What do you think? Does it help to have a hint section in there, or is the temptation too great to resist peaking?
I’m not talking about a full walk through, just a brief guide if there’s not too many variables that will mess with it.
Does it help to have something like:
Ending 1: X person must be alive. Pass when tested which depends on previous actions. Make the choice to do Y thing. (Longer length playthrough)
Ending 2: Fail when tested. Depends on prior actions. (Medium length playthrough)
I’m not sure if it’s vague enough to be annoying, but spoilery enough to ruin the story for people who peak.
If you were to put something like that in, how do you get it to unlock after someone has played at least once?
Well, isn’t that basically what the achievement page is? It’s to chart progress of what you already did and what you haven’t done and usually has some not so subtle hint about how you do it.
Yeees kinda, but from prior experience, it seems as if a fair proportion of COG’s readers on the app stores often assume choice games are pretty linear and either don’t replay or replay in a similar kind of way to get similar endings without realising there are completely different things out there.
Alternative is, is a note to visit the forums if having trouble with the achievements.
Hmmm, I wouldn’t be able to resist peeking, and “person x must be alive” could be kind of spoilery if I checked in the beginning! Maybe if you have a tab that says “For a walkthrough/endings guide, you can visit this address” and have a forum post on it? I’m also not sure if enough people replay (it seems from the poll that a lot of people do though) to justify only having the hints guide appear after the first playthrough?
I think the way I’ll present it is by giving each ending their own achievements, so you get something like Ending 1: The noun verb for time-period (or some other subtle description you like) Ending 2: The noun has finally verb2
If the player finished your game at least one, they can check your achievement page and try to figure out the clue you gave them.
“Huh, the noun has verb2? Is that what I think it is?”
But of course, if the player is not the kind to replay games, they’ll miss quite a lot. Shouldn’t force them to do that, though.
In mine I’ll probably copy what’s his name (no offence I’m super tired) in the amazing game (fyi if you wanna know how hilariously branch-y it is you can go through 3 different paths before even entering the house!)
A little after the game comment on how “Hey you died really early, do you want a) boosted stats b) hints for super cool items/ endings c) tons of lore knowledge”
Or “Hey you finished the game. You can now play with a godmode and guide to doin’ stuff, if you want”
Tl;dr : I advise having an option for it at the end of the game, like a newgame +
I’ve actually got something similar in there like that already (minus the how many endings left there are) Maybe I’ll stick with that.
@fairlyfairfighter that’d work except I try not to write too many good or fail endings where a god mode is of huge help. (I can only think if one out of all of them that a god mode would influence and at the same time make sense to the player).
I agree. Where this came from, was my last game had a number of bad reviews saying it was short and linear. (When it branched quite a bit.) Some even said they’d played a few times and gotten the same ending, which makes me think they were playing towards what they saw was the only goal when there were many others. It was just to help with that and prevent player frustration
Maybe I’ll stick with that.