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Infinite Lives's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Theme (How well the game fits the jam's theme) | #2 | 3.705 | 3.705 |
| Fun (Overall enjoyment) | #3 | 3.432 | 3.432 |
| Overall | #4 | 3.358 | 3.358 |
| Uniqueness (Originality of the game) | #5 | 3.500 | 3.500 |
| Balance (Speed of the game) | #6 | 2.795 | 2.795 |
Ranked from 44 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
Really nice game, and it fits the GameJam theme perfectly! Well done! As others have mentioned, the early game feels quite slow for me, with not much to do. It would have been great to speed up this part for the submission.
Will there be any updates after the GameJam?
it's a pretty good game, but not sure why you chose that thumbnail for it, since that never appears in the game
It appears in the 4th tab, albeit quite muted
Now that I've gotten to what feels like end game I can give my full thoughts:
Uniqueness: This game has what I feel like is a new and unique "puzzle" section in the middle when it comes to maximizing Lunarity for the Rebirth upgrades. I see many games do the AntimatterDImensions "studies" thing where you have a whole array of upgrades and you can only buy so many and the puzzle is to figure out what the most efficient set is, which always feels like a puzzle that is too difficult to solve because there's just so many variables at this point.
In this game instead, the puzzle section happens earlier so there's less variables, and instead, it's about playing the game a little differently rather than solving for which set of available upgrades combos the best. How can you get to the 1e6 stress in a way that lets you still Learn enough times before dying. It's not obvious at first, but once I figured it out, it's a much more enjoyable "puzzle" than maximizing a set of complex upgrades.
Theme: I feel like the theme comes online far too late. It took a couple real life days to get there. I think you could introduce the concept of Solsperson/Lunesperson as soon as the Rebirth menu becomes available. It will add an interesting bit for the player - The Lunarity bonus to Solspeople will make them feel like the better option initially, then when you unlock Learning you'll see the benefit of Lunespeople and your priority shifts.
Fun: The "chance" to lose Influence upgrades is what made me stop. I went 5 rebirths in a row, buying a Settlement each time and immediately losing it. It made it feel impossible to build up to bigger numbers. It also means that I feel like I can't ever spend a life just farming Lunarity. I ALWAYS have to farm knowledge because I will lose the upgrade that lets me farm the Lunarity in the first place.
The theme definitely comes a little bit late yes. I originally intended it to be much earlier but I got too carried away with the duality between stress and "other things" that I didn't really come back to the concept until there was little time left. There was an additional duality I wanted to visit about choosing to fight for equality between lunes and sols people, or *not doing that*. This is implemented extremely roughly at the end of the game
The settlements are frustrating indeed--they came on the last day of development and I didn't really bother balancing them. It's probably quicker to get the e7 lunarity without them and instead just getting as many quick resets as possible (There should be a label that says "the game isn't balanced beyond this point" when they appear but perhaps it's not implemented correctly.)
Really neat concept. I agree with some comments that some of the rebirths felt a little like a struggle in the middle - though the balance of "real life time" to "lunarity generation" was interesting - sometimes it was faster to Dubious an extra time just to hit the stress cap even though idling out would have maximized the lunarity per rebirth.
I'm also apparently stuck at Knowledge, because pressing the Learn button a single time sends me to like e11 stress. and it looks like I need to Learn 10 times in a single life before I can get a single upgrade? Not sure what I'm doing wrong there.
There are multiple upgrades that seem innocuous but greatly increase stress (just as in real life!). You have to figure out how to avoid them while still reaching 1e6 stress to unlock education in a reasonable time
I finally figured it out. I had thought the stress multipliers applied to only Work, not to *everything*. Neat balancing trick to get just enough stress multiplier but not too much.
Pretty interesting and with a nice complexity but it felt really slow. You barely feel any progress with every life.
That's odd-- I thought I'd balanced the game so that nearly all lunarity upgrades were attainable within 3 rebirths at most. Perhaps you're buying too many copies of "dubious" each rebirth (Someone mentioned that 3 was the sweet spot for quick progress)
If not, the solution is probably just to idle a bit more. The balancing is quite off since I let the game run while I developed it to save time, which probably contributed to this issue a fair bit
Concept is solid, I enjoyed exploring it at the beginning. But the balance is off -- rebirths are pretty samey, just to get a little bit of lunarity. When I started my fourth rebirth I realized how slow everything was going and that the hidden unlocks were all speed-related upgrades that would take quite a lot of playtime to get to, so I lost interest.
I'm curious about the two remaining locked tabs, but I don't think I'll get to them.
The balance is definitely somewhat off, but it's influenced quite heavily by your strategy (One mistake some people make is getting "dubious" too much quite early on, which easily tanks lunarity gain)
It would probably be best to play this concurrently with other games though, since it is still admittedly quite slow. This was how balancing was done when I was developing the game
Being able to work with space or enter is very nice.
This feature is actually something built into webpages-- pressing enter will click the currently active button.
(This also means the game would be significantly harder on mobile, but the UI is not designed for mobile at the moment)
It is!? That is amazing!
Enter currently works, but currently all buttons that need to be repeat clicked are toggles, so enter will keep toggling them on and off, which makes them work at half speed