really enjoyable experience! I liked how the game embraces having painful thoughts directly in the narrative, it makes a cozy game feel more meaningful. And I enjoyed being able to transform those words into something new (and silly)
ambitious and well-polished! it was interesting to use affirmations to clear out negative thinking, and unlock more words that way. great job on the mechanics, art, story, and audio, and showing poems from other players!
Since Josep mentioned wanting constructive criticism in the Discord server, I’m going to drop a couple of my thoughts from my playthrough here:
I was surprised that “haiku” was not defined and that non-haiku format submissions were allowed. I do see the consideration that syllable restrictions might make the game less cozy, but I feel like in that case, it didn’t need to be specifically haiku-themed.
The RNG nature of what words were available to write a haiku with was frustrating to me – I would keep refreshing to try to get the specific versions of the words I wanted. I didn’t mind for the first few haiku, but because I spent so much time on them, I only begrudgingly completed a few more with less time/effort in the later parts of the game. (I don’t know if this is the typical experience playing though HAHA)
Similarly, the RNG nature of what blocks appeared for the word clearing minigame could be a bit frustrating if I couldn’t get the shapes I wanted.
It wasn’t clear to me whether and how the word clearing connected to the haiku word bank.
Thanks for your comment. I would like to acknowledge your points one by one.
Enforcing traditional haiku metrics is something we had in mind but we decided against in the final game. There are different approaches to writing haikus and some favor flexibility on metrics. Since we have the tech already built I just published a quick update where I use visual feedback to relay the traditional 5-7-5 metric adherence (see the before and after images in this update). I will look into boosting or giving some visual indicator to shared haikus that adhere to the metric (or some of the other popular metrics)
This is an issue we are aware of but we do not have a good solution. We wanted to be able to give more words than there is space for. We started with the letter-based pagination but that doesn’t suffice and we decided to choose randomly for now. And this is related to the last point. We wanted specific words to be rewards for solving specific puzzles. We still want to revisit that idea but currently solving puzzles just increases the percentage of non-negative words shown. Solving more puzzles makes haiku writing easier by having more words available. This is a mechanic we decided on to convey the mental block idea while still showing a variety of interesting words.
The puzzle minigame is something that I want to continue working on. I implemented some guardrails to ensure blocks can be placed but we also wanted to introduce some challenge. We want to add more puzzles to ensure the challenge ramps up appropriately. Keep an eye on future updates :)
See comment above. It’s not directly related just yet. Something we want to continue exploring.
Comments
really enjoyable experience! I liked how the game embraces having painful thoughts directly in the narrative, it makes a cozy game feel more meaningful. And I enjoyed being able to transform those words into something new (and silly)
I’m so glad you enjoy it! Thanks for playing!
Very cute game! At first, I didn't know how to play the tile puzzle, but I eventually figured it out and it was fun clearing them.
Thank you for playing! Do you think a tutorial on the first time playing would help with that? Or was figuring it out on your own satisfying?
I think a note to tell the player to drag the word to the spot could help, but I find that figuring things out is also part of the experience!
That’s good to know. Thanks!
ambitious and well-polished! it was interesting to use affirmations to clear out negative thinking, and unlock more words that way. great job on the mechanics, art, story, and audio, and showing poems from other players!
Thank you for playing! I’m so glad you enjoyed all the elements of the game. It was so fun to make.
what a lovely and meditative experience… really liked the 2.5D style and how the mechanics show the power of reframing words
Thank you for playing! I’m glad you enjoyed it. :)
Since Josep mentioned wanting constructive criticism in the Discord server, I’m going to drop a couple of my thoughts from my playthrough here:
Thanks for your comment. I would like to acknowledge your points one by one.
Cute art and lovely music! I enjoyed reading other players haikus as well, that's cool!
Thank you for playing!