There's a lot of good feedback in here, I'll have a lot to update in my notes. Continuing development is sporadic (it's a hobby project, I work on it when I have time) but it's still continuing.
The intended way of playing is without spoilers...
To clarify, the intended way of playing is to try to play without spoilers as far as you can, but players should feel okay with seeking them out once they've reached their limit. Every player will have different limits, what everyone finds difficult vs intuitive is different, and the game is not intended to purposefully exclude players who run into some arbitrary obstacle.
For the time being, I'm working on making the documentation more clear about help resources. Right now, the best guidance I can offer is to ask the community for help if you get stuck. Most of the guidance that's included in the game itself is based on what's actually frequently asked, and getting that kind of feedback is really the only way to know what players commonly have difficulty with.
...the (unofficial) game wiki is no help...
Some volunteers have helped fill in what's in the wiki so far, but it badly needs more help.
Frankly, hint system is terrible. It gives a nudge...
It has come to my attention that calling them "hints" is probably misleading. The purpose of the "hint" system was originally to "hint" to players about content that's available, so that players would not assume they'd reached the "end" of the game just because they missed things. Rather than assisting players in finding things, these were really meant to goad players into searching.
"Hints" are going to be renamed "Challenges" to better reflect this (it's already in the dev branch).
Hint Actions, not Outcomes
Might give this a try, but my translators will not be happy with me again 😅
Intuition is not instinct, it must be built, and a large part of the early game is building that intuition. If you are just randomly throwing things together or exhaustively trying every combination you will probably never build that intuition.
For some players, once they figure out the first couple of things, it's pretty easy to build on those and they end up figuring most of the game out on their own. Others need more help from the community, or aren't interested in the discovery phase of the game and want to skip to the invention parts (though they do need to be aware they're sacrificing part of the game that way). For some others, well, not everyone is going to like every game, no matter what.
The built-in player's guide offers as much help to get you started as possible without serious risk of spoiling things for anyone, as it's assumed that ALL players will likely read it, including players who really want the reward of having figured out each thing on their own. Beyond that, the About box lists the official chatrooms on IRC, Discord, and Matrix, and you can get questions answered by the community, and most responders there can also point you in the right direction without ruining the puzzles outright. There is also a semi-official wiki (which does allow unlimited spoilers), which is maintained by the community, though it requires volunteers to help complete it.
It's good that you gave it a serious try, though. Everyone should give a novel experience a serious try, even if there's a risk that they won't like it.
I've incorporated some of your feedback, such as renaming "hints" so their name no longer suggests they're going to offer you help.
The idea that the hints are there to "help" you is a common misconception. They're there to challenge you, by letting you know that there is more to discover and give you a push in that direction. Completing the hints should get you access to pretty much all of the basic content in the game, but there's more to discover that can't be covered (emergent mechanics) and there's still a lot to do even if you don't complete all the hints. It is still fundamentally a sandbox game, not necessarily a completion quest.
It's a puzzle game, so the documentation included in the game is very careful not to spoil solutions for you. If you're looking for more guidance, the best source is probably asking around in the community. The task of designing documentation to guide arbitrary players through the game without spoiling what they don't want spoiled is tantamount to building a game in itself, so it's not likely to ever happen on a mostly-single-developer hobby project.
As it says in the description, Dokimi's original Exile is no longer maintained, and is becoming outdated. This negative review is to help Mantar's fork (and potentially others) to rise above it. This package still has value as the original, but should not necessarily be the first version of Exile that players see, which is affected by package ranking/scoring.
The screenshots folder packaged up with the game does not appear to be used by the game in any way, and more than doubles the size of the package, making the download from CDB take longer. You could use export-ignore in .gitattributes to make CDB, github, and other packagers that zip up your game exclude the screenshots from the zip archive, while still keeping them available in the repo.
I tried to reproduce the problem myself, downloaded the game, created a new world with v7 mapgen (all mapgen options enabled except floatlands), and THOUGHT it hadn't worked (screen was all black), but it turned out I spawned inside a tree trunk. I turned on fly+noclip to get out of it.
So v7 worked for me, but maybe the game should check the player's starting position and ensure it's not inside a solid, or push players out of solids.
I tested this out with NodeCore, and while the resulting worlds it created are probably mostlly unplayable, it was fun to see some surreal results. There were worlds that were extremely radioactive, some that rapidly caught fire, some that were covered in dungeon stone, and some where pumwater was seeping out of every crevice. There were a lot of wet cement beaches, and trees made out of doors, and grassy fields transformed into a cornucopia of different ores and stones.
