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I like this! I feel like I came to it pretty late as there were already quite a lot of useful notes, but not so much in the way of supplies. I hope my journal helps future players as I think I may have stumbled across something important.

This is kind of picky for something that was made for a game jam, but I'm not a fan of the "click on a weapon item to use it" style of interaction: at one point I ended up guzzling a whole bunch of energy pills instead of stabbing a zombie because I hovered over the wrong thing while looking somewhere else. I think it would be better to drag weapons to a left hand or right hand slot and then left or right click to use the relevant attack.

The tutorial also feels like overkill. I wanted a quick look just to check the controls, but ended up locked into a lengthy (and as far as I could tell unskippable) sequence that went into way more detail than I found necessary - especially as much of what it explained seemed apparent just from poking around in the game. The whole thing feels pretty intuitive! Because of that, I think you could get away with just a little "cheat sheet" - perhaps with more detail available behind a "next" button for anyone who wants it.

Those are trivial complaints, though. All in all, this is a pretty spectacular result for two weeks of work!

Thanks for playing :)

The click to use weapon thing is the most complained about thing about the game - I got comments about it at the mid-way point too. I did it just to avoid having to add another system - I already wasted a load of time adding the crafting system which is almost entirely non-functional! (it's just used for part of the story).

It also meant that it was very easy to add new items - every item optionally has a "use" which is independent of everything else - so a key implements its use to open doors, an apple implements its use to fill the hunger bar, and weapons implement their use to kill nearby zombies. This saved some time when I needed to fill the world with stuff.

I hope to return to this idea and I will include a proper equipment system then.

I was also not sure about the tutorial. I was concerned that if people didn't know that zombies and items are degradable and non-replacing then they'd treat it like any normal survival game and just waste everything, and people didn't realise at first how to e.g. shoot a zombie - so I included that. But I agree the tutorial is quite long with a big information dump - maybe it could have been handled better with some in-game tips the first time you play.


Did you notice the tutorial uses the character that you picked? I was quite proud of that :D

Yes, I did spot that! I also liked that you could actually move during the relevant bit of it.