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The Blink's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Overall | #6 | 3.900 | 3.900 |
| Narration | #6 | 3.900 | 3.900 |
| Theme | #9 | 3.300 | 3.300 |
| Originality | #17 | 3.350 | 3.350 |
Ranked from 20 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
really well-written, and the name-entering popup was a fun surprise! i got the crew killed, RIP (I’m guessing the other crew killed them so they wouldn’t take up so much battery power/resources?)
Thanks for checking my game out! RIP to the crew, and that's not entirely what happens but I won't spoil it I guess, since that ending wasn't entirely finished due to time constraints. Oops!
Ah, I totally get that. I look forward to reading the full thing if you ever return to it!
[spoiler: english is not my first language, i hope i'll write something understandable XD]
Ok, when I have read "Ripley" the first time i was gagging, when i have understood better, i was dead.
First praise: the pace management. Little group of sentences makes it easy to read, and in this case, create more curiosity ('cause i wanna know what's going on :D), and than more bigger paragraphs for descriptions. Good, really good. It's not common at al <3
Second: sci-fi is not my genre, but you have made me really comfortable with a highly evocative style. It's somehow full of colors, emotions. I'm really in love :D
Gameplay it seems common for CYOA (it's not a bad thing, but my love for Ink comes from all the neardy possibility that it has :D). In a few places there are a lot of choices, that could feel overwhelming (is that a farm?/a child?/the housing etc etc).
I have had a bug nearly the start: when i have chosen to say my name, anything happened. I have tried again, same problem :D No problems when choosing "rank", but i have had another blocking problem later (nearly "They don't resemble anything from Earth. Well, you'll learn them soon enough.).
Curiosity: it's clear that you have put a lot of effort in the writing part <3 how many words are in the game? And have you wrote novels and so on?
Good job <3
Marco
Oh wow, that's a long one, thanks for checking out my game! Thanks for the compliments, and yeah the gameplay is really limited mainly because I'm not a programmer, Ink is all I can really understand! Unless I get outside help, the most I'll really do with these games is add images and sound (maybe).
As for the bug, can I have some more detail on what happened exactly? When you're selecting either of those choices, there's supposed to be a popup at the top of the screen where you type in your name, and I'm guessing the popup never showed up. Might be something with your browser, I'm not sure. I never implemented the feature before in an Ink game so I have no clue how it might break. Either way, I'm sorry that happened to you. If it helps, the story continues as normal after that point, it only decides whether or not you still get called Sergeant by the Paradisaea crew. As for the later block, I'm not sure what happened there either but I'll check it out later.
Lastly, there are around 18k words, but roughly half of it is recycled endings with few differences between them. I was running low on time so it was done really inefficiently. So the actual word count for unique sections (before I started copy-pasting) is roughly 8-10k words. A single playthrough will be anywhere between 3k-5k words based on how much you skip and which endings you pick. I've never written novels, but I've always enjoyed writing short stories. This was my first major attempt at making something like a game using my writing, so I'm pretty proud of it.
definitely made me existential. startling premise of darkness, and the plotting/interaction on the planet all worked to add layers to a scifi conceit in a way that propelled me to finish. the failure hint was a good touch to encourage retrying.
looking at the other posts here shows an impressive variety of outcomes. i died knifeless in my pod, which was terrifying but fair given my choices. 👍
Thanks for checking it out and for the compliments. There are quite a few outcomes, that one was by far my least favorite purely because I would hate to go that way too. Just writing it made me uncomfortable.
Wow, game has a really nice hook! and the lore document had a lot to add.
Thank you, thank you!
The premise was really well done. I was legitimately hooked after a few minutes of reading and wanted to find out more of what the crew’s purpose was and if they’d solve it.
*** SPOILER ***
I got the ending where I went back to the ship and stayed up to talk with Ripley. The ending felt a bit abrupt here as it just said “You join your friends in dreamland later”. I’m guessing it’s supposed to be open-ended, but at least a node to the future would be nice. As in referencing a long journey of exploring ahead of them to find a start or similar.
Overall though, this was a really well done story and I enjoyed reading it!.
