[quote=Hanon Ondricek]Just a note - I’ve gone ahead and shut off the code for play-testing Stepchild for new testers. I’ve apparently got a bunch of people wandering around who haven’t provided any feedback, so it’s not worth letting people knock around in there, get lost, stuck, or confused because stuff is not done, then go “this game sucks!”
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So I’m one of the bunch of people who’s been bumbling around and never saying anything, and I feel very rightly chastised by your remark above. So here, for better or worse, are my initial reactions. I should explain that I haven’t managed to leave the castle yet (just because I haven’t got that far, not because I’ve hit a problem) - so I suspect I’m quite early on in the game.
First of all, you’re really pushing the envelope on what you can achieve with StoryNexus, and some of the mechanics you’ve come up with are remarkably clever. I’m thinking of the Time Passing cards, for example, or the way you’ve modelled clothing using equippable items and QLDs. Plus, you’ve got semi-autonomous NPCs! A first for a StoryNexus world I think… and again cleverly done, by leveraging the randomness of the deck and using Must cards to control their movements.
I’m guessing here, but I suspect you’ve drawn inspiration from parser IF (aka text adventures, the likes of Infocom games)? A few of the techniques, like the passage of time and movement of NPCs, feel familiar from that genre. Most strikingly of all, you’ve used that classic model of moving towards the compass points as you navigate round the castle.
The trouble is though… to make all this happen, you’ve had to salt the deck with cards which are fundamentally there for engineering reasons rather than storytelling ones. And because of the way StoryNexus works, these cards are really very visible. So whereas in parser IF, you’d simply see a message stating that the King has arrived, in SN you have a card to say that the King has arrived - and have to click at least twice (“Go” then “Onward”) to get past it.
Likewise with the movement cards. In parser IF, moving east is two keystrokes (E, Return) and takes less than a second. In SN, it’s three mouse clicks, and feels just that little bit more cumbersome. To me (and it’s just my opinion), that was a mild inconvenience at first, but it added up to an irritation after a few dozen actions’ worth of playing.
So what am I saying? I’d maybe take a look at whether the clever bits of engineering are needed throughout the game, or whether you could just save them for special occasions - to maintain their “wow” factor, and avert the risk that they become an annoyance. And perhaps you could streamline the map, representing rooms by cards rather than areas.
That all sounds a little bit negative, but there were things I liked too! I quite literally LOL’d at the point where one of the characters spotted they were repeating themselves, and the interplay among the family in general is very witty. There are a few things already which intrigue me about the scenario, and I was genuinely surprised by… oh, gosh. How to say it without spoiling it? The thing which, when I tried to avoid it, resulted in me being grounded. That’s a nice plot twist and makes me think there’s a thoughtful strand as well as a funny one.
So, I like the concept and I admire the innovation! But just now, the mechanics are a little too intrusive, for me.
All the best
Richard