itch.io

But you can't beat the game with just the knife, the journal, and the play--if you have only those three items, it won't warn you that you need more evidence, but you get stuck at the "what happened after the mutiny started" stage and none of those three items will get you past there. That's a softlock state.

Tried this new build and it works and I got to the end, yay!

I will note that it's still possible to softlock, though--you're only warning people that they need to find the knife, the journal, and the play, but you need the other clues (the music, the locket, etc) to finish the game.

Vampire VNs are popular right now, but it's also a very crowded field, and I don't think this one is going to stand out--the characters and plot feel very well-trodden. I also think the visuals need work. I do like the options that let you control people's emotions, though.

These instructions are helpful; I had absolutely no idea I had to move the map with WASD. However, there still seem to be several features that aren't working or I don't know how to use them--namely, StellarCulture and StellarScience aren't building anything and I don't see any option to select what they should build, and I also don't know what researching new tech or culture would accomplish.

I also found this bug where it won't let me exterminate the planet even though I have enough soldiers.

Well, I have all three of those items, but I get to "what happened after they turned on each other," I've tried all the items I have and none of them work.

I'm not entirely sure this one is running properly? When you open it, there's a big pile of sprites all on top of each other in the middle of the screen.

I do love me some 4x games, but what I'd like clarity on here is how much the final game is going to look like this prototype. What you have here right now is basically a resource management/cookie clicker game--you're managing math to maximize number values. In the final game, will you actually be flying spaceships around to the various planets, marching little armies against your enemies, etc? Or do you conceptualize it still fundamentally being about balancing numerical values?

Tried it with just the Fish rune and it went perfect! Once I knew that a lot of the answers were just going to be single runes I was able to figure them all out, and I didn't have any trouble with the carving.

I'm really liking where this is headed--I like the characters a lot (the character art is so good). I'll be excited to see the whole thing!

This was a fun little mystery. The writing is funny and the characters feel very distinct and memorable. Lots of fun touches like the skeleton parrot. And I actually really enjoy a breezy, sketchy art style. And I do appreciate having extra health so that it's not an instant game over if you choose the wrong clue.

The thing I'm not a huge fan of (and I know that similar games like Paradise Killer also do this) is that if you don't find all the clues, it softlocks the game at the end. It might be nice to either a) warn you "are you sure you want to continue, you don't have all the clues yet" or b) allow you to leave the end scene and go look around the ship some more.

Nice clean visuals and the implementation feels very smooth. And I certainly appreciate that you made it procedurally generate random valid mazes. I'm unclear on what the strategy is meant to be, though--it seemed like all I could do was pick a direction and it was either right or not, and how fast I got to the end was just luck.

(Sorry, I had a couple of screencaps attached but Itch didn't like em. Should have saved em, that's on me.) Yep, I clicked on the runes in the book to place the stencils on the wood, and then I carved over them with the gouge using my tablet, and I thought I did a very careful job. But it's super high praise that I gave it so many tries--I very, very much would not have tried a mechanic 5 times in a row if I didn't think the game was very good overall.

(Out of curiosity, is the answer Locate + Fish or Locate + Fish + Love? And do they need to be that order on the board?)

The physics here feel quite well-implemented and the whole thing felt, well, immersive. I definitely felt the pressure on as your oxygen ticks down and goes from green to yellow to red. Plus picking up ocean plastic is a great theme. One thing is I wasn't sure how you know when the decompression stops were supposed to happen and I just ended up ignoring those messages.

Also, possible bug: I got to the surface and it said "You survived the dive" but then the oxygen kept counting down and it said "you died" a few seconds later.

*ETA: My trouble was just that I was carving the wrong runes. Once I carved the right rune I didn't have any trouble with the mechanic.*

Now this is really impressive. The interface is so smooth and polished, the art is beautiful, and the premise is unique and appealing. Super professional all over! I really got drawn in.

I just couldn't get the wood carving to work, though. It's tough to draw very precise shapes with a mouse, and I don't have any sense of how precisely I have to trace the line for it to count. I tried it 5 times and he rejected them all, and I don't know whether it was the symbols, the order, or my tracing job.

It would help if you started off with a practice round where you carve just one rune and it tells you exactly which one, so you can practice tracing.

(Possible bug: When you put down "locate + fish + love", "fish" jumps from the middle to the left. Not sure whether that was why he kept rejecting my carvings.)

Great to hear--I know just getting it running during the jam is an accomplishment in itself and there usually isn't time for tweaking stuff like how the colliders work.

This is a great witty premise. I like a lot of things here--the writing feels sharp and fun, the wacky pizza ingredients, and the van's animation is very quirky. I liked the balance of map movement to pizza making. Plus you've just created a big scope of game for a weekend jam.

