i agree. i am considering nerfing accelerate in particular if i make any balance changes, the fact that it can be replayed essentially for free makes it very strong. glad you had fun though!
kerfuzzl
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man this is so cool, and i really want to be able to try it out for real, but i haven't been able to get it to work with about half an hour of messing around on my computer (i am using DS4Windows).
so, i'm trying with the "-b1" version, and with DS4Windows, it is able to rumble my controller, and it's able to detect the face buttons, but it seems to not detect any movement from the joysticks, even though the DS4Windows app does show the joysticks working. i really have no idea what's going wrong there.
from just the intro though i feel like the writing here is really neat. it does really feel like my physical controller just got up and is talking to me, it's super cool. the suspension of disbelief just works really well here.
given how close we are to the deadline & the whole median punishment nonsense, i think it's fair enough though for me to throw e.g. a 5-star novelty rating and such on here even with only being able to play through anything past the issue, so i've given my best attempt at an honest rating despite my technical issues lol.
neat game! i haven't played a lot of stealth games before so the mechanics were somewhat new to me. i think they worked pretty well! i found that it was often much easier to try to sneak past the enemies than to subdue them, although it was also satisfying to successfully subdue multiple of them with melee combat when that ended up being my only option.
i found i didn't really use the dash very much, maybe this is mostly because i forgot about it. it also might be because the cooldown seemed a bit confusing when it was first introduced (i wasn't really able to read the UI elements), so i couldn't really tell how reliable it was going to be.
(i did eventually zoom in on my browser to make the game a bit more readable, which helped).
i appreciated the availability of checkpoints, made it possible for me to lose a bit and get more comfortable with the controls. i also lost shortly after rescuing all 4 researchers but before i could find the exit, and i'm very glad the game didn't make me replay that entire part.
the story was well done, it was short & to the point but engaging. i liked being able to communicate with rowan over the terminals. there were a couple points where i felt like the dialog on the terminals was not quite up to date--specifically, i was trying to remember what the game had said about where to go after rescuing the researchers, but the terminal wouldn't tell me. but, that's a nitpick.
good job!
this is almost certainly at least partially a skill issue but i keep losing and i can't really tell why. the visual feedback for what you missed, especially when you actually game over, is very unclear. this is in part because it just deletes all the nearby notes, so you can't even tell where you were in the pattern when you failed. i think i would have appreciated a "no-fail" system or similar as i don't think i get much out of losing here besides an inability to really see the game through to the end.
it does feel like to me i kinda have to focus on the visuals over feeling the rhythm, as you're seemingly not punished at all as long as you hit the spacebar sometime when the circle is intersecting, and i can't always tell audibly what the circles are supposed to line up to in the track (this may be because i don't know what to set the offset settings to, although i was playing the download version). one part i really noticed this was the sections with the, iirc, three up dots + the one left dot, i just played all 4 basically in a 4/4 pattern, and didn't get punished at all (although, to be fair, the reason i was playing them was as 4/4 was because that's how i was feeling them, so i guess it worked out).
the idea of laying out the rhythm on a spiral like this is very cool. it's not a visualization i've really thought about before, and i can really see the ADOFAI vibes--in theory, all sorts of interesting rhythmic ideas can be represented just through different kinds of angular relationships on the spiral, and it seems like a neat representation. it's also pretty intuitive specifically because it's a circle.
i often find hypnosis-styled spirals pretty hard to look at but this one was pretty nice. there were definitely moments where i could just zone out and stare into the spiral (although, not if i wanted to avoid failing some notes). i think the spiral concept really does work here, both from a rhythm game perspective and from a more kink perspective.
the music is really neat. it is a bit repetitive, but this actually works really well for selling the hypnosis theme more. i definitely enjoyed it.
interesting tension here, as the various constraints of the game really force you to jerk off in a specific way if you want to win and don't want to fill up the red bar.
my best run so far did involve the red bar going up once, so maybe there is some value in it? i can't tell for sure if it jacks you off faster than you can go manually.
keeping track of what all the different bars do is a bit tricky but i think i got the hang of it. thank you for providing context in the game description!
nitpick: the game is really small on my monitor's default resolution, so i kinda had to change my resolution to play it. i think this game would be perfectly fine resizing with a fixed aspect ratio, e.g. with it blackboxed inside a resizable window.
i don't have too much to say that hasn't been said already, the writing that's here is great!
