Salutations. I've gone and submitted my game "Text Adventure Collector" already, but if anyone is interested in helping to playtest, bug-hunt, or generally provide feedback on whether I've made the puzzles too... I dunno, bloody infuriating? Any and all feedback would be greatly appreciated. Link to the GameJam Entry page is Here, which also contains hints for the curious adventurer. Thanks in Advance!
Sorry if this sounds a bit like negative feedback, but I wanted to give you my honest opinion of that game. I'm not a judge, and I won't be swaying any judges opinion myself, and my opinions are only my own. It may be that other people disagree with the points made here. I'm sure there are many well thought out puzzles here, but after 15 minutes I don't think I've solved anything. I did find the ZURK treasure somewhere, but I forgot what I did to be honest, and when I restarted the game, I can't seem to locate it again.
Some inputs that I think should be supported. Sorry I haven't tried more of the game. I guess I'm a bit stuck.
<AT TOWN SQUARE>
> LIFT COVER
NOT UNDERSTOOD
> REMOVE COVER
NEED CROWBAR (maybe too direct a clue)
<AT CAVE ENTRANCE>
> CLIMB FENCE
NOT UNDERSTOOD.
That's it for now. I'll try to make some progress a little later, but certainly, I think you could do with evaluating of the map layout, redundant objects, and maybe add in an easy to solve puzzle in the first two locations to deliver a fun puzzle box for the players.
First, genuinely, thanks for the feedback, I wouldn't have asked if I thought I didn't need it.
I take the point about the excess "scenery" objects maybe being distracting. There's a puzzle or two later on where the act of looking in the right circumstance is what triggers progress, so I wanted to put some scenery around to prime the player a bit, but it may have had the demotivating effect of making it unrewarding that early on. I'll need to re-examine that.
The 2-words/6-words thing as well, I was trying to keep things as minimal as possible, where longer responses were more to emphasize significant objects/events, but this maybe just ends up coming off as undirected or indecisive on my part.
What's actually worrying me is I hadn't even considered climbing the fence as an option, or how much it inadvertantly gates off progress so early on. The solution I have there presently is to "Search" the fence for a hole to enter the cave through, but nothing really prompts that as a verb now I think about it. There had been a prior reason for it involving nearby wirecutters, but I'd scrapped that puzzle without realizing it makes the fence a sort of meaningless frustration now. I may end up scrapping the fence entirely now it serves no point.
I think the fence serves a purpose as a barrier, and that you need to remove barriers to progress on with the game, but personally, I would not have thought to use the word SEARCH for the fence. I would reward the player with a "HOLE" scenery object and a : success beep if they examine the fence. That's enough. Then examining the hole would give a message like "CAN'T EXPAND WITH YOUR BARE HANDS.". That lets the player know that they need a tool.
I think that EXAMINE should be the command that rewards players for inspection, except in the case of TALK (which is very natural to type when confronted with another character). Having two such commands for inanimate objects just forces the player to brute force EXAMINE and SEARCH for every object in the game. If every examine relates to a joke, a clue, or some progess, EXAMINE is fun. If it's just plain old messages, then it is slightly demotivating, even without duplicating efforts with having to type SEARCH too.
I tend to think of a restricted set of verbs (a bit like SCUMM) when it comes to designing the games. Yes, you certainly want to use particular verbs when it comes to particular actions, but try to keep it simple, and also try to anticipate all VERBS that relate to object NOUNs.
I'm playing the game now and will send a test report in due course, but I need a clue on one thing. Examining the hot tub says, "Something underwater?" I've tried things like ENTER/GO/PUSH/PULL/MOVE/EMPTY/SWIM/DIVE/USE/TIP/TURN TUB and BATHE/WASH/CLEAN/CLEANSE/WIPE ME and GET WATER and LOOK/SEARCH/FEEL/TOUCH UNDERWATER. So is there anything underwater or not? If there is, can you perhaps give me a hint? It may well be that I need something I haven't discovered yet, but I found this one a bit frustrating, so thought I'd ask straight away. I'm not sure if it's a red herring or guess-the-verb issue or my own stupidity. It's most likely the latter.
Boy, this is one mean game. I think I need some hints. I have:
How do I get rid of the queue in the post office?
Where do I use the loaded crossbow?
