Been following AdamCYounis on YT for ages to try an learn (the Bob Ross of our gen), never been very arty sadly but love being creative.
Would love your feedback on how I can improve, what you'd do differently in a 16x16px framework, and any workflow hacks for aseprite you can share (just bought a cheap wacom - big upgrade from my laptop trackpad :D)
The central mechanic is memory collection. After each battle you pick a fragment (true or false, you have to piece that together) and those build into core memories that carry buffs, costs, or both. This came to me while (somewhat depresingly) reflecting on my life and the memories I had changed to deal with events, sometimes they were painted rosey, other times darkened for more weight, but it was a realisation that neither was right or wrong, just my story.
The design question I kept coming back to while making it was should the true/false split have a clean mechanical payoff? Should truth always reward and lies always punish? That would be legible (possibly more satisfying), but also probably what players would expect. So I landed on ambiguity instead, there's no reliable moral arithmetic, and that was a very deliberate choice.
The counter argument I guess is that clear consequences would teach players to actually engage with the choice rather than just optimise it, and I did take that seriously but ultimately rejected. My reasoning was that the ambiguity says something more honest about how memory actually works: the false version of something isn't always worse for you than the true one.
Curious whether this reads as meaningful design or a missed opportunity to make the choice matter more clearly. I'd genuinely rather hear the pushback first before I explain the thinking further.
Intentionally omitting the name of the game and links as per the self-promotion rules here - genuinely curious about your thoughts.