The method used to determine which nodes can substitute or be substituted uses a heuristic, so it works with every game ... but it's obvious it was only tested on a couple of games so far, as it misses a number of things; I'm pretty sure that liquids were not intended to be substituted for non-liquids, but not all liquids use the liquid drawtypes. The shuffle is also uniform-random, and ignores the relative rarity of some things (which is at least partly the point of the randomizer) but making extremely rare things become extremely common may cause some performance issues. Fine-tuning the heuristic with some more cross-game testing may help, and in extreme cases, maybe just white/black-listing certain problem cases that slip past the heuristic.
One feature that I'd love to see would be different randomization "zones" with different shuffles, maybe of configurable size...
There is a minor bug wherein tree leaves can be mostly substituted but occasionally some unsubstituted leaves are found at mapchunk boundaries. This is due to a limitation in how the engine works that would probably be difficult to fix without creating other issues.
N.B. make sure the mod is enabled before first creating the world, or else the first areas that generate will not be randomized. If you make a mistake on first startup, you can reset the world but keep the same seed by quitting, deleting map.sqlite, and restarting.
I am not familiar with the aforementioned Slimesling mod this is adapting, but found it fun, interesting, and well balanced.
As far as a practical form of transportation goes, I haven't exactly figured that out yet, but in theory, one could setup a series of stations for "refueling" by crafting more replacement mudslings to continue a long journey. Getting the trajectory right, and not having problems with hitting an unloaded mapblock boundary, might be challenges. It would be interesting to see someone make something interesting like a travel network based on this.
N.B. at this time, this is a VERY short game, and clearly very WIP. It really should be marked as such in the description fields to make this clearer. A public source control repo should really be setup, and that field filled in on CDB, so players can follow along with development.
This game seems very focused on a core concept of crafting ever more complex things by combining simple items, like Little Alchemy. At least, this seems like the safest assumption since it's by far the most fleshed-out gameplay area. The idea of having a single simple crafting system that everything is built through over multiple stages is interesting and seems like it could lend itself well to continuous progression.
It feels like this game needs a list of goals, or a progress indicator or something, since there aren't a lot of elements that naturally generate and it's hard to tell whether you've reached the end of the game so far or not. Also, constraining the crafting system (limiting size/shape or number of ingredients) could make the crafting a little easier, which would balance out well if it's intended to have a huge number of items and recipes.
The only issues I've found with what content there is so far, other than the total length, are the texture for the copper ingot, and the fact that water is completely opaque but intangible so you can fall to the bottom of the ocean and be trapped/lost indefinitely. I hope to see this game continue to coalesce around a strong core idea, and continue to improve the execution.
As far as the tutorial content is concerned, I got pretty much what I expected. I really enjoyed the scavenger hunt mini-game though. The castle was well-made and had lots of fun nooks and crannies to discover.
Although the tutorial says it's not MTG-specific, it does focus mainly on MTG-likes, especially around the crafting and smelting systems. It is still a good starting point for things like general movement, liquid mechanics, digging/building common to the majority of major games for this platform, so still a good choice for players who haven't yet found a game they want to invest time in.
This is my current favorite; it's a slightly different stylistic direction from the original WinterCore (also very good) but I consider it an upgrade. The blue fire is bold and striking. The smoother look of the optics in particular is very pleasant.
This is great concept and well-executed. Once you get the hang of movement the rest is simple and easy to learn, but there is a smooth learning curve to the existing puzzles, and room for a lot of challenging puzzles in the future.
The game itself is short, but there are instructions on how to create and submit new levels right in the project README; adding a "puzzle creation mode" to the game itself might be a way to encourage players to submit more levels. It also feels like it could be easy to extend the concept with new mechanics, like spaces only the player (not boxes) can enter, one-way movement spaces, etc. I would very much like to see more of this in the future.
I wanted the game itself to be spoiler-free, so that players would know that they wouldn't accidentally read the solution for a puzzle they were hell-bent on solving for themselves. The intent was to have external resources like the wiki contain the detailed/spoilery info, but everyone wants to READ the wiki but nobody wants to WRITE in it. As of right now, YouTube is probably the best resource for spoilers.
Have you looked where the inventory screen used to be? There's a pretty extensive guide in there already, which is careful to avoid spoilers, but still includes a complete achievement/"hint" system (though the hints themselves are behind on maintenance).
Attractive design, especially stone and other earthy materials (which are a LOT of NodeCore). Faithful to the original, blends well with mod content even when not yet supported, while still providing a distinct and improved look. Immersive, actually makes the game feel colder.
