I'm relatively new to the alpha, but wanted to make a suggestion for the biggest thing I feel missing in the game. So far the game has been a lot of fun, but a lot of times I end up feeling aimless, not sure what to try next, wasting entire energy bars on singing to butterflies....
My idea is for a hint mechanic to help very new players like me figure things out (WITHOUT just asking the forums for help and they supply the answer). For example, here are some confusing things:
- I have a quest that says drink a lot of beers. How do I get those beers if I don't have a recipe for them? I know blending but not cocktail making -- I don't want to waste the time and currants on cocktail making unless I have to (being relatively poor and having not much inventory space), so I'd like to make sure it's something I really need before I invest in it.
- Mining... what's it for? I see all these rocks around, but not sure why I would want them. Food/Drink (and related skills such as cooking, animal tending, blending, etc) give me an obvious benefit -- they help give me more energy/mood. Again, it seems like I should focus more on skills I know will benefit me unless I understand more about what I'm getting myself into.
My proposed solution:
- Allow people to get hints in exchange for energy -- each hint costs some energy or mood to get.
- The mechanic could be anything -- perhaps singing to butterflies about certain quests. This could even be listed in the description of Animal Kinship II: "Allows singing to butterflies about quests or items."
- Getting a hint (by singing, whatever) about a quest might hint about how to get one of the required things in the quest. Example: quest to harvest all the different kinds of trees might give a hint "Egg trees can be found underground." as one of the random hints, to give a simple example (or in butterfly-speak "Egg trees gro under grownd, go way!" ...? )
- Getting a hint (by singing, whatever) about an item might hint about how to get/make that item or its ingredients. Example: a hint for cheese might be things like "Need butter to make cheese" (which might then prompt the person to ask for a hint on how to make butter...)
- If the hints are via butterflies, one way to do this would be to add a menu option to the butterflies such as "Sing about....". You would then be given a text box to enter the exact name of the thing you want to sing about. If what's typed matches something there's a hint about, a random hint of the available hints for that topic is given. If it doesn't match anything, then the butterfly tells you to go away and stop bothering it.
Perhaps this won't be necessary when the game goes live -- I'm sure someone will write a guide for the game online, and people can always ask on the forums, but it seems a bit more fun to me to have this in-game.