Okaaaaay.
First of all, I commend your determination to invent complex unorthodox gameplay. It really makes this game special, though may be not apreciated by that many. Yout choice, and you stick to it. It's admirable.
Secondly, you specifically asked for feedback on new dungeon. It LOOKs great! Both visuals and level design. Sadly, can't give a formed opinion.
I was able to find only one solution for one puzzle -
. I stopped exploring when the game freezed upon entering this location:
View attachment 892197
I can see a lot of potential "puzzle solvers" there, so I decided to try again when the bug is fixed. I played version 5.2.
I have a few considerations though:
1) The main idea of the dungeon, as I get, is to design mechanisms and enviroment as close to reality as possible, hence no glowing dots on interactible objects. As of now I can't conclude if it worked for me or not, but the several things I'd like to point out are:
-a lot of people are not very familiar with mechanics and it's theoretical background. It does not help that objects are small and are drawn in unfamiliar steempank style instead of 20th century style. Yeah, I know what junkbox is, I know it purpose and that probably tinkering with it can influence something. But to do that I have to differ it from everithing else (and there is a lot of objects) by visually examinination, otherwise it is "clicking everithing in hope for some reaction", which is not the expected way to puzzle solution, I prezume )
-Moreover: these are two junkboxes from different locations:
At first I found the one on the first screenshot. It is not interactible. From that I devisied that this type of object is not interactible, and skipped every other object with this image, until accidentally clicking the object from second screen, where I found out that it is indeed a junkbox from text description. IMHO, if interactible objects are not highlighted, every object of the object type that is potentially interaclible should be interaclible (i.e. clicking junkbox from first screen should result in text like "this junkbox is totally rusty and damaged beyond repair"), otherwise it is "clicking everithing in hope for some reaction"
- (partly humor) There are a lot of thin pipes there. If Adelina had a wrench, why not unscrew them and use as levers? Spent some time looking for a whench (surely one can't build all this whithout a whench. And we know for sure they have crowbars). Just saying. Point is - the problem of not highlighting interactible objects is an infinite amount of potential solutions that could come into players mind that did you did not think of. And it could be sad that they aren't working
. Finding the one solution that came into someone else's head is not always as easy and fun as it seems.
2) Economics. Till this update there was one type of in-game resource: money. Now there are two: money and mood. Till now mood was just a parameter that represented your ability to make money from bar job. But now it is a resource that could be spent on going to dungeon. That changes the effectivenes per resource income of bar job and newspaper job, and now the balance is completely off.
Say we do only newspaper, we get:
5 copper and 5 mood (rest in evening)
Say we do only bar, we get:
4+ copper and 10 mood (rest morning + day) - from 20 to 35 mood, that makes:
4+ copper and -10 to 25 mood.
Taking to account that 5 mood costs 6 copper (most cost effective bar treat), bar job is just not worth it. IMHO need rebalancing.
3) So far I've seen 4 quests in the game, 3 of them dungeons heavily relying on puzzles and deversification and one article writing quest with no actual gameplay for obtaining information. That rises the question: what will be the main focus of the game - information gathering or enviromental puzzles? IMHO, the problem with puzzle dungeons as you implement them is that they take a lot of time and effort and do not advance the plot much. So if puzzle dingeons are the main focus, then either other aspects will be naturally neglected or game development is going to roughly 10 to 20 years. It's all just some considerations, maybe something to think about and arrive the entirely different conclusion then i did ))
Now, as you might suspect, different people have different interests, so it might come as no surprize that you spent 100+ hours on dungeon, while I found myself more interested in mechanics and details of bar job implementation ). I will address them in another post, though, when thoughts and statistics are fully gathered.