There's a lot of good feedback in here, I'll have a lot to update in my notes. Continuing development is sporadic (it's a hobby project, I work on it when I have time) but it's still continuing.
To clarify, the intended way of playing is to try to play without spoilers as far as you can, but players should feel okay with seeking them out once they've reached their limit. Every player will have different limits, what everyone finds difficult vs intuitive is different, and the game is not intended to purposefully exclude players who run into some arbitrary obstacle.
For the time being, I'm working on making the documentation more clear about help resources. Right now, the best guidance I can offer is to ask the community for help if you get stuck. Most of the guidance that's included in the game itself is based on what's actually frequently asked, and getting that kind of feedback is really the only way to know what players commonly have difficulty with.
Some volunteers have helped fill in what's in the wiki so far, but it badly needs more help.
It has come to my attention that calling them "hints" is probably misleading. The purpose of the "hint" system was originally to "hint" to players about content that's available, so that players would not assume they'd reached the "end" of the game just because they missed things. Rather than assisting players in finding things, these were really meant to goad players into searching.
"Hints" are going to be renamed "Challenges" to better reflect this (it's already in the dev branch).
Might give this a try, but my translators will not be happy with me again 😅
Intuition is not instinct, it must be built, and a large part of the early game is building that intuition. If you are just randomly throwing things together or exhaustively trying every combination you will probably never build that intuition.
For some players, once they figure out the first couple of things, it's pretty easy to build on those and they end up figuring most of the game out on their own. Others need more help from the community, or aren't interested in the discovery phase of the game and want to skip to the invention parts (though they do need to be aware they're sacrificing part of the game that way). For some others, well, not everyone is going to like every game, no matter what.
The built-in player's guide offers as much help to get you started as possible without serious risk of spoiling things for anyone, as it's assumed that ALL players will likely read it, including players who really want the reward of having figured out each thing on their own. Beyond that, the About box lists the official chatrooms on IRC, Discord, and Matrix, and you can get questions answered by the community, and most responders there can also point you in the right direction without ruining the puzzles outright. There is also a semi-official wiki (which does allow unlimited spoilers), which is maintained by the community, though it requires volunteers to help complete it.
It's good that you gave it a serious try, though. Everyone should give a novel experience a serious try, even if there's a risk that they won't like it.
I've incorporated some of your feedback, such as renaming "hints" so their name no longer suggests they're going to offer you help.
The idea that the hints are there to "help" you is a common misconception. They're there to challenge you, by letting you know that there is more to discover and give you a push in that direction. Completing the hints should get you access to pretty much all of the basic content in the game, but there's more to discover that can't be covered (emergent mechanics) and there's still a lot to do even if you don't complete all the hints. It is still fundamentally a sandbox game, not necessarily a completion quest.
It's a puzzle game, so the documentation included in the game is very careful not to spoil solutions for you. If you're looking for more guidance, the best source is probably asking around in the community. The task of designing documentation to guide arbitrary players through the game without spoiling what they don't want spoiled is tantamount to building a game in itself, so it's not likely to ever happen on a mostly-single-developer hobby project.
How would you change the game that would change your mind about it?
As it says in the description, Dokimi's original Exile is no longer maintained, and is becoming outdated. This negative review is to help Mantar's fork (and potentially others) to rise above it. This package still has value as the original, but should not necessarily be the first version of Exile that players see, which is affected by package ranking/scoring.
The
screenshotsfolder packaged up with the game does not appear to be used by the game in any way, and more than doubles the size of the package, making the download from CDB take longer. You could useexport-ignorein .gitattributes to make CDB, github, and other packagers that zip up your game exclude the screenshots from the zip archive, while still keeping them available in the repo.I tried to reproduce the problem myself, downloaded the game, created a new world with v7 mapgen (all mapgen options enabled except floatlands), and THOUGHT it hadn't worked (screen was all black), but it turned out I spawned inside a tree trunk. I turned on fly+noclip to get out of it.
So v7 worked for me, but maybe the game should check the player's starting position and ensure it's not inside a solid, or push players out of solids.
I tested this out with NodeCore, and while the resulting worlds it created are probably mostlly unplayable, it was fun to see some surreal results. There were worlds that were extremely radioactive, some that rapidly caught fire, some that were covered in dungeon stone, and some where pumwater was seeping out of every crevice. There were a lot of wet cement beaches, and trees made out of doors, and grassy fields transformed into a cornucopia of different ores and stones.
