Aww, that's a good idea! Our friends who play-tested early came up with other verbs to try for that. The latest version of the game (on GitHub) supports "apologize", "sorry", "apologize to engineer", and "console engineer". In the current itch-hosted version, at least "sorry" should work. I've filed an issue to add "hug" to a future release: https://github.com/cashpipeplusplus/moonshot/issues/8
For now, we're not updating the itch-embedded version until after voting, to try to keep things fair. But we have continued making improvements to the source and to the auto-updating GitHub-hosted version. Thanks for the idea, and thanks for playing!
I really loved this game. It's beautiful, and the audio is great, too. Well done!
The only thing I struggled with was the "health" concept. I couldn't see a meter anywhere, and the bit in the intro about using your ability on shooting stars never did anything obvious.
I failed to make it to the end, but it was really very well done.
I really enjoyed the audio and the concept, but I was very confused trying to play it. I couldn't tell what I was doing by sliding the tiles around. Some wolves would fall through trap doors, but then they just ran around the bottom. Eventually, it just said "game over", but I couldn't tell why.
I found by chance that I could use the scroll wheel to move the camera back, but it wasn't obvious. And until I did that, I couldn't see the moon. Once I could see the moon, I had a hard time clicking on it precisely enough. Finally, the projected course for the moon was not the course it actually followed.
I loved the music, but I kept getting stuck in one of two ways: either with the astronaut lost off the top of the screen, or stuck on his side somehow.
I can't update the itch version, sadly, but I published an update to the GitHub version which includes a map. In the new version you can get this link in-game by typing "map". Hope this is helpful!
The level with the girl dancing outside Gooby's was so hard, but so satisfying to beat. The graphics and music put in me in mind of Toe Jam & Earl for Sega Genesis, which I loved. Well done!
I see html & js in your repo, so perhaps you should mark the zip as being playable in the browser. Otherwise, I would have to download your zip and host it myself to try it out. I hope that helps!
We had a hard time with knowing when our messages were sent and when they weren't. Sometimes it would show a message I sent, leading me to believe it got there, but it did not. Or vice versa. (My wife and I played in the same room, and then compared notes after.) Was that intentional?
I found that I could resend or reformulate ideas that didn't come through, but without knowing when they did or didn't come through, that was really way too tough.
This story is really interesting. I was enjoying it, but it seems to have hung on me. I filed an issue on GitHub. I hope that helps! Thanks for making this game!
I hear you! Autocomplete would be nice, but sadly, it's really far outside of what this engine offers. To compensate, we tried to provide aliases for things that we thought would be misspelled. For example, we have this line in the source:
Understand "cofee", "coffe", "cafe", and "cofe" as coffee.
I'm glad you enjoyed it, though. I can't think of a higher complement than being anywhere in the same universe as Pratchett/Adams!
My laptop doesn't have an F8 key, so I never figured out the controls beyond WASD. :-( Could you add something to the game page describing the controls a bit?
This was so much fun! It took me some time, but I was able to beat it eventually.
Some things confused me, though.
One was that the aliens would stop moving if I knocked them backward into another alien. So two could gang up on me in a line and I couldn't stop them. And the larger spiders in the "get food rations" room were not affected by the gun at all. Was that all intentional?
The other was changing spacesuits. Did that have an effect other than changing the sprites?
The design doc in your source was incredible. Well done!
I had fun, but I was unable to do anything that involved a right-click. (Using ChromeOS stable and the builtin trackpad.) So I had to get moons placed exactly right the first time. Only going back to menu would clear them.
I really like the graphics and the sound. I had a really hard time with the controls on a keyboard though. (Got stuck in a crater.) I did see your recommendation to use a controller, but I haven't got one. :-(
Ah, a map would be helpful. Inform (the engine/language used) has a way to generate maps, but the output was really bad, IMO. But it wouldn't be hard to make our own. There aren't that many rooms.
I wanted to add background music. In an earlier revision of the source, I had a TODO comment about it, and the web interpreter supports it, but ultimately, we ran out of time. I spent some time digging up classical music recordings with free licenses, but ultimately gave up on that to save more time for the story. We finished the plot the night before the deadline, and I was fixing last-minute bugs the morning of. :-)
This is really fun and weird. I love your writing! And it looks like AOL. My coworkers never even had CDs, much less dial-up. :-) Thanks for creepy nostalgia!
The color-changing puzzle was wickedly hard, and super satisfying to beat.
It took a long time to figure out how to move the "log". I tried picking up several likely-looking things, and it turned out to be the first thing I tried, but I couldn't make it work at first. I have found that this game is generally very picky about being off by a few pixels. If I wasn't completely outside of a square, facing the next one, the action button wouldn't do anything. So that made the controls a bit tricky.
The spade/hoe timing was simply too difficult for me, but it was fun to try. I was able to solve the other three, and they were all really fun! I'm really impressed with the puzzle design.
The audio was excellent. Overall, I liked this game very much! Well done!
