Ah!!! You are the first player to finish a Heist!!!
First these are amazing. I need to find a new word, but that is all I have right now. I'm not the writer, that would be my partner.
• The stat system is not on much display in the Jam, but your point does stand to telegraph more clearly WHEN a stat is nudging the effects/behavior. For most of the heist Warm/Cold and Sub/Dom are the primary 2 stats. The other CAVES scores (based on Big 5 OCEAN https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits) only affect skill checks, which are already baked in. Example: Persuasion is CHA + Agreeable. Shadowing is AGL + Careful. Warm and Dom are actually calculated from the CAVES scores, a vector sum and then renormalized. Upshot, we will need to keep the CAVES, but making it clearer when they are used will be important AND (my key takeaway here) they distract from the greater important Dom vs Warm plane, so we should highlight that more in the heist setting and downplay/hide the complexity of the full personality scores mid-heist.
• Oh no! Sorry about the gate. Yes, absolutely. We have a flag for "redoable" but that does not mean it is useful to do so. We should look into being a bit more stingy with the "redoable" flag, no need to keep running up that hill.
• Ah, I think this is the leader issue we are currently trying to find a good design for. When your leader (Isabelle) is acting, she can't command. The orders appear locked. We are not sure if we should keep this limitation, on the leader or not. Or go the other way and keep the leader from doing ANYTHING but command. TBD how to handle this. But beyond the leader, Movement seemed to be a point of friction for other folks too, I'll need to spend deeper thought on how to communicate it in a diegetic way that makes sense.
• We have a drawing of the map on paper we didn't manage to use. Hopefully the next version gets that and the paper texture so candle light flickers on the map. Rooms will then be NON-overlapping, which should help. The paths will be less clear tho
"I genuinely did feel like I was on a heist, which is like the thing you want your player to feel for this game."
Wonderful! The experience lens at work!-
Definitely expand on this system [self assigned actions] more later
Yes, definitely. Right now it is a very simple system. Later it will be based on their goals, not just what they would rather do in this particular room. But again, we will need to be very careful to be sure we telegraph the why's of this. Kind of like Agreeable vs Warm/Dom... we need to make sure we are showing what is relevant when it is relevant. Knowing it to type it is one thing, I think your playthrough has helped me feel whento do it deeper, rather than just in general.
THANK YOU SO MUCH for sticking with it. It means so much to us, plus this is all very actionable feedback that will make the game better!
You are MVP.