itch.io

I think that there's an element of formula to the game that I wasn't fully prepared for. Where you have substitutions and things you cannot use or have to avoid that made me have to stop and think, "Okay, I need to do this but not that..." and realistically, thinking about the instructions in a purely cerebral way isn't the way to understand your game. Your game is hands-on movement, visual, active, etc. and that's where it makes the most sense. Most of my confusion was very "duh" moments. For example, in the creation instructions you ask the group to find the first non-proper noun and that one stopped me in my tracks. I know what a noun is. I know what proper noun is. Do I REALLY know what a non-proper noun is? And of course I do, after thinking about it - but I did have to think about because I'd never heard it described that way before. If you'd asked me to find the first noun that isn't capitalized I would have gotten it right away. Oh, they want a noun that isn't proper <---but even saying it like that is confusing. "A noun that isn't proper" makes sense to me, but someone just getting off of a Jane Austen campaign might picture a saucy little noun that speaks its mind. And as a creator, it's almost impossible to plan for that. The key is that I think people eventually CAN understand it. Because if I didn't get it, I'd look for an example - and bam it's there. So you've made sure on your own that there'd be no confusion. You've done exactly what you need to do.