itch.io

Hm...yeah that is a bit of a conundrum. I think people tend to assume patterns more often than not, so if there's one item that gives you more detail the more of them you collect, the player will assume there must be more. But since there's no way to tell from just looking at one of the item (or even multiples, neccessarily), and you don't want to miss out on any of the storylines, that paranoia just spreads to everything and leads to item hunting. (or it sorta did for me, anyway.)

So it might just be as simple as marking the items that you need multiples of? Not something as grotesquely obvious as a "1/20 TAPESTRY FRAGMENTS COLLECTED", obviously, but maybe just something subtle like a key phrase ("You wonder if there is something more to these...") or taking them to another screen when they examine the pieces. Then, as long as there are at least two examples, the player will be able to draw the connection and go "ah, ok, so that's how this works" and be reassured that they're not missing out by not hoarding 40 Slime-Covered Notes.

Granted, that does sort of gamify the experience in ways that aren't ideal, but I think that might just be unavoidable for any instance of "collect X objects to unlock Y story"? So it might be better to make that small sacrifice and confine it to an identifiable set of objects, rather than let that sort of item-paranoia leak out all over everything.

IDK, I'm just rambling now. You almost certainly know better than I do here.

Hm...I think that was about 2-3 hours, maybe, spread out over the evening. (I know it's not that meaningful in this game, but I get antsy over the idea of losing all my items and "progress", so I just kept the same game open in another tab and hopped in and out of it instead of starting a new one. Alas, old packrat RPG habits die hard. Also, I got more story detail the more tapestry fragments I collected, so now I'm paranoid and wonder if I'll unlock the Super Secret Ending if I collect like 200 mosaic tiles or something.)

Anyways, looking forward to the update! I'm quite interested in meeting this "slime mummy" character you mentioned...

So, uh, hopefully this is the right place for this.

I seem to be getting an error in the cave area.

Here's the error message:

and here were the contents of my inventory:

I think it may be the viscerturgy book that caused the problem, but I'm not sure. I went through the caves before without it and had no problems. But once I got it, I started getting a lot more flavor text, but also this error every couple screens. I discarded the book to test this and kept getting the error, but then I remembered you still keep some knowledge even after you discard a book. So I'm still not 100% certain what's causing it, exactly.

Really amazing game otherwise, though!