itch.io

Honestly, I don't exactly know how to use it either. There's this construction with the 6-shaped circle attached to a star-shaped one to create a drum, but other than that it's mostly experimentation for me too. As long as you're having fun and maybe even have it sound good too, that's all that matters right?

I must say that the dialogue trees are neatly organized. It's interesting to see how you've set that up. Seems like an effective and flexible system. The rest of the code looks good too.

Can you add the github link to the game page? So other people who're interested can find it?

This game reminds me of games like Oregon trail. Its fun to play, though I had a feeling it missed a bit of direction or a goal. There's a lot of dialog for a jam game. I found the event that gives max everything (1000 gold, 50 cannons, etc.). That was a trap. The increased food usage killed me within the next 20 days. Is this game open source? I'd love to take a look at how a branching/dialog based game like this is implemented.

It took me a while to figure out you could attack the other characters. The aesthetic certainly stands out.

That bug of crashing the game when clicking mercury too fast, is still in there. It happened as the max button breaks at a certain point and just shows 0. Got to about 100D or something? I spend way too much time on this.

I missed that I could see the controls with Esc. But after that, it's quite fun. Having to balance ammunition collection with combat makes it interesting.

I managed to get onto the roof of one of the buildings! Was this inspired by the crazy eats mini-game in Yakuza 8?

This is all I get to see, a single short line. I can make the line shorter/longer with the A-Z keys, and change it to a square wave with Space. The slider on the top does not seem to do anything. Is it bugged for me and is there more to this?

Ooh, I like this one. Thanks!

Unfortunately the robot factory is broken. It requires 500 power to operate, but there is no building that allows increasing the power cap.

It's a Godot 4.beta10 game. Which has the necessary issues with web builds.

The technical reason is that Firefox does not yet officially support this header:

Cross-Origin-Embedder-Policy: credentialless

The workaround is opening it in a new window. I uploaded a new built that advises to try that option.

I agree that it needs more feedback. I focused too much on the visuals and not enough on the actual gameplay. The goal is indeed to change their orbit so they burn up in the atmosphere, without burning up yourself. The game is kind of broken though, as sometimes debris spawns in an orbit that already crosses the atmosphere. Those are still added to your score. If you are too far away, debris can despawn even though you've correctly changed its orbit so it would've gone into the atmosphere. Anyway, great that you enjoyed flying through space.

This game is indeed quite zen.

Interesting puzzle game. The double links made the later levels a lot harder, but I still managed to solve them all.

I like the concept, but had a hard time controlling the slime.

There's a description of the game's controls on the game's page. See https://bcmpinc.itch.io/orbital-garbage-collector

That probably means you ran out of energy, or it overheated, or maybe it short-circuited. It's part of the game to figure out why it got stuck.

I frequently had that everything on screen would just disappear or that I'd randomly died. Another issue is that I had no idea what I was looking at. So the first time I was randomly strolling around and after 40 seconds started to try out stuff like what are those glowing lines along the walls. Can I touch them? At some point I saw question mark boxes so I tried to pick up those, but nothing happened. Or I encountered a sign of other live moving around. Should I touch those? I died, so apparently not.

For you the developer it is clear what everything is, but not so for the player. You have to somehow communicate this to the player. Either by using concepts that they are already familiar with, like spikes and pits or scary looking enemies. By outright telling them, or by making sure they experience what they are early in game.

I considered that, but the problem is that I cannot properly estimate it. For example, if you'd try to move from the end point to the artifact, travel time would be infinite, but you couldn't possibly know without trying.

That cat is so cute <3.

Did you wait for the actions to reach the line where it says "now"? There's quite a bit of lag between scheduling an action and it being executed. This is a core mechanic of the game as the planet is a few light-hours away and thus signals takes a lot of time to travel between you and the rover.

It might also be that while reading the instructions, the rover's battery died. In that case the energy cell would read 0% and the system log would indicate "Energy cell critical. Shutting down". There's a restart button there as well.

Figuring out why the rover is not responding is an intended part of the game, but lacking a proper tutorial section, this doesn't work when it happens right at the start.

