🎮 ➡ PLAY 'THE DOLDRUMS OF DELIVERY' (WEB)

I don't love text based game but the music was banging!

Damn I did not know about Twine actually pretty cool tool to stand out during a game jam. Unfortunately it's 2:40am here so I couldn't do more than 3 jobs. Feels like the kind of game where you sit down with a piece of paper and start taking notes and drawing maps. I might check it out again tomorrow honestly. Good music and happy birthday to your dad :)

Funny that you used ChatGPT to make a game about robots. Maybe that's what inspired it? :)

I get the idea was to force the player to learn the layout themselves, but there is no way that's happening with the number of different rooms this game has. I even started writing them down on graph paper, but there were just too many. It's a big investment to memorize this many rooms all at once. I think I would have started the player off making deliveries only to level 4, then expanded outwards. That way, you're constantly learning a bit at a time instead of being expected to either memorize (or write down) every room right at the start, or just give up and wander around until you stumble into the correct room. And then once you have everything memorized, the rest of the game is just rotely executing a series of movements. Rolling the two gameplay processes together would have made for a better experience.

The movements could be more intuitive by arranging the buttons on the screen in a diamond pattern. Then I can just click the button that corresponds to the direction I want to go instead of translating from map direction to cardinal direction to dialogue option. The menu-based system adds to the busy-work feeling of navigating the tower. If that was intentional, that's fine. But I'm not a fan.

I think what I mainly I didn't like is that the writing (which I think is the entire point of making a text adventure, so you can spend more time writing and less time programming) doesn't really matter for any game events. In I Require Human Parts, all of the text described game events and rooms with real in-game functionality. It matters that this person has a cyborg heart and not a real one. Here, only a small percentage of the text you're presented actually affects the game. It's not so much a text-based game as a game with text on the side.

Sorry this feedback is all negative, but I hope it was constructive.

@zungryware Don't you *dare* apologize for giving good quality feedback! :laughing:

There is a pretty simple system to the structure of each level: they are all a circle around an elevator room (think your keypad around the [5] key in the center), with two of the up/down connections being in a different spot than the center. Honestly, knowing the system, I myself mostly remembered the vertical routes and simply circled around the target levels without remembering the exact location of my target.

The diamond-pattern navigation is a solid idea that would probably take me half a day make, but it would also make navigation *too* easy given the basic grid of the city levels. I had meant to add something of a simplified visual map (like the one people barely noticed in I Require Human Parts), but I ran out of time with just a day and a half available.

As for the writing, I again agree. I used ChatGPT to give me ideas in bulk for descriptions and dialogue, that I would only need to slightly edit about half the time. But I feel it does create for text that *doesn't really matter* in the end. I was impressed how well ChatGPT keeps to the entire conversation we were having, so it remembered location names from before and some of the world building aspects came from there.For example, I had asked for district ideas based around the theme of each level, and at the end of the day when I asked it to generate things that robots might say during the random encounters, many of them referred to events in those districts.

That said, all that writing is indeed world building more than that it creates active game elements to interact with, which I am generally okay with (a story doesn't *need* to be all plot, either), but it doesn't delve too deep and doesn't make for engaging navigation. The original plan involved more things to do in the city (outside of getting a job at ACE on Level 4 and upgrading firmware at Robotics Research on level 6), and having the random encounters also offer skill check challenges. If only there was time. :smile:

Great feedback, thanks a ton! :heart:

@flaterectomy

The minimap in I Require Human Parts was definitely useful to me, but it is kinda tucked away up there. I can see how people missed it. (I actually had to go back and check because I remembered the game's UI very differently in my head.)

When it comes to creative writing, "text that doesn't really matter" could be ChatGPT's tagline. There's a reason people mostly use it to write cover letters and business emails. It's impressive, given how much better it is than other language models from just one year ago, but we have a ways to go before it can write stuff worth reading.

