This game was really fun to almost understand what I was doing, lol. I couldn't understand how to solve once the pink blocks were introduced, but I kept playing for a bit anyway.
Viewing post in Nights With Junk jam comments
I added basic HOW TO PLAY section in description, but probably the problem here is that i just made the complexity curve WAY TOO STEEP.
I thought that if i couldn't realistically add needed number of levels in time i should just choose the most interesting ones and put them in the order of increasing number of available operations to not pour too much mechanics on the player too quickly.
Obviously that was a mistake ^______________________^
Ironically a friend of mine when he first saw the drafts (on the first day of the jam) said sth like:
- The main problem with your games are long dialogues and no tutorial. Like i go into a game and have a real hard time figuring what's going on. Make a good tutorial and if you make long dialogues at least voice act them to make them more fun or sth.
I should have listened.
I guess i will have not only have TIME as a factor limiting size and depth of my games, but also my ability to make tutorials for them.
Like, if one can't realistically make a needed shallow tutorial, then reduce the scope even if you can go for cooler things.
I kind of wish for some cool tutorial tech which can introduce mathematically simple but counterintuitive things easily and not as a separate tutorial but like fused with the game itself.
At the same time concepts i usually tackle (even if simple in nature) prevent me from assuming that an average Joe will easily come along without a longish journey. That would make me a mega-accomplished pedagogue if i could do that.
And when you limit yourself to things you can reliably tell and transmit to others, that's a bit different from when you just play yourself with stuff you consider fun (even when it is not really important and can be considered junk).
In other words, i currently have a "wrong" goal for my games - incorporate some cool (for me) stuff and be interesting first of all for me while letting others to play with it as well as a side-effect, instead of considering a game as a communication tool with a "purpose" of communication, i.e. sth _useless_ if not communicating properly.
Or maybe i just need to have two separate types of games, like internal and external APIs - games i want to play myself and games i made to communicate with others.