Thank you for the immense amount of feedback, we sincerely appreciate every bit of it and will consider every aspect of it for future game jams and other games.
For our second game jam, we thought about implementing much more and improving upon our previous mistakes, but most importantly we tried to have as many self-created assets as possible, during the time of the game jam. As a team of two, we did try to narrow down the scoping due to the amount of time available but was unfortunately very difficult to keep in our own scope... the life of a student and part-time weekend jobs is honestly quite dragging.
As team Twin Hydro, we do like to aim above our very own expectations and satisfaction requirements, but it's to be quite the detriment to a complete jam. We'll definitely try to plan better in the future.
For the narrative, we wanted to create an engaging dialogue between the two characters, but like the lack of text objectives, subtitles, tooltips, sound feedback, game balancing and testing, audio balancing, we approached these challenges at the last possible moment of the game jam.
At the end of the game, we wanted to allow the player to have multiple choices to choose from which will all lead to different kinds of endings like:
1. Destroy and Disable the AI (but then the player goes with him and dies alongside him).
OR
2. Keep the AI activated to continuously study and learn from the humans.
We also wanted to pace the player to avoid any overlaps of dialogue by either implementing a skip dialogue function or just simply make a long passage for the player to walk in at the start and/or the very end. As per the end of the game, due to the time limitations, we used an old-fashion way of ending the game, by displaying a black screen with one final voice-line and once it finishes, the player would've automatically be returned to the main menu but some unfortunate responsibilities consumed this issue, forcing it's way to an unforeseen bin of bugs. So yes, the unfortunate black screen was the end, after all, the only way out of it was to quit the game as the 'MAIN MENU' in the game menu button also wasn't able to return to the menu. A very simple fix was required, but unfortunately, it wasn't noticed.
For the narrative feedback, we wanted to display the dialogue text at the bottom, while also displaying the persons' or AI's name, let the AI react if the player falls in the water or gets shot by the player, keep statistics that may interfere with the player's hud during the game to joke with the player or to tease the player.
We fully agree with you regarding the flow of the narrative and we admit entirely to the fact that the overall narrative is sluggish and not engaging at all with the player. We definitely make sure to squeeze in more time for narrative.
Thank you once again for all the spectacular response and in-depth feedback, it really helps us to understand what we're delivering for all the gamers out there. Thank you for hosting this game jam, it was great fun!