i like the sort of way each page has its own nested subpages--this seems like a nice way to provide more context for the reader, similar to footnotes, etc. but i think they're used super effectively with the potion ingredients scene, where we can imagine ourselves taking out each ingredient from the box, then putting it back, and i love this specific line from the black key: "You're okay. You're great, in fact. So great that you're going to drop the key right now and grab something else. haha." just a super creative & fun way to have the page navigation work.
to be clear: i truly was not triggered at all by the game. i honestly think this is kind of impressive. as i said, i really found Iana menacing and evil, but in a way that did not manifest actual bad feelings at all. i didn't even know this was possible, and i can't really explain it, but there you have it. it's pretty neat!
if anything, the only thing that might bring up bad memories was my own choice to write about abuse, sometimes that can be a bad idea lol. but that's ok, i wasn't sure if i wanted to say anything, but i figured the perspective was useful. like, it is true that Iana is basically an abuser, and i would say i am motivated to get the hell out of there by that fact. but, idk. i guess that wasn't triggering, it just feels like a really engaging and interesting story. i really have no idea why.
to be fair, i find i have a relatively high tolerance for specifically sexual violence in fiction. i think there were some scenes i read that i could describe as outright rape, and that is likely worth a trigger warning, but it didn't really phase me. idk. unfortunately my perspective is quite limited in that regard.
so as far as trigger warnings and such go: i don't really know lol. i wasn't really negatively affected by anything in the game. i mean, i really did find it a very good experience to play through, maybe even because it's sort of a safe way to experience standing up to an abuser. (although i guess that's less true if there's no good endings lmao).
i definitely appreciate the consideration though!
with respect to the map: i did sort of figure it was topologically a ring, and this definitely was very clear by the end, but during the scenes where you encounter other characters along the ring you seem to only be able to dive into a side room, and then you can only leave the side room into one of the two sides of the hallway, so it gets confusing if you're still moving along the ring in the same direction or not. but, on the other hand, this does mean that the hallway encounters provide a very real blocker to your progress--if you dive to the side and then leave, you won't be able to go back, and that has gameplay consequences. (the encounters are basically a "one way wall" in the ring, which seems perfectly fine).
this game is both super cool and somewhat frustrating. i think my perspective on it as a non-hypno-kinkster is perhaps interesting, and i played it for quite a while so i have a bit i want to say.
first of all: wow. the audio here is so excellent. and one thing i want to make very clear, so that what i'm about to say makes sense: i really, really hate this Iana character. like, i truly find them menacing and evil, and i so desperately wish to get the hell out of there. i don't know if that's necessarily the intended reading, but i am very much not here to be hypnotized... i am here to escape. and the writing really does a good job at making this place feel scary.
and so the way that this cheerful melody plays whenever we get near Iana. it's so cool. this melody that seems happy and delightful takes on a truly menacing tone and creeps me out. and this is just really awesome. it's something that i have never really seen before, the way the writing just makes me feel so freaked out that it literally impacts the emotional quality of the music in this way.
the audio is really effective in other ways too. for example, the first ending i did was just the immediate submissive one, and the way the SNAP sounds go is just really neat. the rest of the audio work is also great, the way it communicates hypnosis or ambience or whatever. similarly, the sparing use of hypnosis visuals is pretty effective, at least for the first couple rooms where you run into them. you can really feel the bright spiral bearing down on your vision when it's one of the only images you see in the novel.
however, as a non-hypno-kinkster, there are also some stumbling blocks for me. for one, i really was tryharding after my initial immediate-sub ending. the second ending i got was one involving me attempting to hypnotize Iana but failing. and i couldn't tell if i still had some chance of getting somewhere, and it took the novel a very very long time to confirm whether i won or lost. i remember at some point there was talk of like, a fire glove (?) or something, but i couldn't really tell what the game was even talking about at that point, and that plot thread didn't seem to go anywhere. i admit i may have been skimming though. but what was unfortunate is by the time i confirmed it was definitely a bad ending, i could not actually rewind all the way to where i was before. thankfully i had saved shortly before then so i was able to get my progress back pretty quickly, but had i not saved i might have had to quit there.
the willpower system seems neat but ultimately felt kind of silly as it mostly meant going back to the bathroom whenever possible. i mean, to actually successfully hypnotize the cat all i had to do was wrap around back to the bathroom, restock on willpower, and then re-do the same actions i had done before, which seemed kind of silly.
