The second post-jam update has arrived! This one focuses on the tactical gameplay within each party.

Each party in Loose Ties is essentially two games overlaid onto each other - a deduction game about identifying the guests, and a tactical game about maximising good vibes. As a new player you first learn to play the deduction game, and then you begin to improve at the tactical game. For this reason, most of the jam was spent iterating on the deduction game, leaving the tactical side of Loose Ties to fall to the wayside.

Here’s a quick look at one of the problems that plagued the tactical game.

In this case, the player is wedged between two guests who each create good vibes when you chat to them. By alternating chats between the guests, the player can repeatedly increase their good vibes without much consideration. I love breakable games as much as the next guy, but this is a remarkably boring exploit to pull off.

I interpreted this as a symptom of a stagnant state space. Here, we are alternating between two states that loop directly into each other without introducing any complications into the position. The player’s actions leave no artifacts behind, make no meaningful change to the world, and so you can get stuck in these very tight loops that sap the intrigue from a play session.

Another issue, pictured below, is what I’d call a “push and pull” problem (let me know if there’s a better name for this).

Here, the player is making some meaningful change to the position by scooching the pink guest across the room. The issue is that they can then use the dance action to pull all the guests towards them, which almost perfectly undoes the changes they’d made to the state. They’re able to “pull” on the system in a way that undoes whatever “push” they just did. This is an extension of the stagnant state space. Even though the player is performing more actions, they are still able to trivially repeat board positions.

For the deduction game, this is not really a problem. The main resource you’re trying to collect is information. Repeating a board position gives you no new information, so it’s effectively a wasted turn. In the tactical game, however, repeated board positions are a solid way to rack up good vibes, so it becomes a zero-effort optimal strategy that undermines the rest of the game.

So, what changed?

Well, to solve the push and pull problem, I made some changes to pushing and pulling.

Previously, when you scooched a guest you would move along with them. This immediately set you up to chat to them again, and prevented any complications from entering the picture. Now, the guest is scooched but you stay still. This puts the guest onto the opposing parity (if they were on the black chess squares, they’re now on the white chess squares), meaning you won’t be able to chat to them again until there is a meaningful change in the state space.

The mechanics around pulling have also been overhauled. Before, you could boogie whenever you liked as many times as you liked, giving you almost full control over guest positions. In an effort to be a full-on party pooper, you now only get 3 boogies per room. This makes boogie feel like a more precise tool. Instead of being spammed to hard reset to a desired state, it becomes the keystone of a few subtle plans that you build up to through positioning and timing.

There’s one other addition that I wanted to cover, those new coloured squares! The removal of the boogie did initially make the game worse. Guests moved randomly and could now only be moved by pushing, so it became basically impossible to maneuver them for either the deduction game or the tactical game. More distressingly, the complications of parity had begun to sneak it into every crack of the design. Two tiles can only be adjacent if they have opposing parity (a black tile on the chess board is only adjacent to white tiles) and Loose Ties requires a lot of adjacency. The player must be adjacent to the guests to chat to them, but guests must also be adjacent to each other so that the player can observe how their personas affect one another. These are two constraints that cannot always be satisfied simultaneously. Games would frequently wind up in positions where the player was unable to chat to any of the guests, or one of the guests was never able to become adjacent to the others. In an effort to solve these problems, the visible move targets were introduced. Each coloured square shows which tile a guest is moving towards. When they arrive at the tile they pause for one turn before picking a new target and moving towards it. This has two important effects. Firstly, you now get some foresight into the movement of the guests, which allows you to build more elaborate plans for pushing and intercepting. Your tools become more powerful than they were in the context of purely random movement. Secondly, it introduces a steady churn to the parity of the guests. By pausing for one turn when they arrive at their target, the guest swaps their parity in relation to the rest of the characters. This means that even if a guest has an inconvenient parity right now, it will have flipped in a few turns. This introduces a “rhythm” to each room that I’m having a lot of fun exploring.

Following these changes, and quite a few smaller ones, I’m much happier with where the tactical game is at. There may be some more iterations in the future, but for right now each game is presenting an interesting web of decisions that continues to grow as I engage more deeply with the game.

Thank you for reading. As always, I would love to hear your thoughts.