Thanks for the play, feedback and rating! I put a lot of effort into polish, and even though it was a small game it took a lot of effort. I realized a week in (I did art the first week) that the design was pretty linear and easy. I couldn’t do much about it by then so just stuck with the design from day one. Worst, case, people don’t get stuck.
You are 100% right on the shielding and being the solution before the obstacle. I feel like the design suffered under the weight of just trying to make and implement the game. Next time!
re: voice lines. There are like 129 lines. Most are 1-2 lines long and they were recorded as a “line”. Something the player would say, then pause. Coule be 1 line, 2, 3, 4, whatever. I just imported them into a voice[] array in Unity. I used the index as the id for the file (and it coincided with the script, so I just played line 29, for example). Lip sync was nothing special. Just had a 6-7 frame “talk” animation with the head separate and several frames of mouth position. When I played a voice line I just played that animation for the length of the voice ogg file so at least the player stopped talking when the voice did. Cheap and easy and good enough.
re: my engine. It largely held up well for the things I’d tested before the jam. But I ran into a lot of instances where “uh oh, I have no way to lock a door/exit”, and things like that. But mostly it held up. I probably lost 2 days to coding new things, or having bugs or whatever. Couple hours here and there. Some things were 15m fixes and easy and some caused me grief. I did the jam as a reason to stress test the engine and see if I could make something more ‘real’ with it.
I’m pleased overall.