although, i will admit it was harder to find my way back to the bathroom when i hadn't yet hypnotized all the other heroes. there was a neat moment where i was trying to find my way back to restock, and i ran into one of the hypnotized heroes, and i had to try to hypnotize them back because it seemed like that was the only way back. and i just barely managed to do that with 10 willpower left, so that was a tense moment.
that said, i think the navigation was rather confusing while all the non-hypnotized characters are in the hallways... like you can't really tell if you're coming back to the same rooms or not. i mean, this is probably a good thing from a "your mind is hazy" perspective, but it does seem a bit strange that hypnotizing other people makes you a better navigator.
after seeing that the keycard itself was not enough to win, i put in quite a bit of time trying to go through everything else i had missed. there were a couple unmarked rooms i hadn't explored--one thing that confused me was, i thought the "unmarked room" next to the midnight office was the same as the "unmarked room" one step down the hallway from that (i thought that moving one step down the hallway just kind of shifted everything over by one--it took me a while to realize they were actually distinct rooms).
eventually i stumbled upon the safe, and i had absolutely no idea what the passcode might be. i'm pretty sure i had seen everything else besides a couple of the things that happen when you get hypnotized (whenever i saw myself kind of locked into a hypnosis loop i would just back out, when exploring the rest of the rooms). so, as far as i was concerned, the passcode was probably completely random. this is when i threw in the towel: i just looked at the HTML to see the passcode, and yeah, i have absolutely no idea where these values come from. turns out it didn't matter though--doesn't seem like anything in the safe will lead to a new ending.
i think i may have been tricked by the way the other endings were labeled "Bad Ending" -- i was definitely imagining there was a Good Ending somewhere that i just hadn't found yet. but at this point, i was pretty sure i had seen everything i could reasonably get to, so i decided to give up and start writing my feedback. from checking the comments, it seems like maybe there isn't actually a Good Ending. i guess that would have been nice to know earlier...? idk, i do think that saying "Bad Ending" sort of implicitly suggests there is a Good Ending to contrast with it, but that might just be a skill issue on my part.
anyway. that's basically what happened for me. the first half-hour or so of this game was really very cool, again with the menacing vibes and such. the last half-hour was just running in circles with the subdued cat in the hallway, so there was really no risk left (besides the other random ways to end up hypnotized, which i just didn't follow through with) and it became kind of boring.
i do think that the writing is really really good at portraying, say, an abuser, in Iana, at least if you're not here for the kink. just somebody who you really want to get away from at any costs, but where it's easier to just... not. for context, i have been in an abusive relationship before. and this game wasn't triggering for me, or anything, it was just really effective writing. and that in and of itself is kind of cool--i mean, maybe i'm just healing by now, but i also feel like the game just does a good job at making this scary without being like, so similar to real life as to be triggering. i think part of that might actually be the focus on hypnosis--at least from my understanding, hypnosis simply does not work like this irl. and so the idea that someone has control over you due to hypnosis feels comparatively safe (as opposed to say, having control over you through the threat of violence)--because it simply isn't something that can actually happen.
in summary, i don't know if i have ever played a visual novel as good at making me feel stuff. so, good job! but i was not turned on. lol
ok, this game was very cool.
i am not very good at freecell, as it turns out. but i got one game going that really was working out--i managed to play it through all the way to the end. that was super satisfying, as solitaire often is, and freecell seems to definitely have that energy even more (probably because it is even more restricted).
but what's super cool is how this game supports the winning run with the clown animation. once you have all your cards nicely stacked up in the tableau and ready to go, you get to just start going through the animations really quickly, and building to an orgasm. like, maybe i can see where this clown is coming from. once things start coming together, it really feels good! and it's just super cool to me how that ties in to the horny part.
i have discovered a very interesting bug in this game on my end.
the cards are in these weird stacks where i can take any of the top four cards off and put them in the foundation. if i remove all of the seemingly inverted cards, then a normal column is revealed underneath where i can no longer rearrange the cards at will (which as i understand it, is correct).
i tried both the browser and downloaded version. eventually i figured out the problem: my monitor usually refreshes at 240 hz, and this actually breaks the game. if i set the monitor to 60 hz it appears to work fine.
hopefully i'll be back with some more substantive feedback later.
