Post by komehara in Spoon Survival comments

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Hey, I recently heard about Narrat (during O2A2 VN jam) and checked this out.

I learned about the spoon concept in French comic book “La Différence invisible”, and I also made a similar game before (except I used stamina for spoons), so I immediately saw what this was about, and as you could see, the activities and balance is key to making a good experience.

But you went farther with the random life setup generation to show how things can vary between people.

Difficulty varies on the life but generally it’s simple and easy to grasp (even more simple that the writing system in our game). However it’s easy to mess up as you underestimate a cost and don’t pay attention to some low gauges as there is no warning (I thought I had enough hygiene to work, but no). Like printing a big document a realising there’s no ink left mid-way…

Bug:

on one life I was told I had a salary of 500 and rent of 500 but it turns out my rent was only 300 (which was very advantageous; I still lost, probably because I went to work with low hygiene)

Our own jam game if you’re curious: https://komehara.itch.io/finding-inspiration but I was working on an upload with new stats and activities that I never submitted so currently there is nothing to do in the game… I’d definitely redo it in 2D if I had to, to save time and focus on balance and writing.

Liana141 days ago

Oh that is cool, yeah that game was made very quickly mostly as a way to showcase some engine features while finally putting out an idea I had in mind, but it's a very basic prototype.

I think this idea in general could do with a better made fancier game as I think it could be impactful to have more people play with that spoons concept... not that I have the spoons for it

komehara141 days ago (1 edit)

I get it, I’ve been playing several life simulation games after making ours, doing activities and writing narrative text much better, so I didn’t feel like going on…

That said, we have a USP (unique sales point): the game is about writing and you can get inspiration by researching on the net or going out, as well as having your parents, friends and editors proofread you, and there’s a micro-balance in this (basically friends are nicer but give less useful feedback, while editors are harsher but give more interesting feedback). Well at least that looked very good on paper (the best game design diagram I’ve ever written).

In yours, it’s the presentation about spoons and randomness that makes it unique. I suppose you could also have things like random events that affects stats to show that every day is not equal. But really, you could just get the game “out” with its current gameplay since you’ve already worked on balance, collaborating with artists to polish art and add audio.