Diagetic Instruction

[Warr1024]

The need for instructions and hints in the CDB listing and in-game inventory screens is sub-optimal. It would be nicer to work these into the game itself somehow. The less external instruction the player needs to access to play, the more accessible the game will be to new players.

Here is basically a dump of my brainstorming on the matter. This is not necessarily exhaustive, and not all of this would necessarily be useful, especially in early iterations.

Information that players may need to know but can't currently tell without the instructions:

• Their initial general goal is to explore this ruin and hunt for items (treasure).
• There are 4 stones to find.
  • The first stone is obvious-ish to players with strong exploration instincts (look for something high up and central) but it may be worth leading them toward it at first.
  • The forward stone is pretty obvious, no guidance needed.
  • The destroying stone is pretty obvious once you've gotten the backward stone, since you can see a conspicuous spire standing by itself.
  • The unbarring stone was completely non-obvious to me that I even needed it. If we had a way to indicate to the player at least that their collection of stones was not complete until they had 4 (a pouch for stones with 4 slots, as a sort of Checkov's Gun) it would help them keep searching.
• There are 7 treasures they want to find.
  • Players need some way to know when they can stop searching. This doesn't necessarily need to be given up-front on the first play-through, though; you could simply show the treasures they've found in an end game "credits" screen and make it obvious there are 7 slots, and then they'll know for their second play-through.
  • The fact that the treasures are "bonus" items and don't serve a game purpose might be useful information; perhaps keeping them separate in inventory and not allowing players to "use" them would be enough?
• There are 4 plants to find.
  • The small acorn is pretty obvious and hard to miss if you talk to the ghost in the first era.
  • The large acorn is not hard to find if you notice the second tree and wonder where it came from.
  • The vine sprout was very hard to notice, blending in with the grass, and even the fully grown plant is rather inconspicuous (I somehow made my way to the first stone without using the vine on my first play through, so I didn't notice this plant even existed).
  • Similarly, the bamboo sprout was not as obvious to me, however I also managed to solve all the problems in the game without actually using this, so...
• The final quest.
  • I think the ghost does a pretty good job with exposition for this itself.
  • Talking to the ghost in each era was a pretty obvious thing I was naturally motivated to do, so I got all the clues.
  • However, the fact that there were 2 ghosts in one era was not obvious to me, so I might have missed one had I been being more methodical.
    • I haven't actually checked to make sure you can never see both at the same time...

Some obvious-to-me things that could be done include:

• Tell the player the "backstory" as they are physically traversing the "prologue" area, in a series of HUD messages.
  • However, a drawback to this is a lack of obvious replayability in case they miss something.
• Put a more player-character-centric story of some kind into the inventory screen, like a letter addressed to the player character: "I hear you have decided to explore that old ruin and cannot be dissuaded ... well, here is all we know about it..."
• Art in the area itself, such as murals or sculptures depicting stones of power, treasures, or plants, telling some prophecy or listing what exists to find.
• Note or other clue items found, such as those dropped by past explorers (like in Piranesi), that can be examined by players. The original Piranesi clues could only be read where they were found; the ability to pick up and carry them was added later; either option could be made to work here.

Some information, like the fact that there will be 4 plants that will aid the player, will not be easy to work into a backstory (presumably those plants just happened upon the area and wouldn't be known). The fact that there are 4 stones might also be a bit tricky (I get the sense that at some time there may have been many, but most were lost, since the set seems incomplete/imbalanced for general use).

[Irevol]

These ideas are helpful, thanks. I especially like the idea of murals.
Maybe there's some way to partition the hotbar into 2 4-slot spaces (1 for stones and 1 for plants), and then move a stone/plant to the correct area when you pick it up.
Some sort of prophecy could be used to work in information: it could have been foretold that an explorer would use 4 plants to free the ghost.

[Irevol]

I added a letter that the player starts with. It might be temporary but at least it's something.

[Wuzzy2]

Here's my take on it:

I think it's actually OK the game does not start with a backstory. The story slowly pieces itself together thanks to the ghost. Not knowing what the citadel is or where you ended up is part of the mystery an I think it's actually good as-is.

The exploring aspect is natural. You encounter a strange ruin, of course your first player instinct is to explore it all. Doesn't need instruction IMO.

As for the 7 artifacts: I think something special should happen if you got all 7 of them. Maybe unlock a new secret dialog, a new sidestory, or just do something. The idea is to give a small nod to the player for finding all them, even if it's just symbolic. This just feels much better than just nothing happening at all. Also, maybe tell the player that 7 artifacts exist when the first one was found.

I completely agree that the "inventory instructions" are bad. They should be completely replaced my making these things discoverable by another thing. Ideally, the game would be playable without any external instructions.

[Wuzzy2]

The exploring aspect is natural. You encounter a strange ruin, of course your first player instinct is to explore it all. Doesn't need instruction IMO.

Nevermind, I just read the new letter, and actually I like it. Explains things while not spoiling! 👍

[EGYT5453]

Could have benefited from a higher resolution though. Here is how it looks on 1080p screen, without scaling:

[Warr1024]

I like Wuzzy's idea of having a 100% completion game give a different ending. I think this could easily enough be done with an alternative piece of dialog for the ghost at the end.

[Warr1024]

Maybe there's some way to partition the hotbar into 2 4-slot spaces (1 for stones and 1 for plants) ...

I don't know of a way to do this that doesn't cause issues (e.g. drawing a custom hotbar but then breaking slot selection on Android) but I don't think it's strictly necessary to have a visual separator between them. Just having 8 slots, each of which corresponds to a known item, should be a big enough improvement.

... and then move a stone/plant to the correct area when you pick it up.

Rather than player:get_inventory():add_item("main", item) you would just player:get_inventory():set_item("main", itemslot, item) and assign each item a slot.

This also mitigates problems with duplicate items. Even if a duplicate exists for some reason, picking it up again won't have any effect as it just replaces the existing one with an identical item.

I could have sworn I was playing around with this in a branch somewhere but I must not have finished it...