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kasdf191 days ago(+4)

this is a great mood! I especially enjoyed the music as I kept experimenting with the poems — and I mean experimenting literally, not trying to solve the puzzles. I did not find the puzzle aspect very interesting, as it felt like pure guesswork, so I resorted to the walkthrough to progress.

that said, there’s real beauty to this concept. I really enjoyed it when I stopped trying to guess which words the game wanted me to click — instead, I just played around with the words, seeing what I could come up with. that’s real art, held back by widespread ideas of “what a game should be”. (I have some gripes with the mechanical implementation of things, but I’ll spare you the nitpicking details for now.)

also, I love the meta-level itch page stuff, that’s ██████!

4a_maker_crop.png

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asterythm191 days ago (9 edits) (+2)

Hey -- wow, thank you so much for this thoughtful comment!

I know my reply here turned out to be suuuper wordy, but even if it feels like nbd to you this legitimately marks twice now you've saved us on this game and I just want to express my gratitude:

Throughout the course of the jam so far we've gotten a lot of feedback reaffirming what we suspected on submission -- that the puzzles are, sadly, kind of unsolvable at the moment without a better/more responsive way to guide the player to the goal. But at least for me, reading you talk about how you had the most fun when you could just relax and create something your own rather than trying to find a pie-in-the-sky solution suddenly made a major light go off.

I've been trying to figure out how to fit a subjective peg into an objective hole, but the joy of this game concept and about blackout poetry in general was never about finding a set solution, but about turning something set and static into something unique and unexpected. I got so much more excited seeing you post your own creative take than I have at any point watching someone stumble blindly into the arbitrary correct solution after trying a bunch of other beautiful combinations that totally should have worked. This is how the game was meant to be played, and this is what was exciting about it before it was distilled with the perceived need to make it "gamier". We don't need to set up guardrails shepherding the player along an arbitrary path; we need to move the goalposts entirely. What exactly that'll entail, I'm still not sure, but it's a really important distinction that I really hope we can find a way to follow through on now that it's been clarified.

Anyway, suffice it to say: love your poem so much. If you're willing to share, I'd also be very interested in hearing your mechanical nitpicks, just in case we do find it in us to keep polishing this game until we can get it to that full-potential dreamstate. ███ ███!

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kasdf190 days ago(+2)

sure!

  • holding down the mouse button and dragging over multiple words didn’t work as I expected it to. let’s take “a █ c” as an example: dragging from a to c should result in “█ █ █”, not “█ b █”. what I mean is that when dragging to toggle multiple words, the state of a word should only be toggled if it matches the state of the first pressed word.

  • it’d be nice if hovering the mouse cursor over ████ would make the underlying word visible, like white text over the black ████.

  • punctuation is a bit weird to work with. I found myself thinking it should be separate from the word when inking, because I felt like it restricted how I could use the words — but maybe that’s an interesting restriction? limitations like that are not necessarily bad. I’m really not sure about this one tbh.

  • some parts of the poems don’t seem to be “designed” in a way that’s meant to be experimented with. this is hard to convey, but as an example there’s this part “survive and live endure and greet” where I wanted to use “live” and “endure”, but there’s no “and” or comma to support this. I encountered this situation a lot, where I was just missing a little word or some punctuation to make a nice phrase. I think this could be improved by putting more thought into how the poems are arranged, and considering how they could be remixed instead of just setting up puzzles.

  • the options should be accessible while playing.

  • the music shouldn’t restart when I press “options” or “start game” from the main menu.

  • something went wrong with the encoding for the apostrophe in “heart’s”: image.png

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asterythm190 days ago (2 edits) (+1)

All noted!! This is super helpful, you rock.

Actually, it's nice to see that (as you can probably guess, which is presumably why they were left out of your original comment to begin with!) almost all of these were points we'd considered but ran out of time to properly implement/fix -- that tells me at least our instincts had us on the right track, which is always a boon. 

Unrelated... I keep psyching myself up to play I, The Void next and then you go and leave such thoughtful comments that I'm like, how can any feedback I offer on yours live up?! Lmao. Don't worry, I won't let that totally scare me off from playing: It'll definitely happen (promise)... and I'll try to keep it from being novel-length when it does (buuuut no promises there)!

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kasdf190 days ago

it’s a silly little Asteroids-clone, I’m really not expecting anything in terms of feedback lol

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fantazychai190 days ago(+2)

Thank you for your INCREDIBLE feedback you are continuously saving our newbie butts :,) I know there’s a more lengthy response I am beyond eager to analyze and jot down notes for, but for now I just want to say I am SO obsessed over the original blackout poem you created!! (I was the writer for that level and am definitely still learning how to balance the hats of puzzle designer and poet at the same time :,) )  I was really hoping to get to see people creating their own stuff in addition to the puzzles and am so so so thrilled you did!! Thank you so much for playing and helping us during our export ordeal !!!!

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