Definitely a neat concept, and less awkward to pick up than I thought it would be once I started playing. It would be interesting to see the concept developed further, like adding in puzzles that require you to use your bag to weight down switches and stealth sections where you can't afford to shoot your gun.
I seem to have hit a wall though: The exit stairs don't appear to be functional. I managed to loot everything and kill every guard but there didn't seem to be anything else I could do after that and the game didn't show any popup or further instructions. Also, for some reason if you've got a gun drawn and a gun holstered they only seem to share 1 bullet between the two (if you shoot the first gun, you'll only be able to throw the second).
Love the in-depth review, thank you very much. :)
Puzzles were scrapped due to lack of time, but could definitely work with either the bag or just any items really, possibly under time pressure. The stealth sections were also considered, but of course, we didn't manage. I'm thinking simply having a radius around the player where they are heard, for starters. And some proper patrol routes.
The holstered gun "sharing" the bullet was at first done sort of purposefully to adhere more closely to the theme of one bullet, but we later agreed that it's kind of... a stinky pile of poo.
Did you hit the wall trying to exit level 1 into level 2? In that case it's just that currently you can step off the stairs during the fade to black and if you do, it doesn't transfer you to level 2.
If you hit the wall after demolishing the entirety of level 2, I first of all salute you, and second of all, yes, there should be a popup. It's even in the game. But some trigger got broken along with a bunch of other stuff because when the itch.io servers started having a panic attack, so did we. Well, maybe a little one. Anyway, here is your well deserved ending:
Ok so I just revisited it, and it looks like the issue is that if you die and use the pause menu to retry, the exit becomes bugged and unusable. So I had gotten stuck at the end of level 1 at first due to that bug.
I have now successfully gotten through the full game, killed every guard, and looted everything I could (including my hand). I actually really like being able to combo a big group of guards using the pistols dropped by each one you kill! It'd be even more satisfying to pull off if they had smarter AI to contend against, but I def understand sticking to simpler stuff for a jam..
As for the shared bullet issue, I don't think it'd be a problem if bullets were a separate item on their own, but since they're built into the guns it essentially means you lose a bullet when you fire a gun while holstering another and that just doesn't make sense.
Also, I know you can't fix any of this for the jam but here's a few more things I noticed, in case you folks plan to revisit this later:
1. The menu interface isn't consistently responsive, and sometimes you have to hunt around for where on the screen you need to click to interact with it. From what I can tell, it appears the click detection doesn't account for world rotation.
2. Resetting through the menu doesn't reset your loot count.
3. You can mute the music from the pause menu but it doesn't seem like you can re-enable it.