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Letters from a lost time's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| People's Choice | #90 | 2.611 | 2.727 |
Ranked from 11 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Hi dreamer1988! I, like others, found this game to just be very slow overall -- not even just the walking speed, though that definitely did contribute to it. But the pacing and the forced exploration is what did it for me. I love the idea of having to find your grandfather / his marbles (lol love that pun, as well), but I think allowing the player a little bit of freewill to explore at their own pace with a little less hand-holding / locking them into specific areas until they've hit some undisclosed goal would go a long way to helping improve that.
The music used was very fitting and lovely. Overall, I think the concept is overall good, but just needs a little more testing to get some input / feedback from different styles of players so you're able to keep fine-tuning it.
edited: hit submit too early!
Letters from a lost time
by dreamer1988
Hey there dreamer1988, thanks for submitting a project to the 2022 IGMC. I'm Drifty and I was asked to judge your game in round one of the IGMC 2022 game jam. Here's some feedback about your project.
Walking feels very slow, but I can understand that increasing it by one setting would make it feel too fast. This is just a limitation of VX Ace.
I find it funny that grandpa lost his marbles, as that's a saying for someone who went crazy.
I appreciate the fact that the controller works in this one, as not all VX games will allow for that to work.
The music selection is good, but there is a slight lack of sound effects in some areas that could be used to take the immersion up a notch.
The idea that you have to do everything in a very specific order really slows down the game and creates a scenario that makes the player backtrack over and over.
The story itself isn't bad, but it's in desperate need of an editor that has a firm grasp of the English language.
Ultimately what this boils down to is boring gameplay. You slowly walk everywhere on the map to locate a hidden switch event, then repeat this over and over on the same maps. Tie this together with the fact that you have to hold the action button to 'dash' with no setting to just turn that on and you create an unpleasant experience.
This is just my opinion as I'm not a fan of these 'find the switch' story games and some people may genuinely like this game.
I hope that you keep making games and having fun with the process. Thanks for submitting a game to the IGMC 2022.
-Drifty
hey, i streemed this and it was fairly enjoyable. There were a number of minor issues typical of a first game but most of them didnt really detract from the story itself, except i personally didnt like the slow move speed of the main character. At the end of the day it was a nice little romance story and i liked it. Nice game!
I had thought about leaving normal speed but it seemed a bit too fast. However I understand the annoyance of holding the key down to run. I'll reset it with the update then. Thanks.
Fun game. Here's my playthrough.
Thank you so much. I'm going to fix the game a bit to make it more playable and less boring and this video is very useful. Thanks again.
Four legs! Not arms! I am shocked by this mistake! Sorry.
Really liked the gentle piano track that plays throughout and has almost a bit of an eerie feel to it as you search for your Grandfather - asking townsfolk and exploring areas. Narrative is a gentle burn with a puzzle element to it. I did get a bit lost and struggled to find direction at times - so I think a bit more explanation to the player would be helpful.
Thanks for feedback
The storyline was interesting, but hampered by a lot of problems. The writing was not grammatically correct and a bit hard to parse in places. I suspect English isn't your first language, so I won't hold that against you, but it is difficult to get into a game where the focus is on the story when it isn't written very well. The big problem is that the game likes to waste the player's time for no reason. "I should look around before going into the school... ok I looked around and there was nothing." That sort of thing happens too often in the game. There's a lot of wandering around trying to make the story progress that just doesn't really add anything. Some of it could be charming, but the language barrier hurts that (like when you walk around the town and talk to everyone - this could be cute with lots of funny little interactions, but it mostly isn't). Also, the maps are pretty ugly. They feel haphazard and seem like the wrong tiles are used for floors or walls (I think at one point a wall tile is used to to break up rooms as a partition). At any rate, this isn't a bad effort, but falls flat in some key areas. A little more direction and a little less time wasting would have made this more of a joy to play. (For instance, I wandered around inside the school looking for something to light the way, when a simple message of "I should check the shack that dog was guarding" would have sent me in the right direction. You then have the player go back into the school and wander around again, so maybe try to cut back on some of the confusion wherever possible.)
Hi. Thanks for this detailed feedback. I premise that I don't want to justify the choices at all. I would just like to explain the reasons, then maybe I made wrong choices or made badly. I begin by apologizing for the language because yes, I know very little English. This is one of the fears I had as the story is the very fundamental part of the game. So I'm sorry you don't understand much. For the moments of exploration outside the house and school, it doesn't add much but it is to stay consistent with the plot itself (which predicts that the protagonist knows nothing, at least up to a certain point). However, I played with the environment to make people understand which places to explore (the grass in the prologue and the plants outside the school). Same thing happens in gardens where there is a camouflaged plant to be found. I developed it with a player in mind who does not run left and right to finish the game as soon as possible, but a player who observes the details. For tiles, I would have liked you to have been more specific. In the part where the torch must be looked for, I had thought of inserting something to guide but I preferred to avoid "helping" too much. The game continuously guides the player through the protagonist's thoughts. I could fix the part of the school once the contest is over, when I can upload other versions. Thanks again.
I think if you'd described the flowers or something it would have made finding the patch of ground a bit more rewarding. As it was, getting a message over and over that says "nothing there" or whatever was more discouraging than anything and didn't seem to add to the game. Make it have meaning. There's nothing wrong with a game that makes the player stop to observe things, but there has to be something to observe. If you say there's nothing there, that's what the player will think. They won't think "oh this is a nice patch of grass."