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Work Life's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Originality | #1 | 4.667 | 4.667 |
| Polish | #10 | 3.833 | 3.833 |
| Overall | #12 | 3.833 | 3.833 |
| Technical | #15 | 3.333 | 3.333 |
| Audio | #21 | 3.167 | 3.167 |
| Graphics | #22 | 3.333 | 3.333 |
Ranked from 6 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Judge feedback
Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.
- Nice visual novel! Even though I don't usually like these games, I've had lots of fun with yours. Some notes: - The game is quite long! Usually jam entries are short even when they're finished, so it's great that you've made the extra effort. - The interface looks and feels great! Even the minigames are well done. - Text font is a bit too small for the GBA Micro. - I like that you've added extra things like the how to play and the credits scenes. - Tech questions were fun :)
- I especially loved the classic MS Windows textures! I think the textboxes would be a bit easier to read if the background color of the textbox was just a bit darker. Good submission!
- This is really polished! I’ve played for about a month and a half, and reached a good ending. The graphics are the biggest issue, I really like the rest of the game!
- I cannot get over how immersive this was! The game goes above and beyond in creating a believable world where you can forge your own connections with each character. One detail that bugged me was the default 'small' butano font being unsuited for dialogue on a small screen, and in general the art and audio could've been a little more refined (added sfx, more variety of music, etc.). All that said, I absolutely loved this game and am looking forward to going back and trying to get more endings in the future.
- An enjoyable cast of characters, you wrote their stories well and the whole choosing your work tasks aspect was a neat unique take on the visual novel affection systems. I encoutered a collection of issues on my play-through though, such as the quick time events stopping the music until pressed (not sure if that one was intended) and the bug testing minigame had a tendency to drop inputs if played too quickly.
Jam ROM submission
Ok - understood! I attached the GBA ROM file as "MYGAMENAME_jam.gba".
Type of submission
Game
Open Source Repository URL
https://github.com/jgensler8/work-life-game
Existing assets
"Airport Lounge" : https://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/music.html
various butano fonts: https://github.com/GValiente/butano/tree/master/common/include
Tags
Visual Novel
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Comments
This was a compelling and uplifting play experience :-)
As someone who has also made a story driven game, I can appreciate the amount of effort that has gone into crafting a story with characters/puzzles/dialogue etc. I can see you put a ton of work into many different aspects of the game (different backgrounds, endings etc.) I think your entry is really great, very nice work!
thank you for giving it a try! I quite enjoyed your game as well. I really liked your use of animation/cutscenes and the "spatial" audio part. It really adds to the ambience. The first thing I though of was pulling out the cafe section and make a game serving and talking to customers. I also really wanted to press B to jump around, though I'm not sure why. The dialog is well written + the each character and interaction feels real. I think my only feedbacks are:
* physical layout of the text. I think there were some awkward moments when text spans multiple boxes with either one or two words on the second screen. I found this really hard to control in my game so maybe I'm a bit "picky" when playing yours.
* combining objects / open the menu felt clunky. It seems like a bit of rock-and-hard-place scenario as you need to support "combine" and "use" so I'm not sure there are any other options other than using "A" to descend into some "sub menu" (or list all items vertically and use left/right to select use/combine...). It may also be the ergonomics with using the web player :/
Yeah, the text spanning multiple windows was something that we intended to fix but just ran out of time towards the end. It was a bit of a crunch to get the final game out of the door before the deadline, so there are a few things that we would have liked to have polished, and that was one of them.
Definitely playing on real hardware is ideal (as is always the case), the item combination mechanic probably could have used some finesse but there's only so many buttons on the GBA to work with haha.
Thanks so much for checking out our game!
i'm about a month in so far. i really like the little program-manager interface for the doing-your-job part, and it's cool how you can respond to people's questions to build out what your character is like. i was also surprised to see the security lead hitting me with some honest-to-goodness real-life tech knowledge checks!
I just thought I'm mention, in case you're not aware: Ino's face is green.
yes, thank you. I have a green/brown colorblindness so telling the difference is difficult. I did have some trouble picking the tones so looks like I need to be more careful next time. I hope you at least enjoyed playing it for a bit!