I think there's some elements to this that feel very strong out the gate. The sound fidelity is quite nice for a jam game and the background music is cool, and making it attenuated/reverberated shows attention to detail for communicating the setting to the player with sound.. The artwork looks great and works well with the animations. The slow motion is well done. There are some clear problems though once you get past the nice surface level.
First, being met with a screen full of text immediately on starting play is off-putting. Might be cool to instead break it into several popups that occur with the first few documents you grab? Or something similar to that so it's more broken up and integrated into the gameplay.
Second, I began to notice there didn't seem to be any real consequence for missing an input other than hearing a negative buzz... so I just walked all the way to the end to see what was there. And it's all just the same. This means there's no stakes, not much of a goal other than collecting all the documents, not much reward for progression (other than number go up) and no true impediment to that goal. So the game design needs some work, but I know it's tough to get a lot done under the crunch of a jam. Would be cool to see it more fleshed out. Nice start!
Hey Owen! Thanks for the in-depth review and the positive feedback!
I agree that the infodump at the beginning wasn’t the best idea. We were running out of time and needed to quickly put an introduction and list the controls, so this was the quickest way I could come up with (you’ll see my last game jam game has the same problem). A better tutorial would have been nice, but we didn’t have tome to implement it. We could have put the controls in the description, but just because the controls are in the description doesn’t mean everyone will read them.
When you miss a control three (I think) times with the same agent, you’ll lose because the agent is too suspicious of you. Given more time, I was planning on making the agents interact with each other and share their individual suspicion levels (notice that you have to salute the agents but they never salute each other), but we didn’t get around to that. Do you think it would have been better to just have one one overall suspicion level for all the agents rather than giving each agent their own level of suspicion?
Ah okay I see now what you were going for. Yeah maybe having the agents share suspicion, or possibly the suspicion is per-room. Like you can only fail 2 times per room or something similar. I feel that would also help give the player a sense of reward, because continuing to the next room would give them a reset of suspicion level.