First, this game took me about 15 hours to make. I made it solo, including the design, art, sound and code. In this post I will explain some design decisions. These decisions were based on two facts:

1. You need to have your game be played as soon and as often as possible. You don't know what kind of charming nonsense happens between the two beautiful ears of your players.
2. Don't make what the players want. Make what the players need.

If you haven't played Teeth Simulator yet, please do before reading any further.

Now, one might think, quite naively, that nothing bad can happen with a game where you literally only have to wave the mouse around to play.  One would then be entirely wrong, as I was! Let's see some comments I received from yesterday's alpha of Teeth Simulator, what they ask, what they need, and what was done.

"All the food fell on my head and I couldn't eat it anymore"

I knew this could happen, but didn't know it would be a problem. Clearly, the player wants the food to not fall on the head and out of the screen, which could have been answered by either spawning the food right in the bowl and/or putting walls around the screen. Both solutions were big NOES to me. I wanted the player to be fed, like they do all the time in modern games. And walls? This would have taken away the challenge way to much. 

I approached the situation on another angle: knowledge. The player didn't need something added to the game. They needed knowledge about the game. As disgusted as I was about the idea of adding a tutorial... I added a tutorial (and felt a part of me die). But, following years of being pissed at poorly designed tutorials (or poorly designed anything), I had a strict set of conditions:

1. It has to be that clear, right in the face, shiny box of information that you can't miss and that stands in the way of the actual gameplay.
2. It must be possible to skip it for the sake of returning players and game literate players that do not need to be told what to do. So I added that "click to advance" text under the box to make sure. The tutorial also auto-advances every 5 seconds. I assumed it was possible to not know English, not try to click to skip and just think you're stuck
3. It must be readable. I couldn't use the same font as I did for the generated sentences. I had to choose one that would not contrast too much with it though.
4. Each page must not contain more than eight (8) words. This is a gamejam game, it shouldn't even need a word, but hey, I didn't want to change the aesthetic of the game design.
5. The player must know when the tutorial will end. Not telling the player when something separated by pages will come to an end is the best way to annoy them to the point of no return (or make them skip everything by fear of having to read hundreds of pages. I numbered the pages for that purpose. See that as the thickness of a book and the emotions that come when you see you're almost done with it, only on a smaller scale.

Another thing was that the player seemingly didn't know the game continued and, as far as I know, stopped playing right after the food went out of the screen. To fix that, I added a timer. The nearest to zero it is, the more visible it becomes. And while you don't know at first what will come, at least your curiosity keeps you there long enough to find out; then you know. If the timer had been there at first, the player might have waited at least for another food wave to spawn.

"Is there a difference between red and green food? I tried eating only green food but couldn't tell if it changed anything. There should be more colors if it doesn't do anything."

Here I wasn't sure why the player chose to eat veggies (green) and avoid meat (red at first. I thought they wanted to know if there was some food centered mechanism. After a while, it struck me as obvious and I asked: "Did you eat only green food because you thought red food was dangerous or just for the kicks of it?" And that was it, the universal language of videogames playing against a game literate player. Indead, the color has nothing to do with anything, because I wanted green and red for veggies and meat, and while I had ideas for designs around this, there would have been more work to keep the game color-blind friendly. Now you got multicolored food (the player is a designer himself, you should check out Totema Studio, so in this case, what the player wanted was more of a design advice).

Next one is from the same person.

"I tried to click the left mouse button at first to open the jaw. Then I saw how to open the jaw, but didn't feel like I had much control."

Obviously, the lack of control part made me smile. But there was something here: the player clicked the mouse button and expected something to happen. Big advice to all of you: players expectations must be fulfilled, or the game must change in a way that removes that expectation. I just HAD to have something happen when you press the mouse button, at least to provide the pleasure of making something unexpected happen. Now, you get to skip the tutorial. I would have liked to make some useless mechanic, like making the teeth slightly pivot back and forth in their sockets, making grinding noises. The player wanted the jaw to open, when they only needed something to happen.

"I feel uncomfortable."

This one made my day. It's always good to have some positive feedback while you work on your game. Keeps you going and remove doubts about whether you are headed the right way or not.

That's it for now! Next one will be about how the initial design constructed itself and more behind-the-scene stuff.

Thank you for reading, I which you all happy thought!