Zoltan's Curse
This is a game where it's up to you to decide how much of the story is enough.
You highlight words in dialogue by clicking and dragging, which gets you cards. Then, you use those cards to uncover a part of the story.
Any feedback, good or bad is appreciated. This game is a test for the viability of a totally different way of gathering clues.
Note: Try playing it on a Chrome or Firefox browser, if you cannot play the game. This is due to some issues with Godot exporting to web, so some browsers are unable to run the game.
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I love this concept and art direction!
As far as gathering clues goes, I think it would be more effective to flip the shadow's replies from "I don't understand what you mean" or "You're not making sense" (odd if I'm giving them back their own words) into something like "You only repeat words without understanding their meaning" and "That's not what this is about". I think it would make the shadow's story feel more like a puzzle the player needs to interact with and decipher to earn another glimpse and earn their next piece of the puzzle in the family's story. The way it is now they seem more confused than cryptic.
Also I think organic hints would be useful (though this is harder to implement) - If I've failed to highlight a key word in a previous passage and continue to focus on useless words, could they reply to a useless word back with that not-fully-utilized passage? Maybe not every time, that would make it too easy, but after two or three misses in a row? Like "It's not about [useless word], you don't follow. [repeat previously unlocked passage with unhighlighted key words]"
I can't wait to see where this concept goes!
Thank you for the kind words and I really liked your suggestions, especially the shadows default response one! I agree that we will need to implement some ways to introduce organic hints into the game or a way to show that a piece of dialogue is important to the story without having the player experienced spoiled. That will definitely be a challenge going further.
Great concept, and definitely has an enjoyable core to it. But number of cards can get overwhelming quickly; so maybe needs a mechanic of automatically destroying useless cards when they are used to avoid inventory clutter
Thank you for your feedback! Yes, definitely that is something we need to address. There were different problems when we limited hand size vs when we didn’t. Hopefully, we’ll find an elegant solution to it.