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A jam submission

Endless Iterations: GrindboxView game page

A short PICO8 incremental game
Submitted by ZettaSimp — 9 hours, 51 minutes before the deadline
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Endless Iterations: Grindbox's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Uniqueness (Originality of the game)#63.6433.909
Balance (Speed of the game)#102.4572.636
Fun (Overall enjoyment)#102.5702.758
Overall#102.6332.826
Theme (How well the game fits the jams theme)#141.8642.000

Ranked from 33 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

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Comments

Jam Host

I was enjoying playing but I fear I really hurt myself doing some of Rin’s upgrades, and I think it’ll take many days before I can actually afford to characterize them again. Apparently there’s a ton of different endings here, and that’s really cool to hear! The game has a surprising amount of context for the pico-8 limitations, but I fear the kinda ambiguous descriptions and generally confusing mechanics are preventing me from enjoying it enough to seek out each ending.

Developer

I'm glad you enjoyed playing as much as you did at least, and I'm well aware of the descriptions issue. I tried to lean into pico8's screen size limitation rather than implement an ugly hover text box for everything in the game, but it ended up being a more annoying cryptic rather than an amusing one. While I don't know what specific upgrade you're referring to with Rin, judging from your description, I can take a pretty good guess as to the route you opted for. I couldn't add more content due to the jam restrictions, but a prestige mechanic for ruined save files to make restarting less painful is an idea I've toyed with. Thank you for your feedback, I greatly appreciate it. 

how many routes are there?

Developer

5 different endings, one for each conflict, and two secret endings. That being said, gameplay changes significantly based on which characterization you choose for the hero, and moderately for the rebel.

Like the twist on theme, though the game as a whole was rather boring. It is fun in the start, but it quickly hits a wall. There are also many upgrades you must take one between multiple options, with no way to reverse them, which I don't particularly enjoy with no way to see if I've made a mistake until afterwards. In fact my choices may have been the reason I met the wall in the first place, but I'll never no due to how irreversible they are

Developer

Yeah, I kind of figured that would be the case. The combination of descriptions being hard on pico8 and balance being difficult between multiple gameplay routes was a poor choice for a game jam. I wanted the routes to be irreversible to better match my interpretation of the theme, but have generally failed at balancing them to maintain enjoyable gameplay. Thanks for the feedback!