Boogie Juice

How are you gonna boogie without a bit of juice?

A question I’ve asked myself many times finds its answer in today’s update! In yesterday’s update we made the boogie action an exhaustible resource. You get one b oogie per room and then you’re done. This was ok as a stop-gap while we tested the new boogie system, but it felt quite dictatorial and segregated from the rest of the design.

Now, each room starts with a “juice”. Juice is an item that exists on the map and can be picked up by the player. Picking up a juice unlocks the boogie action, and once you boogie a new juice is spawned in the room.

Most of the intrigue in Loose Ties comes from the positional relationships in the rooms. By giving the boogie economy a foothold in the positional game, it could begin to interact with the rest of the mechanics in more interesting ways.

This also addresses one of the issues I was seeing with newer play-testers. The game demands quite a lot from a new player, and can be quite opaque until the persona rules get nestled into their brain. The juice acts as a kind of guiding light for new players. Collecting it is almost always helpful (social battery aside) so you almost always have something concrete and familiar to do, rather than wallow in an information game that is not entirely clicking yet.

Thanks for playing Loose Ties and for checking out this update. I think the design is approaching completion (it’s definitely approaching the pico-8 token limit), so if you have thoughts on how it’s feeling at the minute I would love to hear them!