Two suggestions. First, I'd like to have some hints about what's going to happen at the next node, Slay the Spire-style--for instance, maybe you can only set up shop at certain nodes and so nodes are either shop locations or random events.

Second, I could have done without the physics during the pizza minigame--it was hard to judge how to drop the ingredients in the right place, and I wasn't sure how squarely on the pizza it had to be to count. If you want to keep the physics I'd like it to be real clear where you're dropping things. I'd also like a visible timer so I know how long I have.

Overall, nice work though!

I think there's a lot of potential here, particularly the sleep to restore vision and the entity that creeps up on you while you sleep. This build is pretty rough, though--I got stuck in a wall.

For a game like this, I think the crucial selling point is whether the combat feels good. If you get the combat physics to feel really smooth and polished and fun to use, that's what will hook people.

Art looks nice. You should be sure to change the name of your project in the game engine settings, though, because right now it says stuff like "Installing 'created in GameMaker'."

Great conceit and nice professional execution. The transition from 2D to 3D feels smooth. I particularly like how the plants and environments look in 3D. Nice music too. I do think the levels could stand to be trickier--IME fans of sokobans and similar games (and I would classify this as similar to a sokoban) play a lot of these types of games and are going to expect uber-tricky, complex puzzles.

Unfortunately that's the absolute loudest the voice lines can be  without causing clipping artifacts. I'd like to hire an audio engineer to find a workaround to address this, but won't be able to unless secure funding. We are a small team funded entirely out of pocket so we're operating under a lot of limitations.

I'm glad you appreciate it; this story is pretty special to me even though it's just a short game.

Oh, it definitely has an intentional message! Thanks for playing.

My best combo was 100,000!

And glad to hear it--of course no one has time to fiddle with balance during the jam, that's totally a post-jam thing.

Tightly designed mechanics, plays very well. Could stand to up the difficulty a ton though, I mean...

It's my friends' question, not mine, but I'm sure they will appreciate your answer.

Thank you! Yeah, those old books were a big influence. And thank you for the video, I will share it!

Some of my friends are asking whether the no paid games rule applies to a) Pay What You Want games and b) games released free during the jam but changed to paid later.

Friend of the Forge Kamataya becomes the first to try out our new demo release!

Very appealing art and I enjoyed getting to know the characters! Could use a copy edit to catch the typos, though.

So much suggested by a few short words! Great job!

I'm glad you went back and fixed that bug! (Centimane, messing with your game build, what a dick.) I went back and gave it another try and I liked it--piecing together the different rituals is fun, and you did a good job of building up a tense atmosphere. I couldn't figure out what "burn the saints to embers" was supposed to mean, though.

You're gonna love the full version: The paintings are all going to be real analog artworks in different media (oil, watercolor, and egg tempera). I'm hoping to commission different artists for exactly the reason you mention--to give each character a distinctive art style.

About the roots of Surradia: I'm drawing pretty closely from the women associated with surrealism, especially the whole muse thing (and pushback against it) and the interest in magic and alchemy. We'll definitely dive more into that in later rooms!

If you are interested in this topic you'll love reading about the three real artists that my fictional artists are based on: Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, and Leonor Fini. They all lived absolutely fascinating lives.

Thanks for your thoughts, and for being such a champ and playing all the entries in the entire jam!

It's real tough entering a coop game into a jam--I finished all the other entries in less time than it took to corral another player and find a time when we could both sit down and play this. (I do a lot of my jam playing in the middle of the night.)

The networking worked perfectly, though, and I know how tricky that is. In fact all the implementation was very smooth and polished. But when we actually did get together and play, our experience was:

Match 1: Died 10 seconds in. Neither of us is sure which one of us got killed, or by what.

Match 2: Wandered around looking for things until the timer ran out. Didn't manage to find anything except the music box.

And yeah, that's probably just us being dumbasses--maybe if we played Minecraft, we'd be more used to this type of game and we'd be less bad at it--but that was our experience.

I found the puzzles here interesting, and the time skip mechanic is used effectively. Short but engaging.

Ah, OK.

The reason it felt like an error is that presumably the paper and the notecard both also have ink on them, and so it seems like the effect should be caused by submerging them in the bucket.

Well, not the music. But everything else.

You wrote that whole thing in a day? Daaaaaaang!

The mystery here is super meticulously designed, and the deductions are incredibly challenging. In particular it was interesting working out the order that things happened in and who went in and out of the various rooms in what order. The prose, though, needs a serious haircut--it could be solidly 1/3 the length for the same experience. Its tone was kinda patronizing too, particularly how it kept trying to convince me that I'd really have more fun playing on easy mode. (In fact I found Purist mode easier, because the clues weren't buried in so much text.)

But hey--it's only a first draft! Trim some weight, trust your players to handle the deductions on our own, and a good time will be had by all.