neat game. i like the simplicity of the controls, and i personally enjoy a good mashing game every once in a while, although there are definitely health concerns / accessibility concerns with that lol. (i think after a few rounds i would only really try mashing during the slower tempo parts, as there it feels much more like just tapping along to the beat than actual mashing).
the melodies when you drink the water properly are very interesting. i kept trying to get the next bottle correct so that the melody would finally just complete the scale and release the tension, but it seems they never do that. this is a neat way to keep driving the player forward... just one more melody, i'm sure it will resolve!
the polish in this game is super good. the way the curtains move back and forth, and the low-res "wetting your pants" effect... all just super effective use of the pico-8. good job!
my observations:
- after getting to flop's room, it seems i can't make any more progress. i can't leave through the bottom door with F, or through the top door. i also tried to see if there was an option in the Escape menu to go back to the guild but didn't see one ("restart" seems to just restart the game).
- the art style of stuff is very varied in this game (especially in the sex scene with daphne & flop). definitely gives collage vibes.
- i appreciate the implementation of consent, at least in the scene with flop! i think more games should do this.
- the magic sounds are very loud. which did make me laugh. but i probably should have turned down the volume.
Gone Fishing (Strawberry Jam Prototype) jam comments · Posted in Gone Fishing (Strawberry Jam Prototype) jam comments
so, i played this game for quite a bit. i earned enough gold to buy the fishing rod, but it seems like rodney still won't sell it to me. there also doesn't seem to be any other progression happening in the dialog anymore--it seems each character only cycles through some set of options that are remaining the same.
and this ultimately is confusing to me, as the very first interaction i had with this game was seeing its main menu, pushing "trigger warnings," as one does, and seeing them refer to 1) sex scenes and 2) some other triggering content, both of which are, from what i can tell, not actually in the game.
now, it's fine if those aren't in the game. jam games are tricky, so much content has to be cut, etc, etc. but as it stands it is a very confusing interaction being told that the game has certain content and then seemingly having no way to make progress in the story. then, the game page itself also seems to indicate that there is more to the game than the dialog trees i reached, e.g. it says "and if you're lucky, you might get some action, too."
so overall, it was just a very confusing time, as i'm not convinced that there is anything in the game past what i've seen, but the game is going out of its way to make it seem like there is. i suppose it's possible that the content is there but i can't get there due to a glitch (?), but it's just overall very very unclear.
and i will note that getting the 250 gold worth of fish takes a not insignificant amount of time on its own--so having it make no overall progress, and then also not work on its own, doesn't feel great either.
now, to be clear: this is all fine. i am fine playing unfinished jam games, this stuff comes with the territory. but i want to communicate exactly how it made me feel as a player, as i think that's helpful information to know. i think that especially for jam games, it is usually good to be very clear what the "end point" of the game should be for the average player, because otherwise it is impossible to know what is unfinished or what is inaccessible due to bugs, and i hope you can see where i'm coming from there.
one other point of critique: i found the story moved a bit fast for me. some of the dialog with rodney made it sound like i knew a character called "lorelai" reasonably well, which i didn't. similarly, i felt the dialog with cassidy when we see her in the woods makes it sound like we've known her for a while (although i might be off the mark here). these things do make a lot of sense for a jam game, though, as it's not really possible to implement a real sense of "time passing" without a whole host of other systems, such as a day/night cycle, more intricate relationship systems, etc.
now. all that said. there is a lot of great stuff here! others have already covered it in detail, but i'll point out a few things i liked:
- the music & overall vibes are pretty nice, despite the prototype-y 3d models in the scene. it really does feel like playing stardew valley or similar.
- i really like the use of platforming in this game. it feels like there is a legitimate ability to explore the island, e.g. jumping over the rocks to get to the skull cave, and this is something i haven't really seen in a farming game before. i think that this kind of low-stakes platforming is just awesome and would be great in a bigger island too.
- i agree with others that it's cool how the hook works in 3d. in general i just think the use of 3d here is very effective.
