Hello, progress on Welcome To The Dark Place is nearly at max speed. I've run more playtests since the last post and addressed even more issues--a huge, huge amount of miscellaneous issues and imperfections, like missing sound effects and writing revisions. I'm now beginning to work on new areas and make audios for the ones that still haven't gotten audio treatment. It's hard not to say that the game's development has been revitalized, just in time for the last couple months before release.
I'm receiving a bit of coaching from an old friend of mine over forming good habits for fitness and health (the biggest being a consistent sleep schedule) while for other reasons I've also gotten myself into a habit of reading a little every day--and so it's like accidentally I've found myself in a really good routine which I've never been able to keep before. It is a huge contrast to the rather disorderly state I was in for the last several months. (There are deeper reasons for how I got here, but this is a dev log and not a diary.)
Solving the game's cardinal confusion
Besides working on pure content (which is 99% of what Welcome To The Dark Place is), I did once again get a common feedback from my play-testers, which is that cardinal directions are hard to visualize and memorize. And since I've only just begun to really lock in that muscle memory after having worked on the game for years, I think I can empathize. So far, all I had done was to add a compass rose into the inventory menu for the player to check as they need. But that would require flipping to the inventory over and over, and no one does that.
I first tried radically changing the game's layout by rearranging the text choices to be to the top, left, bottom, and right of each other as if in a compass formation; and if development had only just begun and I had all the time in the world, I think I could make this work in some creative and pretty way. But as it is, English must be read from left to right, and I couldn't fit the more wordy choices onto the screen without some kind of ugly shrinking or wrapping. So the choices have to be listed out from top to bottom like a multiple choice quiz, as they always have.
Another solution was to add a basic or abstract, visual, top-down map like an RPG, which would then transition to text-based gameplay when you encounter anything. I would consider this option nowadays, but I have to remember that part of the reason I chose to make a text-based adventure was because I was so limited in my abilities at the time; even putting together this game's basic interface was a massive challenge for me. So that's why I never went with this option. (Of course I also just think that there would be a temptation to make the map pretty in some way, and yet the more visual stimulus you give to the player, the less they will choose to imagine on their own.)
Then my friend gave me the idea to use the game's diamond selector icon, changing it into an arrow depending on which choice you hovered over. And I think I am pretty happy with this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPDcLszC9CY
Presenting information
There's another, similar issue I've realized, which is sort of unique to this game being both open-world, text-based, and presenting a limited number of choices. It comes from the fact that the player needs to see things that are nearby but which they are not already on top of. From the start, what I decided to do is simply list off what the player character can see in every direction, and this is how the game has been since the start.
I fabricated this example, but it's not far off--in reality things were even worse. A large part of why this happened was because I labored to present a rich, detailed image to the player so they could immerse themselves, using many of the five senses as they teach you in school. But the problem is that when you are presented with such an overload of information at every turn, it just becomes too much. It's too much to ask the player to take in and visualize so many different things at once.
One solution to this issue, which is a little obvious to me now, is to give the player a "Look" option which would present them with this kind of text when they wanted it. This would be like in Zork (one of my main inspirations), in which the text-parser allowed you to type "Look west" or "Look east" as a command but otherwise would give you such wonderful text as "HOUSE." and "CLIFFSIDE." (And there was something about a blank, white screen and a single, capitalized word that gripped my imagination as a kid.) But it's far too late for me to do this now.
So the solution is to only present information that is very important. As a rule of thumb I limit myself generally to allowing the player to see two things from their current position at any given time--but generally, it should be that the player sees whatever they are on top of and one other thing that is only nearby. In writing a book I also learned that one very beautiful or shocking detail can often do the work of five full sentences of sensory description! But this also prevents a lot of decision paralysis.