How much puzzle/how much world?


One thing I think is hard to decide for this game is how far it should JUST be the language puzzle, and how far it's worth trying to expand the puzzle so it relies on and is connected to a fun little mini-world. Two competing principle: 

- pure language puzzles can be fun -> the MLAT tasks are enjoyable (at least to start with), and people like crosswords, and both are low tech paper puzzles

- given this is a computer game, it seems a waste to not try to make the gamey bits fun too 

Really at its core this is a language puzzle, and it needs to be (hopefully already is) fun on those terms, but things like the fire system and getting poisoned and curing yourself are enjoyable to just mess around with. What I worry about is that when people start, they just do the messing around, find the texts but don't really absorb/look at them, and when they've seen all the bits there are to see, THEN get confused or frustrated (it's not possible to solve the final big puzzle in this alpha without properly working out quite a lot of language stuff). And that wouldn't happen if they started a crossword, because there'd be no non-crossword fun to be had. So it's possible that there's too much around the decoding puzzle that's the core of the game.

But then for the person who IS up for the puzzle, I think the environmental stuff makes a lot more things possible (in terms of puzzles and ideas..), and so makes the game overall more surprising than a paper puzzle would be, and much more open to development too because new areas can intorduce new elements. 

And in the end the game is for people who might enjoy it, there's nothing I can much do about players who bounce off it once they realise it actually is a language puzzle. It's an incredibly niche proposition anyway, so I'm going to just make it as good as possible and then people can find it or not..

- - - - 

Anyway - got zoom and 60 fps working in new update

Files

Lekta alpha dodgyone.zip 32 MB
Apr 06, 2024

Get Lekta - language puzzle

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