if you're going to ask players to read as a primary verb, you need to be very, very thoughtful about pacing. give them breaks. give them things to fiddle with. i have a working theory that all text-based games are actually interface games.
would love to see a thread of small practical pieces of advice developers just starting out or unfamiliar with a genre might not know!
I’ll start: if you’re using a tag-based system, don’t just give everything an individual tag—look for thematic groups where similar events can lead to same outcome
julie muncy
Cat Manning
Biggest lesson I learned was, snap your floats! Build on a grid. Large floats take up a lot of extra calculations and the results may vary depending on the hardware. This can cause a lot of unpredictable bugs. Things move around or fall out of the world. A lot of indie projects make this mistake.
