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.