Thanks for the feedback! Full disclosure, the graphics are Kenney.nl assets, but the everything else is all our work! Glad to hear that you liked the tutorial and the writing.
We were a bit disappointed to not have time for the level design by the end of the jam, but we laid a good foundation and have been having fun this week building on it further :).
Thanks for the feedback! I'm tweaking the camera to make jumping less disorienting.
And good call, we definitely intended to have UI or some other visual feedback for indicating when the shield would shut off, but we didn't get a chance to implement it. It does feel unfair for it to suddenly shut off if you don't know it's coming.
Yeah, the contrast of the color palette is not great right now. I started off trying to hit the "use only five colors" diversifier, but it's just not enough. I still plan to use a (tinted) grayscale for the most part with color used very sparingly for better effect, but it'll be more shades of gray for sure.
I like the mist idea! Effects like that are not something I have experience with, but it's worth exploring in the polish stage.
In case it helps, there were a couple things that seem like they could be improved to hint to the player how they can interact:
It took me a really long time to see the button in the upper left that turns around to view the kitchen. Something that stands out more from the background, and maybe even has text, would help.
While you can figure out pretty quickly by clicking around that clicking on the wizards shows their orders, a hint that you're supposed to do something with them would be nice.
Looking forward to seeing more! I missed your project in the concept stage and just took a look back at it. I really like the idea of solving one of the puzzles and passing it onto a friend to do the next one!
I love the premise, theme, and concept art! I'm very bad at games like this in which the player has to keep many plates spinning, but it's always fun to keep trying.
Regarding the theme, I'm reminded of a game that a team made for Global Game Jam 3-4 years ago that was essentially a Papers, Please clone in which, instead of processing papers at an immigration checkpoint, the player would frantically try to get through an endless queue of IT support tickets. I was hoping to find it to share it with your team, in case you'd enjoy it, but I'm unfortunately having trouble finding it right now.
I noticed that you might differentiate towers and enemies by color (but not color alone), using red and green. Heads up that red-green color blindness is fairly common. You might do better with different colors that still contrast—e.g., blues are generally distinguishable for different types of color blindness.
Great question! My current plan is for each chapter to center on the same community, but have that community change and introduce different satellite locations in each chapter. I haven't nailed down a timeline yet, but the chapters may cover a period of 50 years or so, creating plenty of opportunity for the central community to show change over the course of the game.
And you also hit on another key thing about differences between chapters: with the difference in professions of the player characters, the idea is that the player will have different ways of interacting with the communities. They'll work in different ways, as required by the tasks at hand and their specialties, and they'll likely interact with different people in the community.
Thanks! I'm very excited to work on it. It'll be my first time creating a game like this, so it feels ambitious, but I think I have the time and motivation to see it through (and even polish it up, fingers crossed) by the end of the jam.
