itch.io

Thanks! It's intentionally a little harder to read, but illegible was not the intended goal x) It reads: "This page was rudely torn out and stolen by Cpt. J.Kyd on 03/04/70 in an outrage at the increase in postage costs. It was kindly retrieved by D. Bacon, however, the damage still remains"

Wow, thank you so much! These are some great ideas and critiques, we really appreciate it and we'll definitely be referencing this as we work out the next tasks to-do :)

In the original concept sketches, we actually had drawers on the front side of the desk (bottom of the screen) for storing packages, but putting them above the desk would definitely be a better fit both visually and mechanically.

I could see the "lock" button concept visually indicated with push pins holding the item in question down. Currently you can't lock an item in place, but holding L-shift will preserve the current layering of any held object, and holding L-CTRL will push the held object to the furthest layer. That should solve the map layering issue for now!

The 75-cent stamp was only intended to spawn until the player finds/uses it, so that's definitely a bug that it keeps re-appearing every day. I really like the idea of adding it to the roster of stamps available for purchase, or that using it unlocks a different special stamp collection/pack.

You make a good point about not hiding the forecasted route from the player, potentially it could be a one time upgrade (i.e. a calendar or a marine radio). Maybe there could be a Forecast II upgrade where the player additionally gets more info for the week like you mentioned (i.e. "the Yellow route will only be available on Friday this week"). Love the idea of coloured markers as a tool for the player to mark parcels. We've had the art for wooden handled rubber stamps and ink pads done for about...oh geez, almost a year now...but the implementation had a bunch of kinks to work out with the behaviour/mouse-controls and accounting for all the edge-cases depending on what the player would choose to stamp.

I'm so down for small decorative awards for milestones, maybe the starter pack could evolve visually as different milestones are met. After all this testing, I feel like I have the same 13 images burned into my retinas xD

In terms stamps disappearing, the inconsistency of the unused starter stamp pack's postage all disappearing at the end of the day while the purchasable stamp pack's postage remains, doesn't sit well with us. We'll have to workshop this more in the future, as like you said, if they don't refresh at the end of the day, the player would end up with way too many stamps. For now, we'll probably adjust the balance of the stamps you get in the starter pack (more little denominations) and tweak the spawning rules, which should make it a little easier to have the correct amount of postage on hand.

The shop is not well balanced, items should probably be gate-kept, we threw it together as a last minute addition and it definitely needs some love. Same thing with the routes, but we definitely intend to expand on everything: more complex/dynamic rules, more unique shipping options, more parcel variety, NPCs, quests, etc...

...and we also have a bunch of bigger picture ideas we'd love to implement that we think would definitely round out the game. Thanks again for your lovely comment, it means a lot to us that someone took the time to give us such detailed feedback! Glad you enjoyed playing

Thanks for the comment! Colorblind mode is a great idea, we’ll add a unique symbol for each route. You’re spot on with the stamp balance issues, we'll be tweaking the balance as we add new mechanics/upgrades. Currently in the story mode, overweight packages are only possible after day 3, and even then it’s a low chance(10% per package) that one will spawn. We’ll be reworking how that works in a future update – we’ll likely move the large stamps into a stamp pack upgrade, and increase the number of small stamps into the starter pack.

Thanks! We'll definitely be adding some permanent upgrades in the next update, and I'm pretty sure that's a bug -- we'll look into it

That's a great tagline: "it's like if Papers, Please loved you" xD

Yes, a save function is up there on to-do list, no promises on when it'll be implemented though, and we're currently working on a couple permanent upgrades for the next update. Thanks for the upgrade ideas, we'll add them to the list!

We've updated a few things in the new build, let us know if it's still not working

Thanks so much! Glad to hear the bugs are dwindling down, and the easter eggs are being found :'D

We fixed a couple adjacent problems to what you're describing in the last update, where the scripts for returning parcels flung off the desk and the logic for parcels/postage kept overnight just didn't work as intended. Hopefully that'll address your bug report as well, but let us know if it's still an issue and we'll look into it!

Yeah, that bug's been eluding us for a while, but I think we finally caught it. We've added a "discrepancy log" in the last update, so it should be easier for us to tackle these sorts of nasty bugs in the future with screenshots of the unjust fines. Thanks for playing!

Thank you for the lovely comment!

Definitely agree, we intend to do localization eventually, when the game is a lot closer to being done. We’re open to doing that sooner if there is enough interest.

Automatically sorted stamps is a great idea – How would you feel about that being a purchasable upgrade in the shop?

Wow, you outlined pretty much exactly the direction we want to take the game – a good number of these are already in the works. This might just be the motivation we needed to push for the next update :D

Fantastic, thank you -- the video has been very helpful! At a first glance, there are a few things missing that I’d expect to be there, and a few things not behaving correctly:

• The bar above the blue inventory menu should have text on it
• Blue route on the map
• The “Label zoom” should have the stamp on it by default
• The game normally doesn’t let you interact with stuff on the desk when you open the ship inventory
• The blueprint inventory shows the wrong ship
• The desk should get a black overlay when you open the shipping menu
• The route flag is also missing

From what I can tell so far, the initial data that the game expects is not loaded at the start of the game or is somehow being reset to default values. The strange thing is that I know that this data is present in the build, and does not appear to be missing/reset for most people. So, this makes me think that the issue is more specific to your setup.

Here are a few more questions:

• Do you see the same issue if you use private browsing? (CTRL+SHIFT+P on Firefox) If the game works in private browsing – my guess is that it will start working in the regular browser after you clear the cache for itch.io.
• Are you using an old version of the browser? If you are, update your browser to the newest version, and try to play.
• If both of these don’t work, there is a chance that the issue is caused by a Unity bug, and I might be able to fix the issue by building the game in a newer version of Unity – I’ll do that for the next build.

