Final polish before submission

Updates

• Start recruiting choice is now sticky instead of one time only choice
• Add "Recruit more?" option on End of Game report
• Add some reaction text to adventurer text
• Add some descriptive text about the adventurer
• Expand end game report to show which choices were matched/didn't, end-game response from host or adventurer
• Being able to pick which adventurer you can ask/interview
• Add more descriptors to the flow of the game to create the 'newlywed' scene
• Refactored some flows. 
• Fixed a crashing edge case branch issue. 
• Added 2 more questions/answers.

I enjoyed using Ink for this jam. I was surprised how quickly I was able to get my game loop going. I am glad I participated, as this is a game idea I wanted to do to create an interesting twist to the genre ie have player develop attachment to NPC party members like in movies/shows. 

I tried to make the adventurers' descriptions and dialog gender-neutral, as I wanted the player to project their preferences of the adventurers without breaking their suspension of disbelief. Also, I was trying to tie the adventurers' answers more to their subtly hinted class/job rather than background/race/gender and lean more on stereotypical aspects of their class, i.e., rangers live in forests, warriors are 'gym rats', etc.

What went wrong:

Since I was learning Ink, I felt like I was doing tedious work for some of the PGC I was doing for the random adventurers. I had a lot of variables, list of names, switch cases for responses. I know if I was using an OOP based engine, the game loop code would have been a lot simpler and easier to read ie a character class that each adventurer class would inheirt so all the adventurer's answers would be a lot more manageable along with adding more content + variance easier.

I also learned relying only text for the players to gleam context/details of the adventurers to answer matching replies is a fun challenge without outright stating it for players. If the game had visuals, this would help hint things about the Adventurer without being obvious about it while also hide how generic the character's dialog/text are.

What went well: 

Learned Ink is super easy to learn and fast to work out of. There is a lot of flexibility to it so presentation can be applied however I want. Asking for feedback early enough so I was able to implement them right away for the submission. And knew what features to cut as I wouldn't have time to implement how I would want it to be.

Since I was able to get a game prototype quickly, I was able to share and ask for feedback at the end of day 1 to be able to apply the feedback on day 2.

Conclusion:

This experience showed me this game idea has potential, and I plan to expound on this, but maybe as a cross-visual novel + either JRPG/tactics battle system but with the tone of an old cheesy game show. I can see how visuals and audio can also help with the vibes and theming of the game since this is clearly based a TV series it needed graphics and sounds to nail that tone. ie the visuals of the adventurers will have to be procedurally generated and used as details for the players to notice to help get matches.