- i like the characters & narrative that i could understand. i love cassidy's design and i think there's something quite fun about having a secret animal people world on this little fishing island.
the art here is super neat. i remember seeing some of it in the discord during the jam but seeing it all here it really is impressive how much quality art you put together.
i found the number of choices at the beginning a bit overwhelming, so after somewhat thoughtfully assembling my own gear i just gave the ladies basically random choices. once i got to the actual gameplay i was a bit scared of running out of ammo so i figured i should mostly try to run past everyone... this strategy worked great but also meant the gameplay ended pretty fast lol. after going through a bit a second time i think my strategy seems decent though. chewing through all the guys does use a lot of ammo and takes a lot more effort than running past them (and my bad build seems to result in at least one of my helpers dying).
i agree with some other commentors that having companions accompany you on the missions is quite fun. i definitely liked seeing them gun down the enemies. i feel like the companion AI already has a decent amount of "personality" at least in the things i noticed (might have just been due to the weapons i assigned them?) and could definitely be taken even farther.
so, i tried running both the x86 and x64 versions (which, at time of writing, say they were uploaded 2 days ago) on my windows 11 laptop, with both the integrated (AMD radeon) and discrete (Nvidia) GPU. both of them have the same blue screen as others have mentioned. :(
i tried to see if i could step through the program in a debugger, but it seems pretty hopeless without debugging symbols.
i think your best bet for getting enough technical feedback to figure out where it's going wrong now might be something like:
option 1) just release all the source code. this would make it completely possible for others to look into it. i understand if you don't want to do this though. (and it would require someone motivated to looking into the bug to actually get anywhere, as they'd have to compile & debug on their system).
option 2) put in some pretty substantial logging, e.g. the glGetError() after every opengl call (with some identifying info so that users could point you to which line error-ed on their system). from what i can tell the program isn't dumping anything to the console right now so there's not much info i can give you. adding something like this would make it pretty easy to at least paste the logs here and then even the most nontechnical of users could give you helpful information for narrowing down this bug.
i will say i am a big fan of building games in these bare bones ways. i am impressed by the physics & sound modeling stuff you've talked about, although i'll admit i haven't looked into it in much depth. i'll try my best to come back to this game if you make any additional builds and see if i can at least get them running. (i may have to try to track down a controller though).
this is great! took me only one try (2:18.43) but i did lose two lives in the process, so it was kind of the perfect jam game difficulty.
i found there didn't seem to be much reason to do anything other than spam left click, even once i discovered the really big charge shot you could get. just left clicking really fast seemed to still be more effective. which is a bit of a shame as it means i didn't get to see the physics doing too much during the game. i did attempt to play through a second time with an autoclicker (as i like to do with these kinds of spam-the-mouse-button games) but interestingly the autoclicker did not work lol.
but either way this game was just super neat. very fun to play through and feels playfully sexual in a way i enjoyed.
so, these kinks are definitely not for me. (although, i will say the infestation stuff is something i don't think i have really come across before and so i found it neat if unarousing).
this game is quite nice though. the graphics just look great & coherent, and the sound design goes a pretty long way (although i'm not sure the lack of music works as well for me as it does for some commenters--although this might be because i'm playing it late at night where the vibes of a silent park feel more creepy than usual).
from a mechanics perspective, i found my favorite moments in this game were when i had some people chasing me and i needed to quickly fuck an anthill to get them off of me. the mechanical execution of these kinds of key sequences is just kind of intrinsically fun and it works really well here.
i did eventually give up playing after reaching 69 as it didn't seem like the game was getting any harder.
i'm not sure i've ever played a puzzle game quite like this before (which is a plus from me!). it's action-oriented, in some sense, with the HP systems requiring micromanagement of the combat, but it's also very surely discretized to a grid and turn system like many other puzzle games. this is an interesting combo, and it definitely took some getting used to! i found in some of the later puzzles i was a bit annoyed at how finicky it could be, especially when i needed Val to attack higher-health enemies without losing all her HP. i think the map i won on may have had a somewhat lucky/convenient layout.
still, i did manage to get through all the puzzles, and ultimately i think i enjoyed them. there is something satisfying about completing these tasks indirectly as a ghost. it feels good to make efficient use of the abilities that you currently have available, and it's neat how you can dynamically choose from several strategies based on the current layout + your current ability set.
of course, with the combat, you do have to wait until you get "possess" sometimes as you really need the healing ability. i actually think when the tension got higher is when i started enjoying the end-game puzzles more--once i actually had some progress nailed down, it became critical to keep away all the scary enemies while i stalled for the possess ability, and making use of the less controllable haunt and spook abilities was engaging! i suppose it was more the perceived tedium that annoyed me at the beginning of the puzzle but not once i was actually playing it.
the way that the HP system does not actually kill anyone but just undresses them was nice. it gives the game a definite kinky twist, where suddenly i have the power to, like, undress these folks if i so wish.
a couple nitpicks:
- i have to change the resolution on my screen for the UI elements to appear at a more reasonable scale.