Thanks for checking it out, and thanks for the kind words!
Yeah, some of the endings are meant to be a bit open-ended, and I think that's one of them. We don't really know what the future holds, and I'm not sure if it would be a good or bad idea to think of an actual end to the journey like that. Maybe after the jam, I'll add more to that ending, I'll see. I do plan on going back. Thanks for the feedback!
This was engrossing, to say the least, read it in a go from start to finish and never felt for a moment like something was just filler. The ending was perhaps a little....abrupt? This is what I got:
"During the night, with flashlight in hand, the two of you follow the trampled path back to the IORATA. You call to your crewmates, and even search for them but no matter what you do, you only find Cleo and Jake dead in their sleeping pods. It's unclear what happened to the rest of them."
Not sure if there was supposed to be something after that. But I guess I can guess what will happen either way :) I feel like maybe there could've been something more with the...military styling of the crew of your ship? And also I wonder about the time discrepancy. But perhaps these things are answered somewhere else - fascinating, anyway!
Yo, thanks for checking out the game! You're right, the ending does seem abrupt, I've had more than one person complain that they aren't sure what happened and it's true, I didn't write it in. It's not a very happy ending, they're supposed to all be dead aside from you and the one other person who decided to stay. But time constraints led me to kind of forget to elaborate on that. I'll be doing so once the jam is over, though.
Regarding military stylings, there really isn't too much going on aside from Sergeant just going by that nickname, even though you can choose to use a different name later. I didn't want players picking a silly name at the very beginning of the game because I felt that might ruin things, which is why I give you the option to do it later. I came up with the backstory that made the nickname make sense- it's the character's rank before they got to participate in the program. But that's about as military as it gets- the rest of the crew isn't meant to be military.
Also, what do you mean by "time discrepancy"? I can certainly answer any questions you have if they aren't answered in the optional document you can download. It's just a text file that explains some of the reasoning behind the names and other details.
Re: time discrepancy I just meant the discussion that the science team had been flying for, whatever it was, 5 cycles or something, and this team had been out for like, 28 or something, and I got the distinct impression a 'cycle' is at least a year but more like...many years. Whether that was a glitch in the AI or some relativistic trickery or what I felt wasn't ever explained? Or maybe it was.
Why are they all deaaad? Did they die from, like, hibernation sickness or something?
Aaahh yeah that was a bit of an unfinished thing. I wanted to bring it up again but I was running short on time.
Just to be clear, a single cycle is one thousand years! And without too many spoilers, I was hoping to expand that into the reason as to how the Paradisaea crew were on that planet for only a few years despite them having many thousands of years of travel time between them. Hence why the shock at hearing that they were only traveling for five cycles. No AI bugging out, it's more in the relativistic trickery I guess, but there really are all those years of space travel between them. Maybe a mystery for another time.
Also nobody's dead from hibernation sickness at the moment but I could definitely add a sad little secret ending or two just to add ANOTHER bad ending to the story lol
I really liked the writing here. It wasn't quite clear what exactly I was choosing with some of the choices and I didn't really understand the ending I got. That being said I felt like the story and writing really made up of for all of that.
Thanks for checking it out, sorry some of the choices felt a bit weird. Did you happen to catch any specific examples just so I can take a look after the jam? If not that's alright too.
A really fascinating game with good, weighty decisions towards the end. I liked the themes of hope vs realism and the way they were explored.
Thank you!
One of the more original story concepts. It reminded me of Passengers, only with a galaxy wide apocalyptic event triggering the interstellar travel. Very cool.
The beginning felt fast paced. You gave just enough context to understand the situation, but left things somewhat vague which kept things interesting. When I exit the ship, it’s an exposition dump. The story slows down here because it’s all questions and no action. My recommendation is to still keep things vague, limit how many questions can be asked, and then get to some action.
I really liked the story concept and you did a great job of painting a vivid picture of the world.
Thanks for checking it out! I didn't realize it felt like an exposition dump, I'll see what I can do about that, I'd like to keep much of it vague or give the player the chance to figure it out for themselves, maybe. Thanks for the compliments and feedback.
