Just a leopard from Seattle who sometimes makes games when she remembers to.
Made more progress on the zeroth tutorial for Quoll, but it's definitely beginning to burn me out a little.
The ability for the player to be a gremlin in text adventures is significantly high so even a very on rails tutorial needs some effort.
And I'm so close and want to release but there's so many little things I notice...
That sounds like a big challenge! I wonder if at some point you just need to say, "Okay if the player wants to break the game or heck themselves over this badly maybe I should let them"?
But I haven't made any text adventures so I'm not sure
Of course! There will always be some room for "well that person just dedicated themself to avoiding fun, so whatever". But I think a lot of it comes down to my fond memories where I've been a gremlin player myself and the game at least acknowledged me with a quip, and my desires to do that where possible.
But a lot of this comes down to the very peculiar freedom that players have in the conversation system I'm using. Without intervention of code, they can choose to talk about any subject as well as just end conversations early by saying goodbye or leaving. Not to mention just wasting time doing other allowed actions that don't further the conversation.
These two factors crash head on so I ended up writing a lot of responses with some very cute character interactions just to both keep the player on the intended path as well as acknowledge a sort of appreciation for such a player.
This is especially because the game very clearly and openly talks to the player as player and distinguishes the player from the main character. So if anything the main character getting annoyed at a stalling player helps maintain that divide.
That's a lot to really say that I made it harder on myself for various reasons, lol.
Mm, that makes sense! Now that I understand it's about the acknowledgement of what the player did/tried to do I can easily see why creating a lot of content for that would be important.
Especially in a freeform game like a text adventure having that acknowledgement adds so much to the experience
