La Pensadera is a narrative strategy game inspired by the experiences of earthquake survivors. You don’t fight monsters, you fight to keep moving forward. Every day brings new challenges: guilt, nostalgia, illness, hunger, loneliness, and painful memories. You won’t be able to deal with everything. You’ll have to choose what to face today and what must wait until tomorrow. Play online at https://slash.itch.io/la-pensadera
Some improvements made over the initial version, based on feedback from the players. The most important change was adding an onboarding sequence to properly teach the players through the game, replacing the rules screen that nobody reads. This is a complex game, made for a jam, players have very little tolerance to learn by force.
These days, I think making a good onboarding (which takes development time) is equally as important as developing interesting features. People will just not get there if you don’t.
I think this particular onboarding ended up great; it had to go through two phases as the first AI pass was too verbose, so the human touch helped really tell the players the things they really need to know (and also helped set the tone for the game, which is a delicate matter).
The other change was spicing up visuals a tiny bit, using background images from the cards, obtained from Wikimedia Commons. I placed them in the background of the cards with some desaturation so that the texts on them are still readable. I also added an attribution blob to properly credit the picture.
The feedback so far has been very positive; peers from the gamejam have highlighted the game mechanics and the onboarding experience.
Slashie's Gamedev Adventures 