Very nice. It reminds me of Encounter with Tiber, with nods to Planet of the Apes and 2001: A Space Odyssey amongst others.
SPOILERS:
On thing that seems strange to me, is why the 2758 TERN crew would have a kid and doom it to such an existence, since they are the ones who feel so certain this is the last star and it is on its way out. The same people who want to kill you and your crew for batteries, are somehow happy to waste energy on raising a child in a doomed world.
Thanks for checking it out!
For the record, that's a great icon, slightly cursed. SPOILERS AHEAD. Probably should have been marking them in my other posts, too. Oops.
To address the Paradisaea crew, they've kind of accepted their life on the planet and are satisfied with it, despite it being so short. In my mind, the kid came about as either an accident or a decision that probably got a lot of backlash from the rest of the crew. They've been stranded there for a few years, and lots of things can happen when you've got a lonely group of people just trying to lead a good, short life. While I do agree that it sounds pretty contradictory and hypocritical of them, some of them are willing to allow the Iorata crew to join them, even though there are people who still want to keep the batteries for themselves. I'll see what I can do to make things make a bit more sense, thanks for bringing it up.
Why thank you! It's a pepefication of the default icon that itch assigns to everyone, so it's definitely supposed to be cursed xD
It makes sense that opinions in the crew would differ, since they did indeed also respond diversely to your arrival. Please don't feel pressured to change anything on my account, that's not at all what I intended when I brought it up. It's great just the way it is - my second favorite submission to the jam, in fact.
Definitely not pressured, there were many things I wanted to do but couldn't due to time constraints. I can't say what it if I'll change everything I mention here, but there are definitely a lot of things I've gotten feedback for that I agree with, mainly to do with explaining things just a tiny bit more. I do plan to expand the story more, without making drastic changes to plot.
Interesting theme interpretation, reminds me of the poem "Darkness" by Lord Byron. I played through a few times, but there's still things about the endings that I don't quite get (e.g. in one playthrough I chose "I'll stay and wake them" and the crew members woke but later died semi-mysteriously; in another ending, they didn't wake up. I'm not sure if this is related to a choice I made?) Overall, an interesting story and one of the more complete narratives that I've played so far in this Jam (not that I've played that many games yet, mind you).
Thanks for checking it out! :D
To clear a few things up, and spoilers, I guess: The two endings you experienced both have a 50/50 chance of being chosen per playthrough. I couldn't figure out how to include them both naturally in the time I had so I set a dice roll. The idea made sense to me at the time because it would fit the issue of simply not knowing whether they'd wake up or not, but I think I'll have to go back and either remove one of those endings or make them rely more on your choices. Also, the intention wasn't to make their deaths be mysterious (they're supposed to kill themselves) so I'll have to work on that. This is my first jam and I honestly wasn't very sure how explicit I could be with their deaths, as suicide is a very sensitive topic but fitting for the situation, I feel.
Ah, I see! Makes sense.
This definitely gave off Alien/s vibes. The tech language feels believeable; I don't feel like I need to understand it all to get the gist, the story isn't slowed down by it, if that makes sense? I get the sense of the PC, with an edge of melancholy, which fits the themes, I think. Options are generally clear to me. I didn't realise I was permanently saying goodbye to the settlement option; thought I'd linger around after dealing with my ship first. I liked the dialogue at the end with Ripley (I chose to stay awake on my ship); it was interesting to see how they talk to each other. I think the theme got a little lost in my playthrough. There's a part I also liked where there was a series of options in quicker succession, which worked really well to make me uneasy about what was going on. Lastly, I liked reading the logs, I think it helped to give more of a sense of the situation/world, not too complex or too broad, just focused on the ship which was the priority.
Thanks for checking it out! I can definitely add something later on to flesh out the camp more. In all honesty, I was rushing a lot when it came to some of the endings as I was running low on time. And yeah I was a bit worried the theme got a bit lost in the walls of text, as it mainly has to do with the phenomenon happening out in space but I don't think I put in nearly as much information about it as I could/should have.
Very well written. Love the idea of The Blink being this mysterious 'thing'
Thanks for checking it out, it means a lot :D