Options you want to have more often and other features and elements you want to see more often in COGs or HGs

I’m not entirely sure if this is on-topic - if other moderators feel there’s a better thread for it please feel free to move it elsewhere :slight_smile:

I understand frustration; it can be hard to hear critique that doesn’t feel like it helps you decide a direction to take.

I would encourage you and others who feel similarly to assess feedback and turn negatives into positives - for example, based on critique I had for one of my projects, if someone says “I didn’t like any of the characters” it’s helpful to look at what’s there in the game with a fresh eye and examine why this might be. You might know what’s going on in a character’s head and be so immersed in it that you forgot to think about how they look from the outside without that knowledge. You might have not given enough scenes to get to know them. You might have introduced them with an off-putting scene. And so on.

Or you might look at it and say “well, other people have really liked the characters and I want an ambiguous tone for this game so I’ll leave it as is”.

What I always recommend for writers of any level of experience is to explore other games from the catalogue and look at how they do things. Figure out what you like and don’t like about them, what you would do differently. If there are games you really like, that drew you in, think about why you like them and what gripped you. I don’t know which games you’ve played and enjoyed, but if you’ve purchased them you can look at their code and see how they’re structured. There are also plenty from Choice of Games, Hosted Games and Heart’s Choice that are free to play.

The other thing I recommend is to look at the CoG design guidelines; they’re not entirely up to date nowadays but much of the guidance is still in practice in “modern” CoG games. Not every CoG or HC game follows these to the letter - many play around with the structures. HG games vary even more widely as they aren’t subject to editorial control or style guides. But again, it’s very useful to know what a lot of other games are doing, examine story structures that have been developed over the years that these games have been being made, and figure out whether you want to follow them or do something entirely different.

There are a lot of resources on the forum including @hustlertwo’s excellent rundown on factors that can help (published) games be more or less popular. And, indeed, playtesters themselves are a massively helpful resource that shouldn’t be discounted. Some feedback isn’t actionable (such as the kind that can be summed up as “I’d rather this was a different game”) but a lot of it is.

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