I don't see anything here that looks like a game error here (mostly networks stuff and the game does not do any of that). Would you be able to send another screenshot where you have the scroll bar all the way down? 

Thats unfortunate! Are you playing on the web? If so, do you see any errors in the developer console or would you be able to post a screenshot of it? You can open it with the dev console with CTRL + SHIFT + J (Windows/Linux) or ⇧⌘J (Mac).

XD Congratulations on your savvy business skills! We'll patch this in the next update. Thanks for the bug report!

Hmm... we're currently working on a visual overview in the score screen detailing any incorrectly shipped packages for the next build, hopefully that'll help us catch the bug(s)! Thanks for playing and the feedback :)

Thanks for the comment! We'll add a local save system to the to-do list for the next build.

Unfortunately, not at the moment, the game is still a work in progress.  We intend to release the full game on Steam once it's complete and would love to have it localized at that point.

However, if there's enough interest now, and someone volunteers to translate (neither of us devs speak Chinese unfortunately), we're open to adding language support sooner.

The occasional freezing should not be happening, and we couldn't reproduce the issue on our end. Would you be able to provide any more info? 

Thanks for the feedback,  if you are consistently underpaying,  chances are that going down a row on the price chart will solve your problem. The chart is a bit confusing and we'll be updating it soon.

The "up to weight (g)" column should be more clear with the ranges: the "10 g" cell should read 0 -10 g, "20 g" should read 10.1 - 20 g, etc. So for example, a package weighing 25 g going to Tator Isles would fall in the row marked "100 g" since it's over 20 g and fits in the "up to 100 g" range, and it'd need $0.50 postage to ship.

You can use the scale to do the stamp math :D -- hope that helps!

Couldn't replicate the incorrect destination issue you described, but the game doesn't (yet) explain how that system works either. The colour of the flag in the top left corner of the blueprints denote which shipping route that particular ship/train/etc. is going on -- you can flip through all the current blueprints with the dog-eared button on the bottom right of the shipping menu to find the right route for a particular parcel. Hope that helps!

Successful ending should be possible now! We bugged it out when implementing endless mode :(

I believe you've found a bugged easter egg XD -- congrats!

It turns out we broke more things than we originally thought – just uploaded a new build with fixes for both of these issues. Thanks for the bug report!

whoops! We accidentally deleted the starting postage pack in the new build -- should be fixed now :) and nice! I thought it'd take a little longer for someone to find that easter egg, but I guess I'll just have to make the next one a little trickier...

Yeah, it's honestly hard to read even when it's full screen -- we'll try to update the font on the package labels in the next update. The screen scaling issue is a little more complicated with the pixel perfect camera, but we'll get to it eventually!

Thanks for the bug report, yeah the cargo menu gets a little funky sometimes :( we'll check it out!

Thanks, glad you enjoy playing! The story mode atm is basically just a difficulty ramp, but we're very excited to incorporate actual story threads/questlines into the game (currently planning on releasing those in v1.6).

You're absolutely correct on the gilded postage,  it's a free ticket for any package, nothing else to it. There's no timers in either endless or story mode, and we don't plan on adding them -- chill Papers Please is definitely the vibe :)

Definitely agree, you can expect to see some of those in the next update!

Oh no, unintentional horror game. So you're not getting any packages/letters from the customers at all? Is it possible they're layered under the existing map/book on the desk? Sounds like a bug either way, we can't replicate it on our end so any more info you can give would be great!

Glad you enjoy it! We'll add an endless mode in the next update

It seems like the itch app chooses the old Jam version (we've fixed a few scaling issues since). Could you confirm that you're running  the newest build (v1.4)? We'd love to see a screenshot if you're still experiencing the same issue. We really appreciate the bug report!

Is this for the web build or download? and what's your resolution?

That's our bad, the pricing chart really isn't designed well and we'll be updating it in the next build (hopefully) :) The "up to weight (g)" column should be more clear with the ranges: the "10 g" cell should read 0 -10 g, "20 g" should read 10.1 - 20 g, etc. So for example, a package weighing 25 g going to Tator Isles would fall in the row marked "100 g" since it's over 20 g and fits in the "up to 100 g" range, and it'd need $0.50 postage to ship.

Hope that clears things up and thanks for the feedback!

Game is playable now!

WebGL build doesn't run unfortunately, we figured out the build setting issues a little too late to upload the new one to itch :( We'll be posting the working build after GMTK ratings close, we'd love to hear feedback then!

Yeah, it's unfortunate... we didn't check a box that should've been checked in the build settings -- by the time we noticed, it was too late to upload a new build :(

We'll be uploading it after the jam is done though, hopefully we'll still be able to get some feedback then!

Nice! Was hoping you'd catch it :D

Good point, we'll add alt-keys in the post-jam update, thanks for the feedback!

Thanks for the feedback! You bring up a lot of good points, especially the difficulty scaling/introducing concepts one-by-one. The tiny-text is a by-product of us being stupid and deciding it was a fantastic idea to make our own font. Looking back, I wouldn't recommend. We're hoping to address a bunch of these issues, add some additional mechanics that got chopped, and post a more cleaned-up version outside of the LD submission.

There's no in-game time limit,  but rather the constraint was intended to come from having limited shipping space and having to figure out which packages to reject. Definitely needs a better scaling system though, rather than solely relying on rng.

It was super fun to put together, probably because we absolutely love Papers Please. Glory to Arstotzka!

Glad you enjoyed playing, and thanks again for the post

Weird, glad you got it working!

That's odd, we can't seem to replicate the issue. Not sure what you specifically mean by not working -- does it not cycle a new customer/spawn a new package on your end?

@Jin9310 Try clicking the "next" button to get a new customer. When the "end day" sign pops up, click that as well to continue.