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A Pick-Me-Up Story's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Best Use of the (optional) Theme | #1 | 4.333 | 4.333 |
| Most Innovative Narrative | #1 | 3.333 | 3.333 |
| Most Compelling Character | #1 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Best Use of Ludic Elements (Game Mechanics) To Deliver Story | #1 | 4.333 | 4.333 |
| Most Compelling Narrative | #3 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
Ranked from 3 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
You have created a very unique way for the player interaction to be unique. At first I didn't understand it, I thought we were supposed to actually guess what each item was, but then I started realizing the true purpose. So I did stay a bit too long thinking about the first 2 items.
The theme is actually a good one, I like what you are trying to tell the player and in a good way.
I would only suggest that you add some background music or sounds to feel more imersive ( if there was audio, and I had to toggle it on, I'm sorry I did not see the button).
Also, I don't know if it was my browser, but I was only able to play it well on fullscreen, otherwise the game window had to be scrolled sideways too. But this is only a technical aspect.
But overall, the game itself is very good, and I would like to see this in a more extended version, maybe with some extra interactions so it wouldn't always be just the "write object" name.
I strongly appreciate the feedback and am glad you got a good experience out of this little ditty. I would have loved to incorporate audio into this project for sure, though I haven't looked far into what software I could use to potentially create soundtracks for my work. It is absolutely something I want to explore further, though, and it's good to hear that it genuinely could add to the experience.
As for the fullscreen aspect, this is something that I've come to partially accept with posting Twine games to Itch.io. I always leave the window settings on my games at the default size. I initially was going to make the window larger, but I was working on my upload in the app and thought the game just wasn't showing up period. This turned out to be just a weird quirk of the browser app. I just always hope that people see & click on the fullscreen button. I'll definitely try to experiment with that window scale in the future. Maybe I'll even update this game specifically.
Again, thank you very much!
Finally got to this gem. I like the mechanic of the player taking part in the narrative generation. The dream-like crayon colored sketches helps a lot in setting the story.
My only issue is I sometimes get fixated on a certain associated object when shown the image that represents the shape. It doesn't happen on the sphere and pyramid, but I can't help but mentally link the cone with a pizza slice. I wonder if the game would've played different if I didn't see the visual representation of the shape, or if it's delivered after the description of the object somehow.
That's an interesting factor that I hadn't entirely thought of. While the possibility of someone's train of thought being guided partially by the specific depictions of the shapes did cross my mind, I wasn't certain of whether it would become an issue for anyone.
Showing the picture of the shape after all of the descriptors could possibly fix this issue, and it doesn't sound like it would be too difficult to implement. I also think that the cone drawing isn't one of the best shape images that I created; I had a slight hunch that the curve on the end was a little overly subtle, and your experience seems to second this notion. The fact that you specifically saw a pizza slice makes sense with this.
Thank you very much for the input! I'm glad that the player being involved in writing the narrative worked for you overall.
I love that we both arrived at post-apocalyptic fiction. This played a bit like a madlib but way better, because the game and I were taking turns building off each other's prompts. It was like having a simulated improv partner.
It did occur to me that if the entire image was in grayscale, rather than a colourful background and a grey object, then players would be forced to identify the object purely from the shape described, rather than taking its grey colour into account (consciously or otherwise). It would also fit with the protagonist being a robot; I'm imagining him assessing his surroundings Terminator-style.
I'm looking forward to seeing all these games streamed live because none of us know what to expect.
P.S. Your text box system is way better than mine, may I ask how they were done?
I'm glad to hear that the core concept worked in the end! I wasn't sure how it would be received, so I'm glad it ended up being interesting.
I hadn't thought about the gray color of the shapes influencing guesses at all; that is a very fair point.
As for how I implemented the textboxes, I was just using the textbox macro in Twine in the Sugarcube 2 format. You can define a passage for the textbox to send you to in the macro itself. It's fully explained here: https://www.motoslave.net/sugarcube/2/docs/#macros-macro-textbox
Thanks for the kind words!