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A jam submission

Lulu and the Asteroid of 100% Guaranteed Doom (TALP)View game page

Submitted by hey Zeth — 16 hours, 51 minutes before the deadline
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Lulu and the Asteroid of 100% Guaranteed Doom (TALP)'s itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Documentation#53.3643.364
Implementation#63.2733.273
Tutorial#73.4553.455
Story#73.8183.818
Writing#73.7273.727
Puzzles#73.3643.364
Overall#73.5003.500

Ranked from 11 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Have you written a text adventure before?

No

What programming language/authoring system did you use to write this game?
Inform 7

Approximately how long did it take to write this game?
4 months

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Comments

I thought this was good fun and it kept me engaged all the way to the end. It's not perfect by any means, and I wrote some notes as I played through in case they're useful. Please don't take these the wrong way, for a first game I think this is a really good effort!

***SPOILER ALERT!!***

The story is fantasy, of course, and quite cliche - and that's in no small part related to the jam's theme - but there's also a lack of realism. Why are there only two objects in the fridge, for example (it could have been well stocked, with just too items that we decide to take out, rather than being almost entirely empty); and why do we need to lie down? There's no rationale presented for this. The tutorial is good, but quite brief and I feel ot could have been integrated into the story better. At one point it suggests "look"ing twice in a row, and just repeats itself as we carry out instructions that involve going to another location. It explains talking to NPCs but without one present. It also mentions a soldier - but why should we have a conversation with a soldier? Is this foreshadowing necessary? And it could have just included abbreviations in initial explanations, rather than separate ones, I think.

I presume the images are AI generated, and it looks like a lot of effort has gone into this - its not easy to get AIs to capture the right feeleing in an image, as well as the detail. Personally I don't like the art style, but I do understand why the images are here.

Regarding the puzzles, I thought they were generally quite straightforward, although there's probably too much use of the Skykeeper and it's not consistent - if the prisoner requires water, then why doesn't spraying him with Aqua Nero work? Risking firing flames at the prisoner is not intuitive, so puzzles like this turn into save loops where the player tries each of the options to see which one works.

t would also have been nice to have had to make it rain to wash the slab and then sunny to read the 'etchings' - i.e. use the weather to clean the map enough to read it. With a bit more signposting.

There's a fair amount of incantation required on some of the puzzles, generally - for instance dropping the string on the deck isn't well signposted at all, especially after giving the string to lulu in the Crow's Nest to be told she isn't interested. As is not being able to move Lulu enough to see the key - this doesn't seem realistic.

Putting the crystal in the stone and slipping the letter under the door could also have done with more signposting and synonyms. It's obvious what to do, but players may well struggle to find exactly the right combination of words.

These are all things that could be a bit more polished, but overall, as I said at the beginning, I enjoyed the game and it kept me interested until the end. I only needed one hint, which was to drop the string on the deck, not in the crow's nest, and so the game zipped along at a nice pace :)

Nice work!

Developer

Hello!

Thank you for your feedback on the game! My thoughts with the skykeeper spells were that the magic is good and automatically targets 'bad' things, therefore safe to use around non-evil entities. For example when you use it in the town square it simply goes into the ground without killing townsfolk. Nevertheless it is violent and destructive, and would not be a good choice to give someone a drink by casting the water spell. I did not really explicitly communicate these ideas in the game though, so fair criticism!

Hi Zeth

I want to get further into this game (especially as it has a cat) but I have struggled to access it as I use a Mac.  I do have a virtual Windows machine on my computer but it's excruciatingly slow, and then trying to get the Glulxe to work on it.... I eventually got there, but then it froze on me and I just couldn't go any further.  I will try again if I have time, but it was more labour intensive than if it had be able to be run in the browser.  How it looked in Glulxe as well, I don't know if it was just my machine, but the text was pretty small, as were the graphics.  I have been enjoying seeing graphics as part of text-based games so it I would be nice if they could be bigger.  I didn't get very far, but I wanted to go further as the storyline intrigued  me.

Developer

Hello!

Thank you for playing the game! I couldn't get it to look right in the browser but at some stage I will revisit and make it browser-friendly. I think in Gluxle you can change the font size of whatever you're playing. As for the graphics, originally they were larger but the feedback I got was that they were too big, so I scaled them back to the size they are now. Sorry if you're finding it difficult to play my game!