Huh... this was something else... in a fantastic way, of course! Turning "rolling back the clock like all those Baldur's Gate saves" into a core game mechanic, while needing to figure out the timing and ways to make loads of money (and also getting a significant lecture the first time through from Ame, who knows full well you can just roll back the clock after taking in her MIT Series lecture on all her intel (how long did she spend here in true time wtf)) -- is just such a cool concept for a game!
- I really appreciate the fluidity of the pixel animations, thought they were swell!
- The casino-goers, though few, were fun to interact with! I do wish there were more of them, and more I could see roam around.
- I get that Hitman-style vibe during just the mission enter screen where you get the immersive briefing docs and details, which hints to me that Zecret Mission could well become a multi-part series if it continued on
- The audio work -- mixing, design, composition, and atmosphere -- is just superb for the theme. I strongly appreciate Cecilia's ability to VA and even perform a clip of a cover (where's the full OST, come on ayo), as the licks and the core swing motif super-added to the immersion and was extremely catching to listen to!
- I quite liked the boss fight semantics, but I do echo the same concerns the others captured. It is fun to see time battles, though!
The others covered a variety of bugs, and I induced a number of them myself with rapid last-hour roulette rollbacks, breaking UIs and smashing engineers' dreams of stable features (worth noting this was in web build)... including the following extras:
- I managed to break the roulette UIs so chips would still show money on them even though they were cashed/invalid
- During the sus calculation across multiple roulette table results (I'd have to dnSpy to confirm this), it seems to evaluate whether the player broke through the sus meter at each turn -- so even if your net sus meter was below the threshold of 100, if you spiked over it with an intermediate result, you will get trapped in the Ring of Ikemen Clock Butlers (am I the only one who sees Daaku in all of these?)
- While doing this rapid rollback, I did go and bet 400k on Adam Saddler for the second ("final", since the third was bugged to occur past midnight) race -- but didn't see that cash out to me at all... this was after a few times rapidly going between the states for that, unsure if there's a event trigger or future that I'm breaking under the hood LOL
- The first time I reached the 11:59 moment without being in the boss room, I listened on in horror as I heard the `AudioSource.Play` calls spool in real time, and the rapid cacophony of audio sources briefly turned the audio to a Junji Ito-level of ambience and static... before going back to normal as those sources finished out (are those pooled?) and the wails of the damned faded away into the background...
I would be stoked to see this morph and evolve into a broader storyline, possibly even tracing Zeta's origins in this alternate timeline. I'm wondering what other core elements you could use / add over time to spool up the gameplay -- different tools you can select and bring to the mission are one thing, side objectives that net meaningful rewards beyond points (whether in-mission or beyond) could be another.
Thank you for submitting, gang! 🙇♂️