Play-Testing: Asylum

StoryNexus
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The Road of Needles and the Road of Pins wind through the world. Traverse them, and you can get anywhere. Of course, safety doesn’t always seem to be anywhere.

The first installment of the game is now available for play-testing. It is fairly short, but should give a fairly good idea of what the atmosphere and style of future installments will be, barring major revision. I have been working through it on my own, but it is entirely likely that there are terrible, gaping errors in it still. As such, feedback would be greatly appreciated.

You can play it here.

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[quote=Dearheart]The Road of Needles and the Road of Pins wind through the world. Traverse them, and you can get anywhere. Of course, safety doesn’t always seem to be anywhere.

The first installment of the game is now available for play-testing. It is fairly short, but should give a fairly good idea of what the atmosphere and style of future installments will be, barring major revision. I have been working through it on my own, but it is entirely likely that there are terrible, gaping errors in it still. As such, feedback would be greatly appreciated.

You can play it here.[/quote]

I confess I’m torn between restarting and keeping the same character, now that I’m done; restarting feels like leaving the game to me, so I’m often reluctant to do it, but that’s my particular hang-up. I’ll probably go through it again at least once, since it was so quick to get through and since I very much want to see the Road of Needles, but that will be when I’m not almost-late for work.

Lovely writing; I spotted a couple of missing words, but that was it, and even they weren’t very jarring.[1] The flavour text on missing fingernails struck me as particularly quietly-unsettling, and I laughed a little when I found out I didn’t have shoes either.

I was up to 20 in each Menace by the time I ran into James and Hel after I’d been on the road (and as an aside, found the consideration of pronouns lovely), and was beginning to wonder if that was going to go in any particular direction; will play through more before I can solidly speak to how the steady and undifferentiated menace rise made me feel.

Overall, would very much like to see more. :)

Love and coffee,
Frances

[1] On “The Dream”, “You’re chasing them, the a long-haired figure” - remove “a”? On “Drastic Measures” -> “Jump out the window.”, “It’s not like you anything you need to bring with you in any case.” - add “have” or “can think of” or something? On “Choose Your Path”, is there a " missing after “all due speed.”?

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Trippy~

Needles and pins. I wonder if I should have The Path OST playing while I read this. Whistles Needles it is.

In ‘Rifle Through Your Pockets’, the image for ‘Activate a Talisman…’ isn’t displayed for me. I think you’ve got the name backwards - it should be ‘compassroseinverse’ not ‘inversecompassrose’.

There’s an odd result from ‘Stay the Falling’ (and several other cards, I later realise) - I gain Temerarious twice, apparently once for the challenge and once for the success. This is intentional?

While it is a beautiful experience, it just clicked with me that I’m going nowhere until I grind myself enough Tincture or Talismans to trade for either Shoes or Wings. I’ve got one of each and, to be honest, I’m already bored. I /am/ interested to see if letting my menaces rise high enough does something bad to me but Falling and Bruised are over 15 each and nothing has happened yet.

I do wonder if I couldn’t meet James and Hel again as the paths cross, or maybe there might be other people on the path of needles? People like Margo?

As a personal thing, I do love to see a range of non-binary and non-cis characters. And of course fairies would be non-binary. I imagine that will come up next time I play Changeling.
edited by lily on 9/21/2012

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Thank you both for your help!

Things fixed thus far:

Typos in ‘The Dream’, ‘Drastic Measures’, and ‘Choose Your Path’.
Menace reduction and item conversion re-balancing for the Road of Needles. (It should be better now, but specific feedback for this would be good.)
The very confused compass rose in ‘Rifle Through Your Pockets’.

Things I’m planning to fix:

In the Road of Needles, converting the Rifle Through Your Pockets card into individual Usable Item storylets.
Menace re-balancing for the Road of Pins.

Things I’m not entirely sure how to fix but would love suggestions for:

In the Road of Needles, cards that test a quality and give that quality as a reward seem to give a certain amount based on how high the quality in question is in addition to the amount specified. I’ve set up the level requirements with this in mind, but is there a way to stop this from happening/at least get the messages to display together?
In view of the fact that there are currently several game_end_effects, all at about the same point, how would be the best way to add future installments? Should they be replaced with ‘that’s all for now’ storylets so that a character doesn’t have to restart in the future, kept as they are so you can try different branches now, or a combination of the two?

Again, thanks in abundance for your assistance, and I hope you’ve enjoyed the experience. :)

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I rather enjoyed this and chose The Path of Needles and probably will again simply because I went on my own without waiting for the other two people and didn’t Rifle through my pockets once… Then go back again for the other path.

I personally can’t help you with the quality increases, you used pyramid numbering correct? I am worried about using that because my math skills are almost non-existent…haha. However, as for the abundance of game_end_effect, I can recommend that you create a storylet with a branch that gives the game_end_effect as a result (it is listed under more options in the qualities affected box, just be sure to warn your players they will lose their characters) and another that clears all the qualities you don’t want them to have a high amount of or that unlock branches while giving them a quality that is the gateway to beginning a storylet. I did this in my game in the signature below if you wanted to see it in action.

Also, did you keep the “a Stranger” quality around for a particular reason or just didn’t think to get rid of it? It seems weird to have it sticking around to me, is all.
edited by Kitsune on 9/22/2012

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Now that we’ve turned monetization on, worlds like this one that have playtesting threads can request if they’re ready.

You can work out whether a world is ready for monetizing here:

http://bit.ly/SNHowToLetPeopleSpendMoneyOnYourWorld