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The Shindig: Day 9 - Feedback

· 4 min read
beho

As part of the PiCoSteveMo game jam I'm building a deck builder game where you host a great party.

The last time (see day 8) I worked on adding animation for a title screen and importantly a game over screen.

I was lucky enough to have some friendly strangers from the internet play test the game. Today I'd like to act on that feedback - the game is "within tweaking distance of fun" - so let's get tweaking.

2025-11-22 1000 Gameplay​

A few bugs were unearthed and there are a few places where we can make the game more intuitive. I also learned that some of the concepts are not clear when you first start playing. I want to find some ways to help the player discover the gameplay without directly telling them.

Since the first three characters on the planning screen each contribute to fun, cash and spookiness, perhaps I can add an explanation to their flavour text. Adding the symbol next to the word it describes might make it clear what the corresponding symbol (e.g. fun = a musical note) means.

explanation showing that the hotel guest character adds one fun to the party

I've also added some features like:

  • highlighting when you hover over or try to buy something you can't afford;
  • when you make a purchase or gain currency the price change is now animated.

This will help establish to the player which number is their balance and which number is the card cost. Which is nice because this way I am not explicitly telling the player what to do or how to play.

1230 Sound effects​

I accidentally made my game ring like a telephone by printing \7f instead of \f7 (I was trying to change the text colour) during the draw method.

It turns out you can play audio by printing special character codes. This is a great chance to start adding some audible feedback to the game. I guess I can't listen to music whilst making this bit.

I went for making global variables for each of the sounds to make it easier to understand the intent of these otherwise cryptic print statements.

SuccessSound = "\as6g1c2g2"
SpecialSuccessSound = "\as6g1c2g2c3g3"
PlanningEndSound = "\asax5g0d1g1g1d2g1g2"
ErrorSound = "\as6x1g0g-0"

-- play a sound
print(ErrorSound)

1730 Scarcity​

One of the main dynamics in this game (in all games?) is that the player is pushing against constraints. At first the player doesn't have enough space to throw big parties and they don't have enough money to expand. Eventually becomes something meaningless and you're trying to optimise for fun.

Right now you can just spam-buy your favourite card which makes it not very challenging - so I'd like to introduce a limit on how many of each card you can buy.

I too am struggling with scarcity of screen space for where to put this information - there are already many numbers on the screen. I think the best thing would be to visually represent a stack of cards running out.

a screen showing that the cards for a certain guest are sold out

Now when you start the purchase screen you see 4 cards stacked on top of each other, and the stack get smaller as you buy cards. I'm pleased I finally found a use for colour 10. The pinball text mode is enabled by control code \^p in case you were wondering.

Thanks again for reading. It's starting to feel like something that can be submitted soon (4259 tokens currently).