Yeahhhh. We feel pretty mixed on it. Basically a lot of people were bouncing off the game and not getting it. We wondered "how much of that is because we don't have text and no one knows what's happening". So, we added a lot of text (too much at this point), and it sort of helped a lot. Still working to minimize it, but, we'll see!
I think the text on items is really great. I'd played for probably hours before the Alpha dropped, and there were tons of seeds I have literally no idea what they did without just throwing them down, and Tumbleseed is not a game that incentivises risky behaviour, so in the end I just ignored most of the seeds I didn't understand unless I had a really safe spot to try them out. Being able to just read what they do means I'm much more likely to use new seeds.
Also, it makes the quest system possible, and the quest system is great.
Definitely miss some of the playful emojis. Do all the characters need to talk in words? It'd be nice if most of the flavour non-mechanical stuff was still emojis. I miss them.
I definitely miss them too. One of the biggest problems with emojis was that people thought we were trying to communicate mission-critical data with them. I agree that with text I think we can add emoji back and have a pretty clear delineation of "text is meant to be understood" and "emoji are meant to be felt/flavor"
