Post by Mandy J Watson in Museum of everything comments

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I played Museum Of Everything yesterday but hadn't commented because I think I hit a bug and so I thought maybe I should poke around in the code before doing so but I haven't had time. (I'm quite intrigued to see how you built this. I found the randomness frustrating yet also not because I could see that the game is built to guide the player to various points and not leave you floating around, lost forever.)

Anyway, the bug(?): I unlocked the room for the refugees and then in trying to find my way "down" I ended up here at the top of this screen and I couldn't move in any direction so I had to give up.

Valeriy Petrov205 days ago(+1)

That's a bug alright, thanks for noticing!

Glad you've found my game interesting and worth checking out. What would you say frustrated you the most in the randomness?

Mandy J Watson205 days ago(+1)

It increasingly felt like my sense of agency was being taken away. There were things in the game I thought I needed to do, or wanted to explore if they were something I was supposed to do, and instead I felt as if I was being pulled along with no way of knowing when I would be able to do what I wanted to do - or if I would be able to at all. Bitsy's lack of a game saving feature complicates this because the player could be in one of two states of mind when playing: either wanting to push the narrative along because they are becoming bored or they need to finish because they need to make dinner in the real world or whatever, or they have lots of time and are curious and happy to linger by wandering around looking at art before eventually tackling some game stuff.

Also, for someone such as myself who very much relies on my sense of direction and spacial awareness, it was frustrating having that taken away from me but I know that was part of the game. I have a messy checklist in my head - I have to look for x, I need to do y, etc - that builds as I play a game based on what I suspect are potential text/dialogue cues but it starts to forget things (cognitive overload) and having no way to backtrack to retrigger those thoughts (for me, visuals help with memory) to remind me contributed to my feeling of a lack of agency.

However I've played this again. The first time I played I was in the rushing state of mind, whereas now I knew it would take some time so I waited until I had the time. Second time around, because I had an idea of the game already, I looked more closely for game elements and what might have previously confused me, and came to the conclusion that there are a bunch of different stories/puzzles to solve (refugees, art critics, statue, war something(?), ...?) and you're only going to get a chance to solve one while possibly having little insights into the fact that the others exist. - is this correct? (This time I had the refugee key but then the room never reappeared and I ended up helping the statue.) This is unusual because in most games you solve all the puzzles - or you are forced to make mistakes where you see that you then cannot solve some of the puzzles so you move on - and then it ends. Here you solve one thing and you have this vagueness about other things but you can't "reach" them and then the game gently escorts you out ("down").

I hope this makes sense? It's very hard to explain and I've also gone on a bit of a tangent.

Also, I found another bug that generates text such as "The sculpture made of garbagenullnull It represents [...]", "The sculpture made of concise jet-blackinknullnull It [...]", and "The sculpture made of evocative watercolorsnullnull It [...]" etc.

Valeriy Petrov205 days ago(+1)

Wow, thank you for detailed feedback.

The game works as follows: there are a lot of "regular" rooms with art objects, and there are a few of "special" rooms with key characters that give you quests. Each time you go through an exit from a room, a random room is selected from a pool of "regular" rooms. But each third room is selected from a pool of "special" rooms, which changes based on what quests have you taken and what stage is currently active.

So, for example, you can stumble upon a room with a critic in search of a statue, or you can stumble upon a statue itself. Once you've led the critic to the statue and taken both his and the statue's quests, their room is taken from the pool of "special" rooms until you finish any of their quests (find four critics or find four materials respectively). Then, you have the choice to complete either the critic's or the statue's quest (you can't complete both, since they contradict each other). After that, the pool of "special" rooms will only contain a room that corresponds to the ending you've chosen.

Overall there are 2 storylines, each with two possible endings: the statue's story (either help the statue escape, or help critics completely immobilize her), and the refugee's story (either get the key and let refugees into the vault, or notify guards and get refugees expelled from the museum). To find the guards you have to "follow the images of war", i.e. looking for art pieces that have war-related images in them.

Hopefully, that makes sense to you ) The main problem, as you have rightly pointed out, is randomness and the fact that player has no agency over where and when they will go. This was kinda the main initial idea behind the game (to make an impossible, confusing space that player can wander through indefinitely), but also, as you've made me realize, ended up being its main foil (taking away player's agency over a story flow).

Thanks again for paying so much attention to my game! It's a dream of every creator to have such a devoted and honest critic as you :)

P.S.: thanks for noticing another bug. I'll look into it when I have time to do another patch.

Mandy J Watson204 days ago(+1)

You're welcome. I'm glad I could offer useful feedback. I've been reviewing video games professionally for over 20 years and in the years leading up to the pandemic I spent a lot of time with the Cape Town game dev community learning a lot from their perspective (the Cape Town - and , in fact, South African - game dev community is really great). Plus, of course, I've now started using my knowledge to experiment with making my own small games.

Your explanation makes perfect sense and now that I know how it works (without having to look at the code to figure it out!) I can go back in and control which stories and endings I see, which is totally the opposite of what you intended but it will satisfy my curiosity about the narrative bits I haven't experienced.

I learnt something about agency that I hadn't thought about before so this was a good learning experience for me too.

Valeriy Petrov203 days ago(+1)

I'm glad you've found time to replay the game and find all the narrative pieces. This project is a lesson for me to be more careful with randomness if I want to tell a story.

P.S.: Greetings from the Ukrainian game dev community to the South African game dev community!

Mandy J Watson203 days ago(+1)

Greetings back! We have an indie (and semi-Global South) event every December in Cape Town called Playtopia so if you or anyone else in your community ever comes this way that would be a good time to pick.

itch.io

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