Watching someone play your game is quite maddening / insightful.

Crossword Dungeon blends mechanics and UI from crossword solving and dungeon crawling. Crossword solving is the primary agency, but choosing which letters to solve in which order based on the dungeon stats is the primary strategy.

Unfortunately, players generally are already used to the UX in online crosswords. They naturally want to fill in words quickly from left to right. In Crossword Dungeon, that approach will end your run quite soon. In my first playtest, the player was so focused on figuring out the crossword puzzle that they didn't pay any attention to the dungeon encounters and stat panels, completely missing the impact of their moves. They also were confused on why the game sometimes seemed frozen -- they didn't notice the auto-combat going on in the other panels.

I considered how to solve this. I could visually emphasize the dungeon parts of the UI, but the problem was more of a mindset than visual issue. I considered different options for integrating the two visual parts of the game more, but obstructing the crossword makes it very hard to work with.

Ultimately, I improved the help / tutorial menu, and added a pop-up over the crossword panel after every letter guess, that showed the log of the interaction results. I already had this log under the dungeon panels, but it was easy to miss. Moving it made player action impacts much more clear, and brought the dungeon mechanics into the puzzle solving mechanics more vividly. It also solves the urge to quickly fill in the next letters by interrupting the flow. The potential downside for experienced users is that disrupted flow, but in my own plays I find it helps me remember to pay attention to my stats when I get swept up in the puzzle solving. Now I need to try it out on another first time player and see if it helps.