fascinating game. i do enjoy typing a bit. only slightly understood the machine building part. pretty easily cleared my first climb (i think — the browser version crashed just before the finishing blow. that might only have been the first boss) without actually modifying my machine at all, because after about ten minutes i still didn't understand why there were five elemental types of words, and also slurry, which is... generated by some parts, and also by any types/colors you don't have? definitely saving for later, though. it knows what it wants to be, and it bes that.
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Thank you! Yes, the balancing act is hard because the delta between "person who is a demon touch typist at 150 wpm like me" and "person who is a 40 wpm hunt and pecker" is honestly a larger delta than I think most FPS games. So balancing has been a bit touch and go, and it’s on the docket, most likely as a slate of accessibility options. Comprehensibility is a separate problem: there’s a hard needle to thread between “intentionally esoteric” and “totally incomprehensible,” which I am attempting to thread while also balancing a jug of milk on my head.
The five symbols are because parapsychology, particularly in the 50s-80s american heydey, frequently focused on zener cards as a means of measuring psychic performance. In particular, it was inspired by Touhou: Lost Branch of Legend, which in turn was inspired by Magic the Gathering. Giving each symbol its own particular semantic chunk of the dictionary means that we can thematically divide documents rather than simply giving the player a pile of homework and going here you go! It gives a reason for selection and, also, bluntly, just makes the engine-building part capable of holding More Of The Game. you can give each color its own gameplay texture, which multiplies the surface through which the game acts, along with making it so that certain mechanics have a natural home rather than any player being able to spec into any build they get loot for.
it will definitely matter more once i figure out the tuning 100% though! and i appreciate "it knows what it wants to be", that really is a very high compliment to me. i hope it will become that and you and others will get to enjoy the demon haunting my brain!
EDIT:
also, i realize i answered the design-history question instead of the mechanical question you were actually asking, lol. every word is sorted into one of the five symbols by what it means, and becomes that kind of material when you type it. your class specializes in two colors, but the other three do not become slurry - they still enter the machine as their own colors through the secondary intake. slurry is corrupted text/waste produced by interruptions and particular effects or parts.
the starter machine is already functional - possibly currently too functional, given that you cleared without touching it. modifying it is supposed to let you route, convert, store, and amplify that material into a strategy, rather than repair an intentionally useless starting rig. if that purpose still wasn’t legible after ten minutes, that’s a teaching problem on my end rather than you missing something obvious.
also, sorry about the browser crash! that is a separate and extremely irritating problem.
Out of curiosity, what compelled you to choose those colors and purposes for the Zener symbols? Circle and Cross are the standard yellow and red, but the rest being nonstandard is interesting.
I can hazard a guess that green for Stars didn't hit the vibe of 'emotive and enigmatic noises', and that change informed Waves being spring green instead of blue, with Square being a more informative/mechanistic steel grey by necessity, but these are all total presumptions.
An unofficial standard as far as having the symbols printed commercially in color, at least; it's understood that adding color to the cards is a modern twist.
When they do show up in color, the color scheme that shows up on Wikipedia seems to be the most common (with some variations), and the earliest reference of that colorscheme seems to be 2008 on the site itself. So it's likely a case of Wikipedia informing an unofficial commercial standard.
Either way! It'd be interesting to hear the thought process on the symbols' colors and meanings, even if it ends up being not that deep. 'They just felt fitting' can be fascinating in its own right.
Here's what I could reconstruct from notes from two weeks ago me.