The method used to determine which nodes can substitute or be substituted uses a heuristic, so it works with every game ... but it's obvious it was only tested on a couple of games so far, as it misses a number of things; I'm pretty sure that liquids were not intended to be substituted for non-liquids, but not all liquids use the liquid drawtypes. The shuffle is also uniform-random, and ignores the relative rarity of some things (which is at least partly the point of the randomizer) but making extremely rare things become extremely common may cause some performance issues. Fine-tuning the heuristic with some more cross-game testing may help, and in extreme cases, maybe just white/black-listing certain problem cases that slip past the heuristic.
One feature that I'd love to see would be different randomization "zones" with different shuffles, maybe of configurable size...
There is a minor bug wherein tree leaves can be mostly substituted but occasionally some unsubstituted leaves are found at mapchunk boundaries. This is due to a limitation in how the engine works that would probably be difficult to fix without creating other issues.
N.B. make sure the mod is enabled before first creating the world, or else the first areas that generate will not be randomized. If you make a mistake on first startup, you can reset the world but keep the same seed by quitting, deleting
map.sqlite, and restarting.I am not familiar with the aforementioned Slimesling mod this is adapting, but found it fun, interesting, and well balanced.
As far as a practical form of transportation goes, I haven't exactly figured that out yet, but in theory, one could setup a series of stations for "refueling" by crafting more replacement mudslings to continue a long journey. Getting the trajectory right, and not having problems with hitting an unloaded mapblock boundary, might be challenges. It would be interesting to see someone make something interesting like a travel network based on this.
N.B. at this time, this is a VERY short game, and clearly very WIP. It really should be marked as such in the description fields to make this clearer. A public source control repo should really be setup, and that field filled in on CDB, so players can follow along with development.
This game seems very focused on a core concept of crafting ever more complex things by combining simple items, like Little Alchemy. At least, this seems like the safest assumption since it's by far the most fleshed-out gameplay area. The idea of having a single simple crafting system that everything is built through over multiple stages is interesting and seems like it could lend itself well to continuous progression.
It feels like this game needs a list of goals, or a progress indicator or something, since there aren't a lot of elements that naturally generate and it's hard to tell whether you've reached the end of the game so far or not. Also, constraining the crafting system (limiting size/shape or number of ingredients) could make the crafting a little easier, which would balance out well if it's intended to have a huge number of items and recipes.
The only issues I've found with what content there is so far, other than the total length, are the texture for the copper ingot, and the fact that water is completely opaque but intangible so you can fall to the bottom of the ocean and be trapped/lost indefinitely. I hope to see this game continue to coalesce around a strong core idea, and continue to improve the execution.
As far as the tutorial content is concerned, I got pretty much what I expected. I really enjoyed the scavenger hunt mini-game though. The castle was well-made and had lots of fun nooks and crannies to discover.
Although the tutorial says it's not MTG-specific, it does focus mainly on MTG-likes, especially around the crafting and smelting systems. It is still a good starting point for things like general movement, liquid mechanics, digging/building common to the majority of major games for this platform, so still a good choice for players who haven't yet found a game they want to invest time in.
This is my current favorite; it's a slightly different stylistic direction from the original WinterCore (also very good) but I consider it an upgrade. The blue fire is bold and striking. The smoother look of the optics in particular is very pleasant.
This is great concept and well-executed. Once you get the hang of movement the rest is simple and easy to learn, but there is a smooth learning curve to the existing puzzles, and room for a lot of challenging puzzles in the future.
The game itself is short, but there are instructions on how to create and submit new levels right in the project README; adding a "puzzle creation mode" to the game itself might be a way to encourage players to submit more levels. It also feels like it could be easy to extend the concept with new mechanics, like spaces only the player (not boxes) can enter, one-way movement spaces, etc. I would very much like to see more of this in the future.
I wanted the game itself to be spoiler-free, so that players would know that they wouldn't accidentally read the solution for a puzzle they were hell-bent on solving for themselves. The intent was to have external resources like the wiki contain the detailed/spoilery info, but everyone wants to READ the wiki but nobody wants to WRITE in it. As of right now, YouTube is probably the best resource for spoilers.
Have you looked where the inventory screen used to be? There's a pretty extensive guide in there already, which is careful to avoid spoilers, but still includes a complete achievement/"hint" system (though the hints themselves are behind on maintenance).
Attractive design, especially stone and other earthy materials (which are a LOT of NodeCore). Faithful to the original, blends well with mod content even when not yet supported, while still providing a distinct and improved look. Immersive, actually makes the game feel colder.