Care to share your first Impressions?

[RoRoDejobaan]

We just put out a major update and made all three worlds available. We'd love to have folks answer two questions:

1. What was your early impression after playing for 5 minutes?
   
2. What did you think about the game overall, after playing the game for a while?

[spumonkey]

The game looks great! The interface is mostly clear and understandable. My one point of confusion was trying to get to "publish" after "editing". After you edit, there is no obvious path that takes you to publish... I had to exit back the portals (at which point I was convinced that my story was lost, since I suspected that my story would only be saved by publishing it) and then re-entering, and re-selecting my story. Maybe I missed something? Anyway, I would think that a really common path would be to finish a story, then read other's stories (to see what they are like), then edit, then publish. But great work on a bold concept!

[RoRoDejobaan]

Thank you for the feedback! We will take another look at that workflow.

[nairobiny]

I'd agree with spumonkey's comment, although I did somehow manage to bumble through the publish/edit maze.

My first impression is that this is everything I hoped this game was going to be. At first, I found my mind emptying itself at the first prompt. But after a while I found the words beginning to flow. And, while I'll never be a great author, it's cathartic to allow words to just pour out of you. I can't wait to have a go at a more ambitious free-form composition.

[Titania]

So far, this game is incredible. The worlds are beautiful, and the music atmospheric. I have enjoyed the prompts so far! Will there be more provided in future updates?
Possible suggestions:
A random option for going onto a world. Might be nice to have the prompts be a surprise.
and a more advanced story share interface. For example, the ability to comment on someone's story would be huge.
Thank you!!

[.anonymalicious.]

I've only played a little, but I think diverging pathways might be cool. Like, after 4th or 5th prompt there would be a door you could enter, where there would be 8-10 prompts to finish the story, or you could walk past (or go through another door) where there would be 8-10 different prompts.

And maybe some sort of collaborations, like signs taken at random from somebody else's writings you could use or edit into your stories.

Love the backgrounds, like the music and don't mind the slightly clunky movement.

[Nomado-Coyote]

At first my impressions were just nice, like hey nice colours, atmospheric and all the like.
After I played a little and got my first poem done and read some stories I think there's definitely room for improvement and enlargening, but it's still a nice one, it's early but it's already great. Does its job. The atmosphere is creative, the interface is manageable, sound is not distracting. Can't really judge the templates/prompts, I think this kills the creativity in a lot of ways, even though it definitely helps to spark the ideas.

I agree with the previous mentions of improving the editing flow, I'd really like to see the easier editing and publishing, as in fast-forward to the end-node (the planet at the end) and reformatting at the preview probably (I don't really like to teleport around, I'd rather edit the old-fashioned way at one place, working with the text, after when most of the creative work is already done). Also deleting accidentally triggered nodes at all.
What I didn't really like is that the community is often a bit fixated on these cliche-ideas of these deserted/dead worlds, despair and lone-exploration themes. I know that these worlds look abandoned and all that, but I'd also love to see more creativity on the matter :) Hope it will develop.

That also leads to a question of worlds, at this I agree with anonymalicious. I think it's a good idea to broaden worlds, the existing ones too. Obviously we will need more worlds in general. But what is IMO important is that each world could be used very differently, you have different "levels" and "rooms" with different sceneries, as in Shelley's world you have the most changes so far, you have really different backgrounds and you can skip the snowy area or do only snow. The variety matters, and that would make browsing and reading others' stories within one world much more interesting too, because people would be able to incorporate different themes in it.

[Abigail]

I definitely liked it but there were two issues I found.

The first, relatively minor thing was that if I pressed TAB when in typing mode (as the instructions said to), it inserted a closing parenthesis ')' before tabbing to the next blank.

The more serious thing was in viewing stories. I was expecting that the images underneath would be what was on the screen when the player typed that prompt, in other words, the image that accompanied the text when they were playing. Instead, we just saw a glimpse of that through weird circles, hexagons and triangles, which often did not capture what they were even writing about. I strongly recommend always showing the full image.

[Llorenzo]

First impression is that I really have to thank you because I could never have found the will to write if it wasn't for this game. Really. Thank you.

[Philip Marlowe]

The best game a hobbyist writer could ever ask for!

Thank you devs (and backers too)!

[DeerTrivia]

Only thing I'd add, for the moment, is some sort of notification that prompts can be erased. I started a story using the prompts, not realizing that I could actually erase them entirely and write my own stuff, until about halfway through.

[Kinrany]

1. I am a dull technie who can't put two words together :c
2. I hoped for a "writing for non-writers" game, looks like I was wrong. Maybe I'll try playing it again later.

[Starwanderer159]

After going through my first world, I really have to say that this game definitely lives up to my expectations.

The only real problem I have with it right now is the difference between preview and readable versions.

When I previewed the piece I wrote, I could see all the lines I typed, even the more extensive sections, but when I read it from the recent list I found that two adjacent, longer sections got put togethor into one page, cutting off a good deal of the text.

I have a feeling this is just a bug, but it's still pretty noticable.

[Starwanderer159]

In fact, if I had to guess, I would say that the sections get cut after any point that I pressed the 'enter' or 'return' key.

[Akurion]

Played about an hour so far, and I'm really enjoying it. I've done prompt-based writing in the past, but this takes a simple concept -- write a story based on a prompt -- and turns it into something really spectacular.

Something I'd like to see, though: an export option that lets us publish stories outside the game (i.e. on a blog, tumblr, etc). Could be as simple as a text file and images. I'm willing to do the rest.

[Atlas Fishard]

I fell in love the first I spent 4 hours + writing about 75+ prompts in this game ^^,

though the only thing that drags away from the reading experience is the actual charecter moving around reading dropped feather notes (in edit mode)

In preview mode, I don't get as much interested as reading prompts alongside with tiny windows

But in edit mode, I get sound effects, full screen side scroll, action of sitting down, jumping up, moving around, in editing mode it is way more interesting, than just reading the whole of someone's short story page by page with tiny images that you can't really see.

I even planned the position of some of my prompts to go alongside the sound effcts that the charecters hits at various points.


If possible on a future patch note, is it possible to make reader enter and read in *edit mode and not make preview mode the only and default mode accessable to readers?

*(obviously NOT edit anything the writer had written.)