Super fun concept and can't wait to see how it evolves. Thank you for sharing this!
One thought: The idea of generating a new language is super fun and innovative. But combining having to take physical notes with the loss of saves mechanic might be a step towards frustration rather than difficulty and stakes for a "thinking-heavy" game. Basically, I would love to unravel the language but personally the idea of losing my progress turned me off from the idea.
Thanks for the feedback, it's useful -> I can understand not liking that, I have been wrestling with how to mitigate it in the next version (e.g. adding extra lives for solving puzzles along the way). I do think I underestimated how strong loss-aversion is (and I understand it, the player's time is valuable).
The reason it's there is so that people can't just brute-force puzzles - in the next version especially there'll be a big puzzle with 16+ options, and a text tells you how to pick the right one but with infinite lives a player can just try all of them. Also, if someone can work the language out, the knowledge they use to do that is transferrable from one run to another (e.g. once you know you can work out plurals from comparing the word for birds with the word for the (singular) bird in the water on the animals sketchbook page, you can then easily work out plurality on future runs too), and if you know how to get in the bear's cave you can do it immediately on subsequent runs. But I understand that actually taking physical notes is pretty involved and it makes sense people don't want to lose that effort.
Also I do think the version that's up at the moment is just probably too hard, in that the jump from the first puzzle to the second is very steep. So I'm adding something between them to try and smooth that out.
If you play the next version I'd be very interested to hear if you think it's improved or not, but thanks for the comment and I'll keep thinking about this.
Ah, great! It's nice that someone likes the idea! :) (I know it's quite niche)
Yes, the morphology is randomly generated, within some constraints -> so e.g. plurality and tense can be marked by prefixes/suffixes (or in a couple of other ways), and if it is affix-based then the affixes are picked randomly from the possible high-frequency morphemes it generates (i.e. shortish ones). I would like to make the syntax choose randomly more (e.g. between SVO/SOV/VSO/whatever, and maybe head-initial or head-final structure) but every extra thing makes the code a bit messier, and also until the player's got some nouns to work with it's hard to do much with other classes, so at the moment (in this build) tense isn't really involved/needed to understand things. So I haven't tackled that yet. I do want to do some tense puzzles later on though, definitely 👍👍
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Super fun concept and can't wait to see how it evolves. Thank you for sharing this!
One thought: The idea of generating a new language is super fun and innovative. But combining having to take physical notes with the loss of saves mechanic might be a step towards frustration rather than difficulty and stakes for a "thinking-heavy" game. Basically, I would love to unravel the language but personally the idea of losing my progress turned me off from the idea.
Thanks for the feedback, it's useful -> I can understand not liking that, I have been wrestling with how to mitigate it in the next version (e.g. adding extra lives for solving puzzles along the way). I do think I underestimated how strong loss-aversion is (and I understand it, the player's time is valuable).
The reason it's there is so that people can't just brute-force puzzles - in the next version especially there'll be a big puzzle with 16+ options, and a text tells you how to pick the right one but with infinite lives a player can just try all of them. Also, if someone can work the language out, the knowledge they use to do that is transferrable from one run to another (e.g. once you know you can work out plurals from comparing the word for birds with the word for the (singular) bird in the water on the animals sketchbook page, you can then easily work out plurality on future runs too), and if you know how to get in the bear's cave you can do it immediately on subsequent runs. But I understand that actually taking physical notes is pretty involved and it makes sense people don't want to lose that effort.
Also I do think the version that's up at the moment is just probably too hard, in that the jump from the first puzzle to the second is very steep. So I'm adding something between them to try and smooth that out.
If you play the next version I'd be very interested to hear if you think it's improved or not, but thanks for the comment and I'll keep thinking about this.
Oh wow! This was a concept that I was wondering if people had made into a game. Really cool idea! I will definitely give your game a try.
I was also wondering if the syntax and morphology are procedurally generated as well? Or if not, will you be trying to implement that in the future?
Ah, great! It's nice that someone likes the idea! :) (I know it's quite niche)
Yes, the morphology is randomly generated, within some constraints -> so e.g. plurality and tense can be marked by prefixes/suffixes (or in a couple of other ways), and if it is affix-based then the affixes are picked randomly from the possible high-frequency morphemes it generates (i.e. shortish ones). I would like to make the syntax choose randomly more (e.g. between SVO/SOV/VSO/whatever, and maybe head-initial or head-final structure) but every extra thing makes the code a bit messier, and also until the player's got some nouns to work with it's hard to do much with other classes, so at the moment (in this build) tense isn't really involved/needed to understand things. So I haven't tackled that yet. I do want to do some tense puzzles later on though, definitely 👍👍