Another design question I have is about Under the Spell of Shiny Shimmering Sunbeam Sparkles.
The concept of the game is a bit complicated for some people to understand (although, Mathilda herself, and one other tester, understood almost right away.)
Basically:
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You have a current letter.
You are trying to spell a word, left to right.
To spell the word, you transform your current letter into the next letter in the word.
To transform your current letter, you move it around the board.
Each time you move, the current letter gets added to its neighbour to come up with the new current letter. If that matches the next letter in the word you're spelling, you get that letter and move on to the next letter.
The adding mechanic is, the alphabet has a number code (A = 1, B = 2, C = 3, etc.) and the two letters' point values get added together. E.g. B + C = E because 2 + 3 = 5.
It wraps around, with Z = 26 = 0. So Y + C = B because 25 + 3 = 28, and 28 - 26 = 2. (Go 3 letters past Y: Z, A, B.)
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For some people this is easier to grasp than others. My current challenge is finding a succinct way to convey all this to folks for whom this is more difficult to understand.
I don't find my current way satisfactory. On the Easy Peasy difficulty, you get a tutorial, but it plays out on every move, making the game very slow to play. On Normal, it plays out a bit too fast to be instructive, perhaps, and still slows you down once you get it. Above Normal, it's fast enough to play but then for added challenge I've removed the numbers from the tokens, so unless you already really understand it well already, it just seems random.
The tutorial you get looks like this:
The announcer announces the word, and points out which letter it starts with.
Mathilda wonders, "How can I get there from the letter $CURRENTLETTER?"
OK, so far so good, it should be intuitive that you are trying to get from $CURRENTLETTER to whatever the word starts with, IMO.
The slow part is when you move (this example shows adding past Z, with the wraparound) (you can't hear it, but when the smaller letter goes up into a cloud, there's the sound of bees; as each point goes to the result, Mathilda is counting out loud):
It really spells it out for you, pardon the pun, but for most people who saw it, they still don't understand the mechanic until at least 3-4 moves in. I guess it doesn't spell it out for you very well, then.
So first of all, I want to make the tutorial easy to switch on and off no matter the difficulty level.
But the real thing is the tutorial. I had an idea for it, to make the alphabet appear on screen, centred on the current letter. The letter being added would then form a chunk of alphabet (say if you were adding E, the chunk ABCDE would appear) above the full alphabet, so A would be above the current letter, and then E, which we're adding, would be above the result, i.e. what you current letter will become.
This should make it much faster to grasp, I would think. It gets rid of the smaller-vs-bigger thing (which for very manual addition calculations--for kids learning to add, too--does make it so you don't have to count as high) but maybe the trade-off is worth it and maybe the small-vs-big thing is a confusing stepping stone rather than an instructive one, the way I've presented it and in the context of a few other things you're needing to grasp here to play the game.
I have maybe an even better idea, though, and one that better incorporates the wrap-around mod function we have going on here; the smaller-vs-bigger thing is still lost for better or worse: Instead of the alphabet in a row, it's in a circle: the current letter would have the alphabet all around it, with the current letter at 12 o'clock. Then the letter being added has an arc of the alphabet, from A (at 12 o'clock) to whatever letter it is. The arc then moves over to superimpose on the current letter's wheel, and you can see what the result will be.
This I think would make a much clearer visual than we currently have. What do you think? I'm open to other tutorial visuals if anyone has any ideas.
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