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Ahoy my Gobbo enjoyer

I gave Goblin Resort a nice long playthrough. I think I clocked in somewhere around 90 minutes, which included some breaks for me to take notes and such. Since I reviewed the game before, I'll focus on the new things and your improvements.

For this playthrough, I went through the movement tutorial, dungeon tutorial, and the first 5 days of dungeoneering.

Anyways, to start:

Movement tutorial isn't particularly complex, mechanics wise. I think the weirdest bit you have is the different jump types, and even that is not that weird. I think you can basically trim everything down to just the crate types, jump types, and the difficult jumps. Keep the one the streamers struggle with, I think that's the most important part of the tutorial. Things such as walking over gaps, crouching, bouncing over boxes, etc. can be condensed into 1-2 rooms (or as few as possible), since most people will know the basis of these mechanics (if you've ever heard of Mario, you will understand how bouncing off a thing works)

I think you can easily combine the dungeon tutorial, and just have it begin at the end of the movement tutorial. Really, the only important bits of it is "see heart -> find matching guest -> leave". Have a goblin at the end of some parkour jump, a tip saying "remember her face", next room is a heart room, explain what it goes, player walks back to guest, matches, leaves, bam.

So, tutorial done. Off to a dungeon. First dungeon absolutely slaps my shit. The very first room I encounter (apart from the start room) is a mushroom/goo room, with the mushroom being in the middle of the room encouraging me to bounce off it. I miss it. Twice. at this point my run is destroyed, but I press on. I'm sure you have some system of "only do X rooms on Y difficulty", but that room is a nightmare for a first player. In general, I think the goo is crazy punishing. Landing in it, with no mana and no nearby vine means your run is over and you may as well ignore searching for guests. I think it calls for a number tweak, i'd personally make it 50% power, but I'm also dogshit at these games. Anyway, moving on to the next room, a simple room, no issues there. Door at the end, cool beans. Open door, and another goo+ mushroom room. This one is U shaped, with 2 mushrooms and spikes. It's actually mean how hard this chain of rooms is, and I ran out of time when going backwards after clearing this room (the mirror was in the following room). Anyway, the run failed, off to day 2. 

Day 2 dungeon was a bit easier than day 1, but again I got griefed by a mushroom+ goo room, this time the one shown in your first gif - 2 shrooms and some pillars. It wasn't as bad but it slowed me down to the point that I needed one extra second or so to reach the exit. anyway, during this run I had time to find a guest and the mirror. The guests bounce around! Adorable. Anyway, I went to match them, and I don't like that I need to go through two checks to match. I think that no matter what, you should only get one popup, along the lines of "Match Guest to mirror? Yes/No/I dont want to match". I noticed that you have a lot of popups that serve no purpose except checking, even in cases where its not needed. Another example is when I did all the quests (found mirror, matched guest, reached exit) and on the exit door, a prompt asks me if I want to proceed. I think this should only appear if something major is missed (no mirror/no guest), because otherwise you're confusing the player by showing them this. They'd think they have missed the main objective or something, instead of being positively reinforced for having done everything.

Anyway, my main takeaways are the following:


>Merge the tutorials into one

>Start the gameplay as soon as possible - probably worth to have some small, set "introductory" dungeons that tie in to the story. Just "oh go to the 2nd floor and get this thing for whatever", and it's just a difficult jump, or an intro to water, etc.  Don't make them tutorials, but more like tiny challenges that slowly showcase the difficulty of the game in a safe, not timed (or leniently timed) environments.

>Your menu looks much better than before. Keep going - simplify everything as much as you possibly can. At this point I'm used to it, but I'm sure a brand new player would still get faced with a lot at once.

>Consider having Shift-running be the default speed, and toggling shift or something could slow you down instead. I didn't see many reasons to walk instead of run (perhaps those are shown later or I missed the rooms that highlight this?) so it feel like running should be the default.

>Room balance. I assume you have your prefabs marked as easy/difficult or something, but it can use more fine tuning. I think it's a mistake if Dungeon 2 is easier than Dungeon 1, but sometimes RNG just works that way - I mean it happens all the time in my game. I still thought I should point this out, though.

Keep up the good work!

(+1)

Thank you for the detailed description of your experience. The tutorials used to be one part, just like the stand alone one on the title screen, but people were suggesting dividing them into smaller sections, and I also split them with the story, so that feedback gives me mixed feelings.

I will look into removing rooms requiring mushrooms from the first 1 or 2 templates.

You are not always required to use mushrooms, like the room with a mushroom in the middle can be progressed through with using your jump abilities or dash instead. Same goes for the u-turn room. Bouncing on mushrooms is pretty much required when you play with no mana, but other than that I give players freedom to move in different ways.

Another thing makes bouncing on mushrooms different is if you use sprinting, or not. I can see why those rooms can be too difficult to new players, and need to be removed from beginner rooms. On the other hand I don't want to just have only boring, flat rooms left (I want to show off the cool rooms as soon as possible, damn it), but I see introducing them later is going to be needed.

I will add more checks to only show the "are you sure?" messages when it makes sense.

Sprinting as default running speed is probably a good option to add, not sure abut making it default thou. I did add option to make shift as a toggle so players wouldn't need to hold it. I personally prefer holding it, and releasing for all the extra control.

Your menu looks much better than before. Keep going - simplify everything as much as you possibly can.

Any ideas on how I could make it less overwhelming? UI is always a struggle.

>UI

I'd say, in no particular order:

Reduce submenus and combine them into one as much as possible
If no reduction is possible, group things together and show that group on the menu (such as: "Dungeon Stuff" contains the start dungeon submenu, all the modifiers, etc)
Hide the things you have no access to (or heavily gray out the buttons)
Don't give player the ability to edit the UI until you're sure they're ready for it
Show don't tell: remove text boxes telling you how to use the UI and instead have the player learn from objectives (this is hard to do)
Example: Instead of clicking a submenu and having a textbox appear and say This is where you do X, have a popup while you're doing something somewhere else telling you "Hey go do this. It's in X menu, it does Y" and leave it at that.
Highlights around a button in a strong obvious color when the button wants to be clicked for progression reasons, or if it unlocked. Think of a blinking red button from the movies - you need to steer the player's movements when your UI is huge.

Your inspiration should be modern releases. They have soulless, but incredibly functional UIs. A player is NEVER getting lost in a modern release's UI, and it's not because they're not complicated. Just make sure to keep the soul!

Reduce submenus and combine them into one as much as possible

I added more submenus because that was the only solution I came up with for decreasing the amount of information displayed at the same time.

Hide the things you have no access to (or heavily gray out the buttons)
Don't give player the ability to edit the UI until you're sure they're ready for it
Yeah, I got some ideas for adding an option for hiding all the yet to be unlocked locations from the office.

Highlights around a button in a strong obvious color when the button wants to be clicked for progression reasons, or if it unlocked. Think of a blinking red button from the movies
I added blinking "!" on some buttons, but I guess that was not enough.

Your inspiration should be modern releases. They have soulless, but incredibly functional UIs.

Yep, my ui is basically homm3 ui if it had text instead of all the nice icons. I might need to add placeholder icons after all.

Thanks for all the tips.