Interesting game mechanics. Plenty of trial ad error helped.
Whats the threshold to open the exit? I spent a while wondering where I was trying to get the Ghost to, but then read I needed to trigger a heat wave to open it up. How much Board heat do I need?
I'm still struggling with understanding when I can and can't play what rumors where.
I think this is one of those games if I can understand more, I'll be hooked :).
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I was considering being more explicit with that, but I needed to get other eyes on it before I made any real decisions. Part of me liked the need to "read the city" to come up with the conclusions for when a contact goes dark or when the heat crosses the threshold, but there isn't enough feedback (the counter in the sidebar doesn't draw your eye to it when you tick past the threshold and the lack of sound doesn't help).
For the exit unlock, I shamelessly pilfered the concept of a "heatwave" from meteorological concepts, so it's "greater than 90 for 3 rounds in a row" which is what a heatwave is defined as anywhere that uses Fahrenheit units. It was arbitrary during the design process and I just decided "90 sounds good" and that's where the name came from too. Had to make it interesting for myself in some way. Also, since it probably isn't clear, the exit window can actually close again if the board cools off before the Ghost gets there.
For Contacts, the burnout cap is if their location ends at greater than 21. Yes, I stole from Blackjack. No, I will not apologize. I figured the concepts were relatively the same. Push the house as close as you can to the limit without burning out. They go dark for 2 rounds, then come back (supposing the heat has died down at their location).
For Rumours, you can only deploy them where a Contact exists (little green online indicator in the corner of the location node). The exception is the Suppress option, which relies on an active Rumour instead (green pulsing ring around a location node) and doesn't care if the Contact has been burned.
I wish I had prioritized getting the on-boarding stuff in place, to be honest. I actually wasted quite a bit of time ruthlessly balancing it so that it was close to where it should be and working out the kinks. The path highlighting and floaty text both resulted from me chasing some bugs that I had to patch out, so that slowed me down more than I would like to admit, but I think they help the gameplay quite a bit, even if they don't read as well as I hoped. Turns out, the board was hiding heat from me in the exit node itself (which was an afterthought, really) during the scatter spread. 🫠