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Looking for thoughts on Prose & Codes - a game of literary substitution ciphers

A topic by Hero Game Co created May 26, 2021 Views: 270 Replies: 4

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Page link: https://herogameco.itch.io/proseandcodes?password=ciphers

Hello! I'm working on a substitution cipher game in support of Project Gutenberg (a huge online library of free ebooks). The goal of Prose & Codes is to expose players to a vast array of intriguing excerpts from classic literature and hopefully inspire them to read the whole book!

There's a little list of improvements on the itch page that I'm already planning on making, but I'd love to hear what others think. Though all feedback is totally welcome, I'm particularly interested in:

was the game easy to learn/explained well enough?
were the fonts easy to read (particularly the cursive font)?
is there a feature you'd want to see implemented?

Major thank you to anyone who gives Prose & Codes a shot! :)

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wolfmakesgames3 years ago (1 edit)

Hey! Can I just say that it's good to see the word "Project Gutenberg". Last time I've been there, I've read "The Turn of the Screw" for my Creative Writing Project in college and it was awesome to see so many free books there. I'm glad you are doing this to support the wonderful site!

So, visually and musically, this game is really good! The look and design feels unique and tbh, this would do really well as a Mobile game if you wanted to release it there. It felt a little overwhelming at first, but I settled into the rhythm of guessing and finding words and the font is lovely. The only feature I'd suggest, is maybe have a difficulty setting where on the lower ones, you can have a few letters already typecast. Other than that, this was really cool!

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Hero Game Co3 years ago

Hello! Thank you so much for playing, giving feedback and your kind words! So happy to hear that you're a fan of Project Gutenberg too. It's such a treasure trove, and I hope more people will take advantage of such an awesome resource.

I really like your difficulty setting idea. Do you think it would be enough to make the first few ciphers partially solved for each genre, or would it be better to let players choose their preferred difficulty via the settings menu or something like that?

Thanks again for playing!

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wolfmakesgames3 years ago

I think giving players an option to choose a setting would be a good idea. Not just from an accessibility standpoint but also helps generate a hook so to say. For someone like me who rarely reads books, I found some of the phrases a little difficult to figure out but I am really drawn to some of the books mentioned based on just the phrases. And for someone who reads a lot of books, they might like the challenge of trying to guess and piece together famous quotes from books they can think of.

Am interested to see what you do with the game. Oh, maybe you could add more genres or categories based on famous authors? Cheers!

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Hero Game Co3 years ago

That makes perfect sense. I can definitely see it being difficult, especially with some of the more arcane language in the Drama category. I'm glad your interest has been piqued by some of the quotes too, that I was definitely my intention!

Thanks again for all your input!

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