How do I get the Textventure Toolkit?
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In the meantime, here are some test comments on what I've found so far. I was using version 0.0.6:
You can pretty up your itch.io game page to make it more appealing to potential players. Perhaps see mine as an example of what you can do. As a minimum, I'd suggest adding some background story, game playing instructions and an embed image behind the 'Run game' button. The embed image needs to be 640 x 360 pixels.
Make sure all sentences in responses end with a full stop.
USE SINK: Water summoned. (Huh? What happened here? No water appeared.)
X SINK: Fully functional
WASH SINK: Doesn't work. (So does it work or not?)
You don't seem to be able to do anything with the bed: GO/ENTER/SIT/LIE/MAKE/PUSH/PULL/MOVE BED or SLEEP.
EXAMINE LANTERN gives different response when carried and when in room.
At north road, trees is synonym for woods (fair enough), but it doesn't understand CLIMB TREES.
UNDO CHAIN: "REWIND" is expected as a single word. (This is clearly a system response of more than 6 words, so might be better to override it when provided with a noun.)
Should override system HELP command, as this is more than 6 words.
Consider overriding system CREDITS command to provide something prettier. You can still get the system one with *CREDITS.
If you move from a dark area to another dark area with the lantern off, it says, "Can't. Dark.", then repeats it.
"Mumbles, distractedly" should be "Mumbles distractedly" (no comma).
You can't wear the bath robe.
When I was carrying 5 items and tried DROP ALL at the hot tub, three items were dropped, two responded "Can't do." and screen wasn't refreshed. This should have worked. I could then drop the non-dropped items independently. Similar thing happened with GET ALL.
Couldn't ENTER/GO/PUSH/PULL/MOVE/EMPTY/SWIM/DIVE/USE/TIP/TURN TUB or BATHE/WASH/CLEAN/CLEANSE/WIPE ME or GET WATER or LOOK/SEARCH/FEEL/TOUCH UNDERWATER. So how do I see what's underwater? I did solve this later, but these were the sort of things I was trying at the time.
When in wizard's hut, there's an extra object the same as the room description. That's not necessary.
Can't UNLOCK, LOCK or CLOSE the door in the wizard's hut. Rather than "Not understood." or "Doesn't work.", CLOSE DOOR should say "Already closed.", LOCK DOOR should say "Already locked." and UNLOCK DOOR should say "Need key." (or similar).
When you give hintbook to the appropriate person, response says he takes off, but he's still there.
CLIMB LADDER doesn't work. This should be equivalent to UP or DOWN, as appropriate.
COVER, PAINT and COLOUR should be synonyms for the COLOR verb, especially the first one (considering that the response says "... Orb covered...") and the last one to cater for non-Americans.
Is it really necessary to have a sign in orb storage that tells you what you already know from the room description? Perhaps if the room description was "Deep cave" or something like that, it would be okay.
Shouldn't the cave entrance, cave interior and orb storage be dark, as they would be darker than the dark forest where the lantern is needed?
LIFT, RAISE, PRISE, PRIZE and LEVER should be synonyms for PRY.
You can't DRINK WATER in locations where there's water.
"Bolt cutters" is two words as an object, but "boltcutters" (one word) when you use them.
Landed spacecraft in room desription, but crashed spaceship as object. Which is it? Room description doesn't change when spaceship/spacecraft is gone, so this would be better as "open field" or something similar.
Examining mail slot in fish room says "junkmail" (one word), but related object is "junk mail" (two words).
There are some puzzles where doing something in one location causes a change in another location without any hint that something has changed. I spent endless hours wandering backwards and forwards to see if anything had changed, using trial and error and repeating the same commands over and over again. This becomes very boring very quickly and will put players off. It certainly put me off. I've come to a dead end and can't progress until I get some hints. The hints you supplied somewhere weren't very useful.I hope these comments help you to improve the game, as it has potential and most of the puzzles are actually quite good.
Thank you for the feedback. Quite close to the end, here. I'll put the remaining solutions at the end of this, general hints and comments first.
First, you don't get rid of the queue. There is always a queue. It's the post office. Just accept that, and do what must be done.
Second, You're hunting Wompus. Clues are in the Adventurer's Guild.
