My first playthroughs

[BrendonChung]

I played for a while - a couple hours or so. Here's the notes I jotted down during my playthroughs:First playthrough- The art style and audio effects (i.e. musical dialogue) are great. Absolutely charming.- It would be helpful to have a tooltip for the health/hunger meters. It took me a while to realize I was looking at a stomach.- I walked around gathering as much food as I could, because the spooky tophat guy mentioned I should. Then night came and monsters ate me.Second playthrough- My goal for this playthrough was to make a fire in preparation for the nighttime monsters. I realized I could achieve this via the left-hand craftables menu.- It would be helpful to have tooltips for the craftable ingredients. I wanted to make a campfire but wasn't specifically sure what the ingredient icons represented; I assumed it was a log.- I ran around gathering grass and looking for logs. I couldn't find any logs.- When nighttime arrived, I settled for making a torch. It took a while of standing in the darkness before I figured out I needed to put the torch in my equipment slot. I had assumed that making a torch would instantly create a bubble of light around me.- When my torch fizzled out, monsters ate me.Third playthrough- Torches didn't work out for me so I focused on the campfire. I put two and two together and reasoned logs are probably obtainable from trees. To chop a tree, I needed an axe.- I made an axe and obtained my logs. When nighttime arrived, I made a campfire. Yes!- The campfire fizzled out. I had no more logs in my inventory, so I was eaten by monsters.- When crafting an item, I found it disorienting that my mouse cursor was replaced with the crafted item (in this case, the axe). I found it disorienting in how quietly and subtly it happens. I guess I expected to see a new item appear in my inventory or equipped slot, or for my eye to be drawn toward some sort of fanfare animation somewhere.Fourth playthrough- I made it my goal to get a lot of logs so I could survive the night. I went on a logging expedition and gathered 11 logs.- My guy seems to have pathing problems around rocks/large objects - he gets stuck on them.- During one night I noticed a bug where the campfire sprite appeared completely black if I stood at a certain spot on the ground.- It was difficult to discern between dark-colored grass and the black water.- The spooky tophat guy led me to believe that there was a plot or objective I needed to discover - I assumed his mysterious behavior and my mysterious origin were mysteries I was meant to uncover. I figured following the stone pathway might lead me to whatever that might be, but I ended up in a waterlocked dead end.- I followed a little spider and was delighted to see it return home to its disgusting cocoon nest.- I wandered around for a few days & nights before dying of starvation.I like how the game mechanics are discovered and I like the role-playing aspect of wilderness survival. It was satisfying to figure out I needed to make an axe to get the log to make the fire.Once I did that, however, the game became a cycle of "gather food/fire stuff during the day, and throw logs into the fire to survive nights." I couldn't figure out what the goal was, what to head toward/build toward to, or if there was a goal. I guess I knew how to survive, but didn't know why I should survive. After a few days of wandering around, I figured my self-imposed goal would be to just explore the map.I do think these types of games generate the most interesting player stories, so I'm definitely looking forward to what you all have next in store.

[Kevin]

Hi Brendon!Sorry for the delay in getting back to you - the forum kept your post in moderation and I didn't notice it until now. I'm not a huge PHPBB fan right now.Thanks very much for your feedback! You bring up a lot of good points about the UI. We've started to address some of them, although I'm still not super satisfied with our crafting interface - especially considering that the number of craftable items is only going to ever increase.We've actually gone back and forth a bit on the overall goal thing. At one point we had actual explicit goals that were the way to 'win' the instance. We've done away with that in favour of a more persistent sandbox model, and I think it plays better now. I would like the player to be self-driven, but we are still discovering ways to nudge them in the direction of fun. I hope that some of the longer-term crafting goals and mystery spots on the map will help. -Kevin( PS- Atom Zombie Smasher was awesome! I loved its commitment to tone. )