- i find the candle system slightly frustrating sometimes. specifically, the way that you can click an ability multiple times but it doesn't appear to actually do anything. for example, sometimes i wanted to try to use "possess" several times just to boost the HP several times but it didn't work. i think maybe the abilities should get grayed out if they can't be activated again.
- like some other commenters, i also would have liked some kind of thing to check what an ability did before using it.
- i also had the issue where objects sometimes wouldn't appear. i think one puzzle was something like "activated 3 bookshelves" and 3 never generated--is this intentional? i did eventually realize i could just re-use one of them for multiple activations, so it does make sense to me, but i thought i should mention it.
to end on a positive note, i quite like the art & animations! the candle art especially is super fun including the little swinging animations from turn to turn.
i'm glad that the low stakes gameplay worked for you, and that you found the matchmaking phase delightful! those things are great to hear for me.
as far as the H/S/V goes--this is in principle why i provided the hex code boxes, in theory you could choose colors in your selector of choice then paste them in. of course, that's a bit of a process and doesn't let you see the colors update dynamically, so it's a sort of band-aid solution i suppose.
you're right that the camera controls aren't super well communicated. they are mentioned in game, once, during the intro popup, and they are available on the game's itch page. but, they could probably stand to be communicated more.
thanks for playing!
impressive work for a month. lots of different animations and 3d assets!
i kept playing until day 4 when i had 46 clients and every slot in the gym filled with equipment. for most of the game i had a 115% success rate for invitations which may have been a bit much lol. although, i personally tried to hold off on inviting too many people early in the game as i felt bad having way more clients that i had equipment for...
i did really like to see the busy gym with all the folks moving about and doing different things. that was fun! the vibe of having cock-milking machines in the same room as treadmills is also fun in its own way.
am i correct in assuming the "socialize", "give item", "manage" buttons etc on the clients do not actually do anything yet? just want to be sure i'm not missing any of the game's content.
i will note there were some animation bugs (and other bugs) on my end (playing the windows download) -- the barbells were desynced from the guys lifting them, and there were also some bugs related to mouse focus, where if i e.g. click away from the game then back it doesn't always restore the focus, and it seemed like some of the menus didn't always restore the focus when closed.
i think the biggest system that might be missing from the game is something that endears you more to specific customers. it's hard to remember individual ones as there isn't much to go off of. (i'm in a similar boat here--i really wanted much deeper dialog trees and such in my game but simply had no time for that lol). it's also tricky because having to go through layers of dialog and such before even getting your first customer could make the game harder to pick up. in any case, the main thing i wanted to point out here is that i noticed several customers who were exact clones of each other: is this intentional? it could fit into the evil scientist lore somehow that i missed or that didn't make it into the game. but if not, probably having each client be at least not a clone of each other would be good lol.
overall, solid work!
this game is fantastic. deck-building suika-like is such a cool concept. and then it takes it in so many interesting directions, in particular i love how there is this tension with the potion upgrades--you want to micromanage which potions you have left on your shelf at the end of the level so that you can choose what to upgrade.
i got to the cow witch before losing. i almost beat her, but i slightly misplayed and my potion overflowed. in particular, i thought i would be able to add the orange potion but it seems like the overflow started happening right as i was adding it. this did feel a little bit unfair to me, as well as a couple other moments--such as against the witch who shrinks your ingredients, when i finish my potion and she throws in a catalyst, it seems like my potion ingredients get worse as they are being activated which just feels mean.
still, those aren't really that significant of problems, and they were probably compounded by browser lag. but this game is so good that i got hooked almost immediately and just played through instead of switching browsers. so, maybe that says something lol.
my only other complaint is that rounds can really drag out. the round against the shrinks-your-ingredients witch might have lasted like half an hour by itself, as every time i made progress she'd counter it almost perfectly. the round against the bovine witch also took way too long to lose (i.e. she didn't finish me off quickly once i was doomed) which was kind of annoying.
still, all my complaints aside, this game is really solid. it looks good, throwing the potions in the big pot with all the clinks and clanks is great, and the way the mechanics interact just seems really fun to me.