Third, I mentioned in the hints I put on the GameJam page that one of the treasures is required as a solution to get another, and the Toolkit is the prize in question.
I'll expand the vocabulary with your suggestions as there were some responses created that were missed given the inputs. "Sleep Bed" and "Use Bed" would have triggered a response, for instance, where Lay and Lie and Enter, etc., did not.
Thanks for catching the "Can't. Dark." duplication, I've spotted my mistake and will address that in the final update, among other fixes.
I'm very new to Adventuron, and unaware of how to override system HELP and CREDITS commands. Is there a guide to doing so?
Step-by-step puzzle solutions, to decode with rot13.
Va gur cbfg bssvpr, RAGRE DHRHR, gura whfg jnvg n srj gheaf. Bapr vg'f lbhe ghea, TVIR FYVC gb gur pyrex gb trg n cnpxntr. Bcravat vg jvyy tvir lbh Gernfher 8, "JvfuTrggre."
Tbvat onpx gb gur Tnzr Fubc, jvgu JvfuTrggre va vairagbel, naq nf gur pyrex'f pbzzragf unq vzcyvrq, JVFU GBBYXVG.
Svanyyl, Jbzchf Uhagvat. Nf gur cyndhr orfvqr gur gebcul urnq va gur Nqiraghere'f Thvyq fubhyq gryy lbh, gur Jbzchf yvirf va gur sberfg, srnef yvtug, naq fgvaxf. Fb, lbh ragre gur Qnex Sberfg (nal ebbz bs vg jvyy qb), RKGVATHVFU YNAGREA fb vg trgf qnex, naq FZRYY NERN hagvy lbh qrgrpg Jbzchf Zhfx. Ng juvpu cbvag, SVER PEBFFOBJ.
Many thanks for the response.
SLEEP/USE BED mentions "Thirst un-quenched!" How is that relevant to sleeping? You can't quench your thirst anywhere anyway, as you can't DRINK anything anywhere.
Your plain English clues were no help whatsover, as they only told me what I already knew. So I used the coded hints.
Oh my god! ENTER QUEUE? I wouldn't have guessed that in a million years. ENTER is a standard verb that Adventuron uses to enter another location, as you've done when entering the hole in the fence and the wizard's hut. I tried entering things in a few other locations (like the bed and the tub) and only got a standard Adventuron error response. I would never think to enter a queue. I tried JOIN/STAND/FOLLOW QUEUE, PUSH IN and various other things that I've since forgotten. Anyway, once I knew that I had to enter the queue, getting the parcel and the treasure in the game shoppe was really obvious and didn't need your clues.
Regarding the wompus, I knew that I had to hunt it (as in the old computer game 'Hunt the Wumpus'), but had no idea where to find it. I had read the plaque and the fancy words. As you use fancy words to describe numerous things in the game, I never stopped to think that it was actually important or meaningful in this particular instance. I didn't even know what photophobic meant, until I just looked it up. I had sort of assumed the opposite of photogenic, i.e. doesn't like it's photo being taken. :-) I had turned the lantern off in the forest to test which rooms were dark, but didn't get any messages at the time. I had tried SMELL and SMELL <OBJECT> on a few occasions and always got a "Doesn't work." response, so just assumed SMELL wasn't supported. But SMELL AREA? 'AREA' isn't even used anywhere in the game. Why would I think to smell that, especially when it's dark and I can't see anything and most commands are greeted by "Can't. Dark."? I had previously worked out how to FIRE CROSSBOW, but it took awhile because I was running around trying to SHOOT <OBJECT>, always to no avail. And why would I be able to shoot something in the dark? That's an extraordinary skill!
Regarding WOMPUS HUNT, HUNT is not understood (as a noun). You have to use WOMPUS, which is an adjective. These should be synonymous.
Anyway, after this guess-the-verb nightmare, I have now collected all 10 treasures and finished the game. Thanks for the hints. I would never have finished it otherwise.
Apologies for the late reply, but I wanted to thank you for the frank and comprehensive commentary, and let you know I've tried to make the vocabulary more generally versatile to avoid the, as you say, guess-the-verb nightmare, and make explanations/descriptions/hints/etc. more clear to the player, as well as other ease-of-use and aesthetic updates. Version 0.1.0 is now live. Thanks again.
