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I'm such a puzzle/word game freak so this is right up my alley. I agree with the feedback that the order of words in the description is confusing, it seems like you have to deduce almost purely based off of the background instead of the description (which sometimes leads astray.) The wordle aspect does really help with this thankfully. Also being able to take ingredients back out is great.

The biggest thing to add would be a list of past attempts, I continuously forgot what I had already guessed, especially in the later levels.

For bonus points here's my interpretation of all of the potions, based off of the title/desc:

  • Woodland Cleanser "Shine off the poison": Toadstool + Star (Star after because 'shine off') (Why is there shine if not star?)
  • Swirl of the Lightning Bird: Had the two ingredients swapped due to the word order
  • Funsponge Tonic: Lighting + Nightshade + Fuzzball (Again, word order)
  • Get2Work Brew: Gear + Fuzzball + Feather + Nightshade? (Why is star dust if "no magic"?)
  • Essence of Flight: Everything but the unicorn horn, most in wrong order coz order is not specified (all the ingredients in this make sense to me except for the horn)

thank you for playing and for your comment! :D

 I agree with the feedback that the order of words in the description is confusing, it seems like you have to deduce almost purely based off of the background instead of the description (which sometimes leads astray.)

yeah after i released it i realised the descriptions don't really make sense. definitely needed more time to revamp it D:

The biggest thing to add would be a list of past attempts, I continuously forgot what I had already guessed, especially in the later levels.

i actually did think of this! but the fun in it was meant to be not knowing past attempts. had a bunch of debates with my friends on which would be better - would a notebook that appears after a few attempts be better? let me know :D

Ok, I have a short answer and a long answer. 

Short answer: Personally, I think I would rather just have the notebook from the beginning rather than it appearing later.

Long answer:

I think it comes down to a few key aspects for me. The first is that this these aren't words made of letters in specific orders. The ingredients could be in any order, it's like if you played wordle but the letters were scrambled. So rather than wordle, structurally this seems to be more like mastermind (the game that inspired wordle). With mastermind, the combination is 4 colors long with 6 possible colors. You also get a lot more guesses. The key difference of mastermind is that you get the "green/yellow/grey" info but not corresponding to each slot. So wordle gives more info, but also has more possible answers.

Having the feedback of what ingredients are correct and what are correct but in the wrong place is great so that if you can't figure it out from the clues then you don't have to just brute-force it, but not knowing what you previously tried & the info gathered from that basically takes it back to brute-forcing. Plus the chance of re-guessing something you guessed already (which happened a lot to me). Additionally, wrapping back to the wordle vs mastermind thing, wordle is limited in scope because not everything is a word. Sure, it has a longer sequence of characters and there's a lot more possible letters, but those letters have to be in specific places with specific combinations. With something like mastermind, or this, it's exponential. The longer the sequence, and the more possible components, the larger the amount of possible answers is. Mastermind has 6^4 = 1296 possible combos. Wordle, assuming any space could be any letter, would have 26^5 = 11,881,376 possible combos. The english language limits that to around 13,000. (And they curated that further to ~2,300 possible solutions.) Your game, on the last potion, has 6,720 possible combinations. (it would be 32,768 if ingredients could be added multiple times. Which could be a fun exploration of like more "concentrated" amounts of things in potions because the ingredient gets put in multiple times? Dangerous idea though if it turns into a guessing game...) 

Anyways, the tools you have provided the player to swing the odds in their favor are the clues and the wordle colors. If the clues aren't enough to get them most of the way there, the wordle colors have to do the heavy lifting. In those circumstances, making the player remember all of their past attempts could be frustrating rather than fun. Is this supposed to be a memory game? Or at least, how much of a factor do you want memorization to be? This also all depends on the balance you want to strike between deducing from clues and deducing from past guesses.

Okok now to some other potential solutions off the dome, some of which could go together:

1. Better clues.
If you can get like 3/5 green from just the clues, guessing is easy from there. It's the yellow that are hard, especially without remembering previous guesses.
I would vote for potion names/descriptions to be adjusted rather than the images since it's probably easier for you and it leaves more nuance in the interpretation of said clues. For example, the first potion that says "Shine off the poison" could be interpreted as star then a poisonous thing because that's the order that the words are said in, or star last because it says shine "off", implying action happening later. Heck, shine could even be lightning or unicorn horn depending on how evil you're feeling.

2. Stop the player from guessing something they have previously guessed.
Just say like hey, you already tried that.

3. Make it optional.
Up for a challenge? No notebook mode.

4. Let the player have control over when to continue after guessing.
So they can spend as much time as they need to memorize it. Or take notes/screenshots if they want to.

5. Give the ability to take notes in-game.
A little book you can draw/type in! This could be cute. Or annoying if they have to guess a lot and therefore take a lot of notes, in which case a straight up list of previous guesses might be better.

6. Add some rules to the ingredients.
This might be changing the game too much, but just an idea. Lean a little more into the wordle aspect (as opposed to mastermind). Let the player uncover rules as to the order. In this route, maybe the wordle colors aren't needed at all if the order can be figured out solely from rules learnt previously, and the potion title/desc just has to clue in to the ingredients... For example: fuzzballs can't be added right before or after lightning because they'll generate too much static charge and the potion will blow up. Or: gears have to be added last or else they'll rust.


It's definitely challenging to not make it too hard or too easy, and I think the only way to really figure out what works for you and your game is to just try different things and have people playtest it...... so exactly what you're already doing lol ^^

Sorry for the big wall of text, I am also by no means a good game designer (this jam was my first game too!), I just like puzzles :)