My First Game.TM

MT_quest
Dear all,

I am very new to coding, and quest, but I am not new to text games. They were an amazing part of my childhood, and I was feeling nostalgic and up for a new challenge, so I looked up how to do this, and now...

This is my first game. It is simply called "Puzzle room"

I would like some simple feedback, just based on what you thought of the puzzle at the heart of it all. This is something I'm very new at too, so any technical issues that I could better resolve would be helpful (if you see something I could have done differently, made easier etc)

Thank you muchly in advance

jaynabonne
I'm checking it out. Which one should we be looking at? (You posted two, which seem similar.)

MT_quest
They are basically the same, but the one that is a slightly larger file size had an error corrected.

jaynabonne
Overall, I think it's a great first attempt at your puzzle. The level of detail is nice (though there are some things mentioned that have no descriptions, like the monitor, keyboard, etc).

A few minor things:
1) When you look at the drawer, it says, "There's a note inside." Given that the drawer is closed and locked, that seems like bit too much author intervention (in other words, the player can't see it).
2) The wording of the computer description gave me the wrong impression initially:
3) There a few misspellings (e.g. "rechtangular")

This tower unit is clearly from before computers became more popular. There are no USB slots, only a button under a long rechtangular opening. You suspect it is an old kind of disc drive.


I think it might just be me, since I've been around long enough to have seen drives large enough to be mistaken for tower computers. But I really did not associate the "it" in "it is an old kind of disc drive" with the rectangular opening. I was reading about the tower. I might just be mental, but I thought it meant the large tower was a disc drive. (Perhaps simply rephrasing it would help: "There are no USB slots, only a button under a long rectangular opening that you suspect it is an old kind of disc drive.")Some other things: there is no indication that the computer is on, so even if I had seen the appearance of "CD drive", I still wouldn't know to "open" the drive, since it didn't appear powered on. Also, it's unclear what I'm supposed to visualize for the CD drive. Is it a slot type (which would match it being an "opening") or a tray type (which would match "rectangular" but not "opening", since it's not open)? I think a good alternative word for opening the CD would be "eject". But more than that, can I assume the button under the try is for opening it? If so, then I would have had that part of the puzzle right away if "push button" had worked - I did try that.

Finally, let's get to the main puzzle - the switches. I did (to my satisfaction) think to turn off the lamp. However, the switch puzzle itself provided no feedback about what was happening. Knowing how it works now, I suspect you wanted people to try each of the 16 different combinations of light switches, hitting the solution switch after each one to see if it worked. I kept looking for some way to get a hint of progress as I went along. And the way you phrased it made me keep looking:

The light above the switch starts to glow. The light is bright, so bright you can't see what number it is. You can only tell becaue of where it is on the wall.


Reading this, I visualized that the light projected on the wall would show me something. So I kept trying "look wall", "look light", etc, assuming there was some clue in the way it projected on the wall. Eventually, I looked at the game code, and I think I see a couple of other potential flaws just from that:

1) You unlock the door when the correct 4-switch combo is entered, regardless of the solution switch being flipped. So you can get out of the room with:
> turn on switch 1
> turn on switch 4
> n
I don't know if that's what you intend.

2) There is no feedback whatsoever that the right combination has been entered, at least until the solution switch is flipped. (That might be less of an issue if the above issue is fixed.)

A final piddly thing: I did not know at first to type "turn on switch x". I tried "flip", "toggle", etc. The problem is that I didn't know it was an off/on switch. It was just a switch. I had no idea what state it was in. Fortunately, when I clicked on "switch 1" in the room description, it had "Switch on", etc. If that's how you want people to find out, that's fine.

Of course, all of this is on person's experience, and you can take from it what you want. Perhaps you're happy with the puzzle being basically trial and error with no feedback and without knowing how the switches work (e.g. the solution switch tests the state of the other four). It is a puzzle after all. I just want to be sure that the level of difficulty is what you think it is.

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