Thanks! When brainstorming we threw out ideas for many more stats to control, like an air meter or money to purchase upgrades. We scrapped them because we didn't want to complicate things too much, but if we decide to keep updating the game, they might be worth considering.
Lots of variety for a jam game! Radiates the same energy as flash games like There Is No Game. I accidentally beat the Y first-try without even knowing what I was doing, but then the options puzzle took me several minutes of trial-and-error.
Almost as frustrating as being a real Twitch mod. I especially liked slash hated how there were always at least two people in chat with similar names, so you had to type out so much more of the name.
I didn't really know what I was doing, I never found the delivery guy, and I managed to soft-lock twice by getting stuck inside doors. The premise of changing the time of day was neat, though.
About 10 minutes into the game I stopped being able to approve papers. I could move left and right, but nothing I did advanced to the next round of papers.
The writing was great, btw. So many headlines that were pure gold.
Spent a good while wandering around the ZXC row because I thought that's where I needed to go. Missed the opening between the alt and fn keys.
The premise was neat, but the movement felt slow, and the level design was pretty basic. I'm not sure if it was even an intended mechanic or a glitch, but wall-jumping was the most fun part of this game. If you do more game development in the future, try messing around with that.
Starting the game, I was curious why I had the option to attack my party members. Then the first turn happened, and I immediately realized why. Jack was a douchebag, Hilary was an idiot, and Kyle was a Kyle. I laughed out loud!
My first run I deliberately killed Hilary after she healed the slime 4 times in a row (almost killed Jack too, but he had too much HP), then died to the goblin. My second run I kept everyone alive, and beat the game! Correct me if I'm wrong, but it felt like my allies got smarter as they levelled up, which sends a pretty cool message about not trusting first impressions.
Honestly, I had a lot more fun with this game than I expected. Every time I healed an ally, I asked myself whether it was even worth it, or whether it would be better if I just let them die. Then I won, and it genuinely felt like the power of friendship prevailed!
By the way, the quotation mark character in the story text didn't show up for me. It was just a square.
Minor gripe: A sound effect for refilling your water at a well would've been nice. As it is, it's a bit hard to tell that you have water again.
Major gripe: I was confused as to why I wanted to keep the plants alive if they're just going to all become enemies in the evil phase. Do I get more seeds that way? Do I get some bonus if I have a certain number of non-evil plants at the end?
Ultimately, the only reason I have these gripes is because I spent a lot of time playing this game. It's a really good game! The art style is great, the sound design is great, the game feel is great, the escalating difficulty is great, it's all great! Definitely the best game I've played so far in the deadline-missers jam.
I kept trying to grab that trophy at the start by outrunning the boulder, before I had a "Eureka!" moment and realized I could grab the ledge, wait for the boulder, then drop back down. That was cool.
The music changing was a nice touch (because I know having music at all in a jam is tough), and the city was nice to look at and fun to explore. Took me a while before I realized dogs don't harm you; only their poop does.
Thanks! You're right about the FTL inspiration. The other key game we took inspiration from was Five Nights At Freddie's, with its time-based survival and depleting resources. The tutorial itself was easier than I thought; it only took around an hour to implement. The text box system that the tutorial was built on, however, took a solid 4 hours to write. Bright side is we'll definitely be re-using that code in future Pygame projects, now that it's written.
A cool example of how a game with a small scope can still be fun and engaging! I really appreciated that nearby bullets disappear when the mode switches. Helped me adjust to the new mode without feeling cheated or unprepared. My best score was 3161.
Thanks for giving it a shot! We had a lot more ideas for how to use WiFi (including some puzzle mechanics to break up the fights) but it took so long to get the engine working we didn't end up implementing most of them.
You overestimate our technical knowledge. The player's hitbox was a 50*100 pixel rectangle, and we tried to resize the sprites to roughly fit the box. We wanted to make the game have a more top-down perspective, but our artist didn't know how to draw sprites from that angle, so we did this weird compromise. I agree that the punch hitboxes are unintuitive.
The boss was pretty last-minute. If we keep working on this, we'll definitely tweak him and make him more fun to fight. Thanks for trying it out, though!
1. The text of the enemies' attacks went by so fast that I couldn't tell it was casting two different spells on turn 1 and 2, which made me confused as to why anti-absorption did different things on turn 1 and 2
2. I got the impression magic absorption was a specific attack, not a status effect. I thought my anti-absorption spell would negate the attack.
I figured it out eventually, but it took a few tries. And it's entirely possible that the game communicated it fine and I'm just an idiot.
The magic absorption/anti-absorption thing wasn't communicated very well, but aside from that it was fun! It almost feels more like a puzzle game than an RPG.
