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Rex Mundane4 years ago

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.

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Adventuron4 years ago (1 edit)

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.

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