Getting (unfortunate) feedback (3)

I think all creators are emotional and sensitive people, which is counterproductive when you get feedback.

My game was never designed to be for everyone. It is a game for people like me that are language nerds and, probably, neurodivergent. (The probably is for the rest of the people, I myself know that languages are one of my special interests).

I thought that an audio of someone speaking a certain language gave enough information to the player, but my professor said otherwise. He said (hello, you will have to read this, I hope it is not weird for me to talk about you saying he instead of you, because what if someone else reads this?) that it was not enough and it almost felt like a guessing game, or even a gamble. I really did not like that, because it just was not. He compared it to me making a game and asking personal questions like my favourite colour, but I believe that the comparison was not really accurate. While I am not universal, languages are. Even if the player is not a language nerd, they must at least be aware of the sounds of different languages. He kept saying I should find a way to guide the player, and I said that I would not put super complicated audios, but that was still not good enough. I also made sure to mention that I would not add incredibly obscure languages or dialects, and the player would have three options to choose from.

For me, it would have been enough, but then I thought I should get some outside perspectives about how to make it work. A friend told me that listening to conversations was enough, and even if you do not understand every single thing, there are words that most people recognise. We live in a world that is connected by the internet and we are more exposed than ever to different cultures, so I find it hard to believe that one may be completely lost when presented with recognising the language someone else is speaking. But that friend also speaks three languages, English, Spanish, and Italian, so I went to ask someone that knew even less.

I asked my sister-in-law if she would play a game about recognising languages, and she said that she would, but she would suck. I asked if she thought it would be too hard to listen and to figure out what language someone was speaking, and she said that even if she did not understand what they were saying, it would not be the most difficult task to know what language they were speaking. She was telling me that she would not be able to recognise a lot of languages, but that she would still give it a try and have fun even if she was bad at it. Then, I mentioned to her that she would have three options to choose from, and she said that she did not know that. She said she would play the game even if she had no options and she had to manually input her answer. She is very kind. When I kept explaining the plan, she said that it was not too hard, but we kept brainstorming about how to make it easier. She suggested giving some hints, such as the amount of speakers it had, and I thought that was great.

I kept thinking about it, and then I decided that instead of using just one audio, I could have one conversation and one part of a song. That could also be helpful!

In the end, the plan was this:

-Use conversations from children cartoons, since they usually speak slower and they enunciate better

-Add a song

-Allow the player to turn on and off the hints

-Add random incredibly wrong answers every once in a while, like animalese from animal crossing