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I'll leave feedback soon. Unfortunately there is a time to work on systems and a time to work on formatting and polish. Systems is BEFORE your game gets media attention. Nookrium played your game and that's how I found it. It is possible that Nookriums video will snowball into others - and this is the time to give everything a personality. You can do more systems work afterwards, maybe make a roadmap and have it pop up to a player after Year 1?

Do you have a design degree? People aren't going to be able to give too much feedback on UI consistency and Claude is weak at it (strong if you can point it out, but you can't just "Do a UI/UX pass, note inconsistencies" Claude isn't going to be great there, none of the AI are. They are great at making good visuals, but they are NOT great at making things consistent, and Claude is a little safe and middle of the road with text unless given substantial direction.

I'm happy to talk shop in Discord if you're down, give me a google to see where I've worked. Note: I am working on a 'similar' title to this with a very different theme. 

Heavily AI created game on itch. You're using the default AI fonts, the default AI text emphasis, the default AI coding structures, the works. And it looks great! You should be proud of coming up with such a solid concept, and doing the AI wrangling to get it to work.

Claude is truly a beast.

Thanks for your video - it's how I found it myself :)

Also, I attempted to open a dice sheet to look at it and got the following:

___________________________________________

############################################################################################

ERROR in action number 1

of  Step Event0 for object button_display_char_sheet:

Unable to find any instance for object index '328' name 'seed_parent'

at gml_Object_button_display_char_sheet_Step_0

############################################################################################

gml_Object_button_display_char_sheet_Step_0 (line -1)

Hmmmm, interesting, it seems like Coffee is just sometimes not working, even on dice sides it's worked on previously.

Camel can't be impacted by coffee? (Only played once)

Exposed doesn't seem to apply correctly (I applied exposed via cat, then hit for 13 via red ant, still took 13) - possible a weird scorpion + crystal interaction (hit did zero, but status was still applied via cat)

Resetting evolution isn't clearing things in the back end properly, causing the application to slow to a crawl after checking just a few options. (Enjoying the game so far)

I found some weird things happening when I would accidentally stop having it full screen, some cards would not be able to be highlighted even if I returned to full screen, so I had to play the rest of the run in windowed mode.

Score = 16 011 164 209 784

Just a little under the GDP of China.

Unsure how I'm getting 0 here. The Min DGT = 4? So therefore for scale the corresponding symbol value is 4?

So it should be adding 4096 x 5 = 20,480? 

Really enjoying the game.

Hey Fabian, would you be comfortable if I worked on a spin off of this as a web game? Would be using news articles rather than wikipedia, and I would make some other changes to the formula.

Bug Report. Sometimes when you return a folder it will become unclickable. Additionally you should warn on going back to the menu that there is no saving and this will end your run - I wanted to go back out to the menu and go back in to see if it fixed it.

I think you misunderstand. I'm not saying base your distribution on how often these words appear, but use that as a dictionary to run your tile improvement method against.

So instead of "The new tile rarities are based on an analysis of the in-game dictionary, weighted based on source word length with a bias curving towards 7 letter words."

It would be "The new tile rarities are based on an analysis of the most used words dictionary, weighted based on source word length with a bias curving towards 7 letter words."

edit: if you do this, delete any one or two letter words in that dictionary, there is a lot of slang and bullshit there that should be removed before running an analysis.

Also, just checking you 100% have the rights to use the dictionary you're using, because hint found a unique word that isn't in oxford or scrabble dictionaries (I googled it because I'd never heard it before). ooecia - cool word, tonnes of vowels, but not in just about any dictionary used for games. (Some dictionaries include unique words to their dictionary to test if people use it without proper authorization)

There are definitely a few ways to approach this. If you want to keep it as is, just a message displayed when the hint button fails but detects 1 or more wildcards 'hint cannot use wildcards'

I don't know what sort and search method you are using for hints, but several methods come to mind to do a search that only use a fraction of the dictionary.

Also would love to talk Kickstarter/Steam/Publishing with you if you are interested in that route. You can find me on discord under the same name.

Almost got an entire grid of wildcards. 

Hint does not work if your only vowels come in the form of wildcards (suspect the same if they are only consonants)

https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/rtatman/english-word-frequency is also a good reference

Also, I had no idea the other colour of tiles were worth more. You said I could hover over them, but when I hovered over the silver and gold tiles nothing came up so I had no idea.

I'm not suggesting you implement this, as I have no idea what your underlying goal is around difficulty. But you could weight the generation of new tiles less towards vowels or consonants depending on how many of those are already present on the board. I too get boards full of I's very frequently.