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Great, I'll add that immediately :) I really do appreciate getting constructive feedback when it would have been uderstandable if you'd just got annoyed and deleted it forever, so: thanks

I've nearly finished the new endgame thing - it definitely won't be as polished as Obra Dinn, but I had some fun ideas..

Okay, great, ta! :)

Would you be okay if I put your name in the credits? (It's been very useful having such specific info on what was breaking!)

Would you be okay if I put your name in the credits? (It's been very useful having such specific info on what was breaking!)

OKAY, that's really useful feedback - I will return to the bug-fixing mines as soon as possible to iron things out..  I'm a bit torn on whether to take this build down while it's buggy and put up the one I know is completable. I might put both up with explanation (it sounds like you very much deserve to finish it!)

You're right, that is the final bit, and it sounds like you absolutely do understand the recipe (if you get it right you should get neither message and health should be fine). Odd re the regenerated language, I'll check that (it might not be re-rolling it properly on re-start - it's WATER + CONTAINER for the trough). I'll fix the save location thing asap too, that's easy to solve 👍

I'm glad you got some enjoyment from it and I apologise for the frustrating end(!)

OKAY I've updated it. In testing, the recipe was behaving itself (I tried re-rolling it lots of times in debug and it was working okay) and tried a complete run, so it *should* be fine now. I couldn't make it so saves work so you might have to start again if you're not sick of trying it. I fixed high-frequency things always being R+vowel 

Good idea re ppt; makes sense 👍

I like the vowel-only + h idea - I'll do that when I have time to properly add new things. That quiz gives me an idea for something a bit like the end of Obra Dinn, I'll think about it... Again, thanks for the feedback, it's very useful to know how people are actually tackling it and what they like/don't

This is genuinely very useful feedback, thank-you! (Incredibly precise, and you absolutely understand how it all works, so it's well-informed). I'm going to implement some of those immediately (e.g. you're right about white/black - and that's easy to fix. Adding the grammer settings to the saves is pretty simple, too). Some would magnify the complexity a lot - in a perfect world I'd like it to randomise SVO each time but that'll need some thinking about. It actually is set up to generate different possible styles of intensifier, with reduplication as one option, but I haven't used that in a puzzle yet - the problem with it for things like plurals is how hard that then makes fitting everything on the texts (if it generates heavy syllables and then they're reduplicated on top the text could be 3x as wide as its minimum version). I like the idea of vowel harmony - I haven't done things like that because I want it to be fun for people without linguistics backgrounds but I could always put behind the 'full' setting. 

I've tested a bit (I need to do more) and it does sometimes generate a recipe with one of the ingredients undefined, so I will fix that and put a new build up (though it might be a while). One thing I think might be affecting its trickiness here is that on that build it generates a new recipe every time the player loses a life (so that people couldn't just brute force it) but on reflection that's quite unfair, especially given the game doesn't tell the player that (& it'd make sense someone with notes on the recipe would assume it hadn't changed before trying again). I'll change it on the next build. I did manage to complete it but it *was* inconsistent and I understand it being very frustrating after it takes time to decode everything, so I will get to fixing it..

Again - this is genuinely very helpful -> I have 2 friends who test builds for me, but they're busy people and can't always do it immediately, so hearing about things that've broken in detail like this is very handy, thanks :) 

Re the mushrooms - on the charcoal art page it says which of fronded/frondless mushrooms are dangerous - but if you've tried multiple times it sounds like there could well be a bug (especially as you've clearly worked out plurality and negation). Thanks for letting me know - I'll do testing and add an update if needed (and if you've got a save at that point it should work on a new version). I'll take the current build down for the previous one while I test (I'm busy this weekend so it might not be for a little while). Thanks again - and apologies for it being frustrating

Thanks for the feedback, it's useful -> I can understand not liking that, I have been wrestling with how to mitigate it in the next version (e.g. adding extra lives for solving puzzles along the way). I do think I underestimated how strong loss-aversion is (and I understand it, the player's time is valuable).

The reason it's there is so that people can't just brute-force puzzles - in the next version especially there'll be a big puzzle with 16+ options, and a text tells you how to pick the right one but with infinite lives a player can just try all of them. Also, if someone can work the language out, the knowledge they use to do that is transferrable from one run to another (e.g. once you know you can work out plurals from comparing the word for birds with the word for the (singular) bird in the water on the animals sketchbook page, you can then easily work out plurality on future runs too), and if you know how to get in the bear's cave you can do it immediately on subsequent runs. But I understand that actually taking physical notes is pretty involved and it makes sense people don't want to lose that effort.

Also I do think the version that's up at the moment is just probably too hard, in that the jump from the first puzzle to the second is very steep. So I'm adding something between them to try and smooth that out. 

If you play the next version I'd be very interested to hear if you think it's improved or not, but thanks for the comment and I'll keep thinking about this. 

Yes, sure - there are NINE texts to collect

Ah, great! It's nice that someone likes the idea! :) (I know it's quite niche)

Yes, the morphology is randomly generated, within some constraints -> so e.g. plurality and tense can be marked by prefixes/suffixes (or in a couple of other ways), and if it is affix-based then the affixes are picked randomly from the possible high-frequency morphemes it generates (i.e. shortish ones). I would like to make the syntax choose randomly more (e.g. between SVO/SOV/VSO/whatever, and maybe head-initial or head-final structure) but every extra thing makes the code a bit messier, and also until the player's got some nouns to work with it's hard to do much with other classes, so at the moment (in this build) tense isn't really involved/needed to understand things. So I haven't tackled that yet. I do want to do some tense puzzles later on though, definitely 👍👍

Ah, okay - thanks

I really only need the encrypted ini save function, but I've imported it and can't get it to work - error message is: 

############################################################################################

ERROR in

action number 1

of  Step Event0

for object obj_save_button:

Variable <unknown_object>.file_ini_create(100334, -2147483648) not set before reading it.

 at gml_Script_scr_save (line 10) -        if !file_exists(_which_ini) {file_ini_create(_which_ini)}

############################################################################################

gml_Script_scr_save (line 10)

gml_Object_obj_save_button_Step_0 (line 18) -               scr_save();

Glad you enjoyed it, and thanks :)  Also - that's the best ending, good job