Haha, sounds like you didn't have the strongest Dragon there xD.
Really happy to hear you enjoyed it like that :)!
-Absolutely. One of the design elements of this was the 'in a song' bonus limitation, so though I was thinking of having a separate play style without that timer (necessary to align the beat of the music with scene changes etc and the ending), it would have complicated the main menu and was the lowest priority thing I had planned. Will keep that on the to-do list though, thanks.
-I'm sincerely surprised that you felt the ending as a standalone element was satisfying enough to want to reach without the rest of the puzzle. I did want people to reach it, but as a consequence and reward for the experimentation and understanding of the consequences of their actions through multiple attempts. I'm not sure if there's anything left there if they can just skip every action and get to the end without anything happening-and if they did that there wouldn't be any stories of interactions attached to things they brought home to list on that ending. For those I got to directly see their experience of it that was the goal/end point they enjoyed reaching, not considering it something meant to be replayed really beyond that.
Would like to hear more thoughts on the matter though, and will keep an eye on how more players interact with it. One thing of note though, is I'm not really aiming to expand this elaborately with a goal of exhaustive combinations like some sandbox games etc. In-case your thinking it would be more fun to reach the end more frequently, but only because of the idea of more interactions for that purpose. Because I feel that would be changing the games goal, and wasn't the intention (though I had planned a single unique path through a few unique interactions I never got to add).
-That's another thing I regrettably feel is more feature creep-y, than a tangible difference in engagement with the game. Note that I'm no artist so this was designed with the scope of the art I had available to me.
Just have to laugh again, haha. Sorry you couldn't bring a dragon home though. My favorite part of developing this was getting to hear a tester at the end running into the various situations for the first time, so I really appreciate you sharing that experience with me, that's the best part of making a game :) .
Thanks a lot. A definitive goal is working through/reporting bugs related to getting this converted to a webgl build, so it can be played on mobile here too afterwards as it's meant to be compatible-another thing planned but wasn't possible in time.
Viewing post in Questing there and back jam comments
-Oooooh, I didnt realize it was timed with music. that makes more sense then.
-Not that getting to the end without solving the puzzle would be satifying, but not making it at all just wasn't fun. Maybe an indication that the player should go back and try again to have a more satisfying story. It'd be similar to how my game has a base "win", for people to feel satisfied by, and then each level has a "par score" to hit, so they can go back in and try again to have a better experience.
-Oh yeah, more interactions and goals would just be pure feature creep. I get not wanting to expand it out, just thinking out loud how much bigger this game could have been. But of course for a jam game, that might have just been too much :P
And yeah, my dragon dying to the boar was definitely a talking point. I'll not soon forget your game specifically because that happened lol.
-Glad to hear :).
-Ahh, I understand more now, thanks a lot for going into more detail. Have a good idea on what to tweak now to make the more common 'failure state' feel more meaningful/less of a dead end, closer to the conclusion without losing the intended structure :) .
-No worries, appreciate that you were feeling enthusiastic enough to desire expansion, just wanted to clarify the design goal/more hard stopping scope I had in mind. I've got enough WIP projects I'm finishing off I didn't want to make this another one haha.
:D that really makes me happy. Thanks again for trying it out and so glad you had such an impactful experience through it as I'd been hoping for :).