i managed to eventually buy everything by the end of the game. i admit i never figured out what the difference between the first two pickaxes are, they seem to behave identically to me. (i also never really figured out how the mining actually works... sometimes breaking a rock seems to drop a million orbs while sometimes it drops 0). my main strategy was:
1. break all the rocks with one and two slashes on them, as they (usually?) broke in one hit and seemed to nonetheless drop a million orbs most of the time
2. once i had the horizontal and dynamite things, i would use them, then break all the rocks that looked like they could break in one hit
i eventually started also trying to hit the red rocks as i noticed one of the times i broke one it seemed to blow up which resulted in a bunch of orbs. but then sometimes they would do nothing when they were destroyed, so i don't know what the deal was. i never figured out any special effects the blue rocks had.
it seems like the horizontal mining tool and the dynamite both are slightly glitchy. usually i can't get them to activate really "on purpose," instead i just spam click while moving my mouse around and eventually they sometimes work. my best guess is they have to be, like, perfectly aligned to the grid to work?
i eventually unlocked the art, which is nice, although there doesn't seem to be a way to close it.
anyway, that's basically a description of how my playthrough went. hopefully something there is useful. here's what i personally liked about the game:
- destroying the blocks is satisfying even though there isn't a sound effect. i think the vfx work is pretty good! same thing with the way the blocks spawn in each time.
- i like how the gameplay evolves over time as you unlock the new tools. it is always, at least for me, a game of trying to efficiently hunt down all the easily breakable blocks on the screen, but the upgrades make it so you're looking for both cracked blocks and the 1/2 slash blocks.
- i like the art!
interesting point about piloting. i think you're absolutely right... i found in my playthroughs there were a couple times when i needed to check the draw pile, and a couple times when i simply made a misplay (especially due to the "flexibility?" card) but for the most part the hands do play themselves.
on the one hand, this is something i was kind of shooting for--you'll notice, for example, that there are two very easily accessible draw 3 cards which are just ridiculously strong. the idea was that it is simply fun to play a big hand of cards, and that it really helps sell the idea of the card mechanics as sex when you can kind of flow through them in this way. that really is kind of the idea with the in/out system too, there's this literal rhythm to it as you're playing.
but on the other hand, i did want to make a reasonably strategic game. i think i'm decently happy with the balance (i often find myself losing to a unique subset of encounters on each run, so i don't think most of them are too over or undertuned) but it is almost certainly bad in some places. i find the game pretty easy on average but i have no idea if that's true for everyone else, and i tend to err on the side of "let it slide" for jam game difficulty as i often find i'm way better at my own games than the average player (cause i've spent the whole month playing it...)
(also, it is super easy to go infinite in my experience. i might want to nerf the draw cards and such a bit. lol)
anyway. that's where i'm coming from. i do think i too would like to see piloting be more of a consideration. thank you for the ideas along those lines! (and to be honest i didn't even think about the deckbuilding/piloting distinction even once over the past month... so thank you for even just the reminder of this kind of conceptualization, lol!)
cute & funny. i beat it after 4-5 tries. i found the mouse controls slightly easier than the spacebar for whatever reason--there were definitely moments where it felt like the game didn't respond to my jump input, are the jump inputs buffered? if not, that may be worth doing.
one thing i think this game does particularly well is how it expresses the narrative. the way that the door is thrown open and we start sprinting out just expresses the idea very well lol.
what a fun concept. this game really is exactly what it says on the tin. i'll admit i'm not great at adventure--i find i usually end up going in circles and never making progress--and this game captured a lot of those same feelings. but i did manage to beat levels 1 and 3 (although in 3, the bat just gave me the buttplug which was convenient).
i feel like the only way to really improve this game would be to have it run on an actual atari! great job!
i had fun messing with this lol. it's definitely a game i can appreciate a lot from a technical standpoint: i liked seeing the way the animations would slow down on the larger portions of the toy, and the way it seemed to squeeze into his butt. these things are just cool to see in a dynamic game like this!
for example, i liked trying making toys with varying widths and such:
besides that, i did try some of the sillier things, like one that snaked around in all directions, and it did work surprisingly coherently although things do start to break down. funny game!
one small nitpick: i think having a saturation slider for the colors would be nice. (or whichever "third dimension" is missing, i can't tell for sure which color space it's in).
