This is cute, and it's a nice little puzzle that takes some thinking and strategy but is also not too brain-breakingly difficult.
G.C. Katz
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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.
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.
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.)
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.
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 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.