Getting the stairs in place was a problem that I was already comfortable with solving. It is the same trick I used to get the pieces of text on the walls together. Though it took me a while to realize that was what I needed to do. Getting up the stairs was easy once I realized that the problem wasn't that I looked away while climbing the stairs. Climbing stairs like that makes absolutely no sense in real life, so it required some out of the box thinking, which is why it's my favorite puzzle.

One thing I missed was a run key. I tried using ctrl for that, but that was a mistake. Ctrl+w is a browser hotkey for closing your window. Though having tighter and shorter corridors as someone else mentioned, might be a better solution.

I was close to winning level 3, but then all my plants died out. For some reason I still managed to win that level. I had no issue with waiting there as I could speed up the time. (Which didn't work as well when there were still plants, as my PC couldn't handle the computational load).

Level 4 and 5 where more challenging, as indeed evolution is out of control. I like the idea. Though might prefer a little more feedback on my actions. When the target crop is the most common, you have no information on what the rest is doing so making corrections becomes impossible. One way to provide more feedback is to have histograms about the length of the plants and the roots.

My strategy was to kill of most plants, then set the parameters to what I believe is best for the target crop and hope for the best.

The artwork for this game is absolutely amazing. The game itself though... there's no way to keep your hp high enough if it gets cut in half every other turn.

Interesting idea, though I feel this game leans to much on luck. If your first tower refuses to go any sensible location its game over in the first round. Maybe if you start out with at least two towers there's still a bit of strategy in there. Might also be useful if the path the enemies take is clear.

I'm a big fan of escape room style games. This mechanic fits that theme really great. The texts on the wall are a nice addition and helpful too as it helps the player get to understand the mechanics of the game. The puzzle where I had to climb back up the stairs had me bumped for a bit. Every time I tried to climb it the stair disappeared beneath me. I did manage to finish the game though. Well done.

I was curious about this game but unfortunately it won't start for me.

Me at world 1: how's this mechanic ever going to become a challenge. Just wait until the timer switched and continue.
Me at world 2: Oh, that's how.

The simple smooth graphic style is great. I had trouble with the bird's hit box being a bit larger than I'd expect, but managed to beat the game in the end.

Tthe keys popping off is great. I got a score of 114. I ignored the function keys as the first time those popped up I hit f5, reloading the page. 

I like the diversity of the puzzles in the game. Having the camera follow the gun and not the robot was a bit tricky at times though.

First time I played it my helper bots went haywire and started planting lots of trees closely next to each other. My browser did not like that. My second play I knew what the goal was and finished the game in a few seconds. I like the idea, though the game needs a bit of tuning so that you have to balance expanding the forest and chasing down checkpoints.

The witty advise of clippy is hilarious. I struggled a lot with the rocket as new popups kept popping up. The invisible cursor, which I expected to be hard was actually quite easy

I finished the game. That's a lot of puzzles you've made in 48h.

The game looks great and the robot feels really responsive. It still needs some kind of goal though, either a score like number of tiles traveresed or a finish. Having different tiles and have them start popping up as you progress in the game would make the game more interesting.

I got a score of 456. As the game does not require the use of a mouse, I'd have preferred if it could be controlled with the arrow keys. Having both available would be even better, so players can choose.

I did the fake 3D thing because I wanted to try it out and I think it looks cool. Initially I also had planned to have more layers, so you could see elevation, but in my tests the difference was barely noticeable, so I scratched that idea. As it currently is, it indeed does not add much to the game. I feared that in 2D the image would be too flat and that you could not make out the edges of the cliffs, but with the shadow in place it works quite well. Here's an image of the 2D map:

Got 43 points. Took a few tries as most games take a while to figure out how to play them, meaning a new game popping up usually results in a game over. I've seen other games in this jam with the concept, but so far this one is the best.

Thanks, the pictures of the different growth stages helps a lot.

I had planned to make multiple scenario's which ramped up in difficulty, so that the player has time to figure out the controls at the start in a level that is basically drive from A to B. Though adding a tutorial popup that explains how to do that is definitely a good idea.

The game is quite complex for a gamejam and I didn't think I would be able to finish it in time. Though I'm glad I tried as I did succeed in implementing the basic idea of the game.