Rubber Wizard Is Going Through It jam comments · Posted in Rubber Wizard Is Going Through It jam comments
i had fun playing through this! love the art, it's cute, the character designs are fun and distinct.
took me about an hour and a half in total, i was quite stuck on finding the folks in the custodial cabinet for a while (i was sure they were in there but wasn't sure how to make progress in that direction). love the ending of the game too, quite fun!
i think a feature to consider would be a menu/view of which characters had which names. i eventually started to learn their names but sometimes when characters were telling me the gossip i had literally no idea who they were talking about.
i do think the controls could stand to be simplified slightly:
- pushing space and up seemed unnecessary to me, just one button seems sufficient. although, maybe there are times when there are multiple intractable objects so the distinction is necessary? maybe in that case just "up" by itself could be used to enter doors, etc? i remember there were a few times where it took me several tries to enter a door because i hit the keys in the wrong order.
- i kind of forgot that left shift existed for most of the game and sorta wanted to go faster. imo making players hold a button to go faster is annoying & bad for accessibility--i think you could consider simply increasing the base speed to the running speed and not having a button. or, if you like having the distinction, having it be a toggle (shift toggles from walking to running) or at least an option for a toggle would be nice. annnnd now as i go to check i realize there was a setting to always be running. that actually solves this problem lol. maybe just add a note about that in the description. (speaking of the options, i have no idea what "command remember" does...)
anyway these are just nitpicks, they didn't really impact my enjoyment of the game. good job!
i think i figured out the problem, maybe:
so if i do it using the trackpad on my laptop i am occasionally able to do the job. but i have to move my finger on it in a very particular way, something like in one big motion (although often my trackpad seems too small to actually do a big enough swipe).
with the mouse what appears to be happening is that the offset is "reset" in some way every frame, so the legs never actually move to the side--instead, they jitter in this weird way moving from the center out towards the direction in which i'm moving my mouse. so i can't actually manage to push them all the way to the side, even with the sensitivity turned up quite a bit. (like, i will physically move my mouse an entire foot and make no progress).
one factor that may or may not be compounding this is i know this computer sometimes runs games at up to 240 fps which could be maybe making things worse?
what a great concept. the feeling of needing to go to the bathroom but being too hooked on the computer game is very relatable to me, and i like the difficulty of multitasking here. it definitely feels like trying to play a game but being constantly distracted.
unfortunately i was not able to get to the end of even one level. it seems like no matter what i do with the mouse i always fail within about 8 seconds. it's not very clear to me exactly what i need to be doing? my best guess (based on the visual feedback) is that the game is expecting me to continuously move the mouse in the given direction, but my desk is only so big. the help menu says that if i fail the direction changes, so i assume that each time the mouse direction changes it means i did it wrong?
thanks for the comment!
when i first put together this game i had tried out a web build but it seemed to me to be too laggy to really give the desired experience.
i definitely would have liked to get it playable in the browser but i never bothered with the optimization work--until now! your comment definitely motivated me to actually want to get this working. :)
i spent the past day or so finally bothering to try to improve things and as of today i am sufficiently happy with the performance of the game that i've put up a web build again. i'm still not convinced it's totally playable, especially depending on your system, but hopefully it runs ok.
hope you enjoy!
i meant to reply to this comment a while ago. i really appreciate the detailed response! a lot of this is super interesting to me.
i think (for me) the most interesting point you made is that being zoned out is a light trance state, and that, as i understand it, being focused (or "in the zone") is as well. in my experience these kinds of mental states are not only possible to induce through games but pretty commonplace. off the top of my head, i can say i have definitely experienced both of these kinds of states in minecraft, for example.
obviously as someone who has no experience being hypnotized specifically, i have no idea if it's possible to go from a state of being "in the zone" to any other interesting kind of trance state. that definitely seems like the most accessible kind of altered mental state, at least for someone like me... i can easily get "in the zone" in most creative games i think (e.g. i definitely have felt this kind of state when building stuff in mario maker or littlebigplanet).
along those lines, i think, you know, it's easy for me to accept "oh yeah, being zoned out is a trance state... that makes sense!" as i'm reading it now. but when i go into something that is explicitly stated to be hypnosis related, rather than say, a really chill kind of game to zone out to, i still do not know what specifically i am meant to be feeling, and i think that's part of why i come away thinking it didn't really accomplish anything at all. i think getting inexperienced players in one of these more commonplace mental states and then being like "yo, heads up, if you're zoned out right now, fun fact, you're in a trance state... do you want to go deeper?" might be a more effective strategy.
again, of course, i have literally no idea what i'm talking about. but. this definitely made me think. again thank you so much for this detailed reply!