Didnt expect this but its a super interesting idea, I love the progression and all the ChatGPT writing is a great addition

was a little confusing at first but loved the vibe and the tunes were really great, nice one!

wow, good job, especially I like an idea and audio of your game, good job!

Incredible work!

Fonts and music are coolly chosen - they help to blend into the atmosphere.

Cool game with an interesting interpretation of the gameplay

cool game,,nice design(while I not a fan of reading game) but you have done a good job

I feel like a different font might have helped with readability, I found myself struggling a bit to read longer paragraphs. The vibe and music are really good for a text adventure

Well, this is a rather unusual game. As much as I love the idea of giving player directions without giving a map, you should be careful with the execution. You can enhance navigation with some sort of environmental hints or straight up write room names on direction buttons, like many other text adventures do (e.g. "on your south there's a dining room"). Believe me, it won't defy the point of not having a map, since it won't tell the player what exactly to do. Instead it would allow them to think in terms of rooms, not plain directions, which is far more interesting.

Another thing I noticed is that there's no real reward in the end of delivery. When, after struggling through the level for several minutes, I end up in a right corner of the world, I have two options, that are picked somewhat randomly: I may fail to convince the recipient to take the package (why are they so stubborn, by the way?), so I won't get an exp point and have to do the same thing again without advancing at all, or I may succeed and have another frustrating trip to the upgrade center, because there no option to fast travel there. Why having the option to travel back to the distribution center, but not to the research facility?

Lastly, random encounters seem to have no meaning. If there are more interaction options to unlock later, I'd rather have them greyed out with a clear indication of requirements. This way, I'd have the purpose to enhance my abilities.

As much as I want this game to succeed, right now it only it only succeeds in causing the misery. Which is not bad, if it was intended. Not all games are made for being fun after all. :) From the technical side, the game is good! I like the color palette, styles of buttons and the font choice. Notice signs look just like in real life, I didn't even know you can do such things with Twine. I'd like to play more of this game, but I'm bringing the notepad next time! :D

Thanks for reading my comment. Here's my playthrough, if you'd like to watch it:
https://youtu.be/_ZMwdztWoXk

@yngvarr Thanks so much for the elaborate feedback! You are absolutely correct, navigation is far too difficult the way it is now. Seeing you move move around the city in the video is evidence that I am not properly revealing the simplicity of the city's layout; I really needed that visual map, but simply did not have the time.

> The city map!

The game play loop itself isn't a *fun* one, it's a slog to get around if you're not hyper aware of the layout like I am, and there's a significant chance you fail the delivery and miss out on the XP. In retrospect, a delivery should always give XP whether it's successful or not, and the amount of successful deliveries should have been what unlocks the victory condition rather than leveling up each skill bonus to +3. (The robots being difficult and emotional rather than straightforward and logical was a juxtaposition that amused me.)

Fast travel to the research facility is simply something I never even thought about. The return to the distribution center was kind of a spur-of-the-moment thought at the time. A fast travel option that appears after the player has visited it once might've been a nice touch.

The random encounters are indeed mechanically meaningless, and mostly there to add some life to the city. They were *meant* to be proper obstacles, but again... no time. :sob: I go further into it in this [final thoughts blog post](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/53/the-doldrums-of-delivery/the-doldrums-of-delivery-final-thoughts).

This weekend I successfully coded a small map mechanic to see if I could even do it. I am debating whether I want to work on a post-jam version; I am not sure this game could ever be truly *fun* to play, but on the other hand it'll probably be a good exercise.

Twine outputs HTML/CSS, so with sufficient wrangling you can do some fun visual stuff.

Again, thanks a ton for your thoughts and the video! :heart:

I played for a while and did a few deliveries but it didn't seem to be going anywhere. I thought maybe by levelling up my empathy I'd be able to engage with the little random conversations other robots try to have with you, but that didn't seem to be happening. I found myself just clicking randomly to try and get where I wanted to go, maybe label the buttons with where they'll take you rather than just directions. All that said, the setting and music were very immersive and something could definitely be made of this if you added more of a story.