku” was not defined and that non-haiku format submissions were allowed. I do see the consideration that syllable restrictions might make the game less cozy, but I feel like in that case, it didn’t need to be specifically haiku-themed.
- The RNG nature of what words were available to write a haiku with was frustrating to me – I would keep refreshing to try to get the specific versions of the words I wanted. I didn’t mind for the first few haiku, but because I spent so much time on them, I only begrudgingly completed a few more with less time/effort in the later parts of the game. (I don’t know if this is the typical experience playing though HAHA)
- Similarly, the RNG nature of what blocks appeared for the word clearing minigame could be a bit frustrating if I couldn’t get the shapes I wanted.
- It wasn’t clear to me whether and how the word clearing connected to the haiku word bank.
Thanks for your comment. I would like to acknowledge your points one by one.
- Enforcing traditional haiku metrics is something we had in mind but we decided against in the final game. There are different approaches to writing haikus and some favor flexibility on metrics. Since we have the tech already built I just published a quick update where I use visual feedback to relay the traditional 5-7-5 metric adherence (see the before and after images in this update). I will look into boosting or giving some visual indicator to shared haikus that adhere to the metric (or some of the other popular metrics)
- This is an issue we are aware of but we do not have a good solution. We wanted to be able to give more words than there is space for. We started with the letter-based pagination but that doesn’t suffice and we decided to choose randomly for now. And this is related to the last point. We wanted specific words to be rewards for solving specific puzzles. We still want to revisit that idea but currently solving puzzles just increases the percentage of non-negative words shown. Solving more puzzles makes haiku writing easier by having more words available. This is a mechanic we decided on to convey the mental block idea while still showing a variety of interesting words.
- The puzzle minigame is something that I want to continue working on. I implemented some guardrails to ensure blocks can be placed but we also wanted to introduce some challenge. We want to add more puzzles to ensure the challenge ramps up appropriately. Keep an eye on future updates :)
- See comment above. It’s not directly related just yet. Something we want to continue exploring.