itch.io

You'll soon unlock a few more "school" minigames, and the only stat that matters is your highest grade in any one game - so there's no reason to even try to be good at all of them. Just pick one you like. (And if you don't like any of them, one is a memory game that you can quickly "cheat" with a pencil and paper, or even just a screenshot!)

In addition, these games don't speed up progress meaningfully at all - it's really just a quality of life boost. (It lets you fast-forward a single mechanic for a few minutes at a time, which is nice to make a prestige less tedious, or to buy an upgrade you can *almost* afford just before bed.)

I don't know what you mean by "100% the game," as there appear to be an infinite number of levels for each mini-game, so you can never "100%" any of them no matter how many times you do them. There is an achievement tied your highest grade achieved, but you only have to do that once in the game of your choice. (And I believe it's a hidden achievement, so it's not even part of the game's "real" progress and doesn't give you any completion bonus.)

Yeah, that took me a while to figure out. Parts of the "horde" UI need some work. 

• There's no indication of how much of each type of damage you're dealing. (Just scaling factors, which isn't the whole picture.)
• There's a whole resource (nostalgia) whose quantity isn't even displayed anywhere in the game, except in parenthesis at the end of a long tooltip. 
• The list of heirlooms isn't labeled, so it's just a list of random upgrades with no indication of where they came from.  (Since "heirloom" implies some sort of physical object, like "relic," and that's just a list of boosted stats, it seems unlikely that they'd have anything to do with each other.)
• I still can't figure out what "damage conversion" means in an item description.

Overall, it doesn't quite meet the dev's stated goal of "detailed explanations about mechanics in-game" yet :)

I was so excited to try this, but I'm playing on a 4k monitor and it's TINY! It's very hard to read the text and I have to lean in really close to my screen. Can you add an option for pixel doubling? (EDIT: never mind, I found the resolution settings!)

That's by design. Focusing makes that research faster. It doesn't make the others slower. So there's no reason to ever unfocus. You always want one of the categories focused.

What a creative idea! There are so many incremental games where you start out constantly clicking, and as you buy upgrades to automate manual tasks, you don't have to click as much. Well in this game, the initial challenge is not merely "click a button over and over," but instead an actual skill-based task, that becomes gradually less challenging and less important as you buy upgrades. I hope other games will take inspiration from this.

The game's balance is awkward... it quickly goes from quite hard (at least when using a laptop trackpad instead of a mouse) to trivially easy, at which point there's not much left to do... except buy a couple of upgrades every few levels. I  don't know if the number of levels is infinite, but I'm on level 21 and I haven't actually had to do anything except click "next level" for quite some time now, so I'm ready to give up and call it done. 

But then, I don't expect good balance from a quick game-jam game, I expect innovation - and that, it's got.

I'm having this problem too. Each time I refresh it goes a few ticks, then gets stuck again. If I restart every minute or so, I get very slow progress... but if I restart too soon it loses the progress. Looks like it'll be a while before I can actually continue.

As for "too many solar sails at once," I only have one factory sending them out, though it's level 2 and it has 30k employees.

Oh man, I love the concept here, but it's unplayable on my mac laptop. The framerate on default settings is about 10fps, and there's a delay of about a 300ms between when I hit a button and the flipper moves. I can reduce that delay somewhat by setting the graphics quality to the lowest settings, but it's still far too long a delay to make a fast-paced reflex-based game like this playable. The weird thing is, according to Activity Monitor, the game is using only 25% of my CPU, so I don't know why it runs so poorly. It doesn't seem like the sort of game that would push even a crappy GPU (in my case, Intel HD Graphics 530) to its limits... I can play action-y html5 games, and those should be even less efficient.

Oh man, I was so looking forward to this game's full release - now it's on Steam and it's suddenly Windows-only? Boo! Is there going to be a Mac release? I've never seen a game support fewer platforms after release than it did in beta - it's supposed to be the other way around!

Experiencing the same bug on a Mac. Has crashed in the same places. The game is absolutely delightful and I would love to play through it without crashing!

Is this game only playable on an extra-large desktop monitor? I have a 2880x1800 screen and the game doesn't fit on it! (Chrome browser on a 15-inch MacBook.) If I make my browser window about 20% wider than my screen, then I can see the full width of the game by dragging the window around, which makes reading in-game dialogue awkward but possible... but there's no way for me to see all the way to the bottom of the game screen no matter what I do.

Also, any time I change tabs or make the window full-screen I get an error saying "WebGL context lost, please reload." Reloading takes 30+ seconds. The first time I loaded the game there was some sort of multi-page tutorial, but I didn't get to see it, and after reloading it's gone for good, so I'm not really sure what I'm doing... 

The graphics are great and the game looks very ambitious, but so far all I've found is one bug after another, making the game unplayable! :(

I'm confused. The first thing I learn about my planet is that it has no life on it. The next thing I learn about it is that it's covered with beautiful lush forests. That sure sounds like life for me. Are these zombie trees I'm chopping down?  :)

I'm playing in the latest version of Firefox (63.0.3) and it failed to save for me. After leaving the page and coming back, I have to start from the beginning again.

I have an idea for reworking hydroelectric power. It seems kind of silly to me that the total amount of hydroelectric power you can generate is capped. I guess the idea is that it's meant as an easy tutorial resource, and the player is supposed to run out in later levels and will have to rely on more complex resources. However, I think hydroelectric can be more complex long-term, while still being easy to get started with, like this:

The blue meter on the hydroelectric plant presumably represents the water level in the reservoir. It should fill up at a fixed rate, representing the flow of water into the reservoir. A rate of 4 or 5 units would be perfect. This means that if the turbines are off completely, the level will rise slowly - and if only one of the 3-power turbines is on, then the level will still rise very slowly. However, if the player is generating 6 or more units of hydro power, they'll be using the water faster than it's increasing.

In the first few levels of the game (i.e. the part of the game that's already complete), the player needs to generate a lot of hydro power to meet demand, and nothing about that would change. After the first few days, the player is likely to be running low on water. In the long run, the player can never average more than 4 units of hydro power, which will make this resource less relevant as the game progresses, especially as the city grows larger. A smart player will try to avoid using hydro power as much as possible, to let the reservoir fill up, in case they need an extra boost later on. 

Some upgrades later in the game that could interact with this system: 

- There might be later upgrades to increase hydro turbine power, but since these would drain the reservoir even faster, they would only be practical for short-term emergency power. 

- There can be upgrades later on that reroute rivers to increase the reservoir fill rate, so that hydro power doesn't become totally useless in later levels.

- Later levels might have drought conditions (fill rate drops to 0) or flood conditions (fill rate increases significantly, but train tracks intermittently flood, blocking coal refills). The player might get 2-3 days warning about these conditions in daily "news briefings" that take place each game night. These briefings could also indicate other events, such as a mine accident increasing the cost of coal for a day, and might also indicate how much sun the player can expect that day for their solar power generation.

I'm playing the HTML5 version on Chrome in Windows 10, and clicks don't reliably register. I'd say about 10-20% of the time, when I click on a button, nothing happens. This is especially frustrating when I'm frantically trying to restore power, or when I realize at the last minute I'm late in replenishing coal, and I have to click the button several times before it activates. I didn't have this issue when I tried this game a couple of months ago.

This game is mistakenly categorized under HTML5 games, but it is actually a Unity game, so I can't actually try it out since I don't have Unity Player!