itch.io

This is an interesting premise fora game. It seems everyone else has already told you that there were problems with the pacing. That was about how things went for me too. Between how slow it is to progress and the way every time you reset you have to start from square 1, it's not super fun. I think a way to immediately tell if you've fixed the pace of your game is to set the timer to one-half or even one-quarter the length and see if it's still completeable.

Sounds like you are working on a post-jam version. I would be very interested in being able to use prior knowledge to skip forward in the steps. Maybe the first round you iteration you get to the comms station and learn that the head of engineering is missing. Then the second round you can go straight to looking for the head of engineering. As it is, it doesn't really feel so much like time is rewinding and more like I'm just getting a game over and resetting like in any other game.

I really like the visual atmosphere and the sound design! The way the paddle makes a noise when you move it feels really good.

A bug I encountered: I got to the worm level and he shot the ball out. When it hit the paddle, the collision seemed to bug out with the ball rapidly bouncing up and down on the paddle without going back up to the rest of the level. Eventually I let the ball fall off the paddle to reset. But when I launched the ball again, it did the same thing, only this time it got stuck on the screen's top wall. Very mysterious.

And then a design observation. Sometimes the ball bounces at a really shallow angle and you spend 30 seconds watching it bounce left and right before it comes back to you and it kills the momentum of the game.

The concept is very intriguing. I feel like there's definitely a lot of interesting places you could go with it!

At a minimum, it would've just been a couple of little quiz questions followed by a score. The questions would be little scenarios such as "An enraged snarltooth has gotten into the village and is rampaging. What do you do?" With options like "Run Away" and "Feed it the Junsael Fruit". With additional polish time, I'd been thinking about adding a more narrative ending, so instead of just getting a little pop up of "You selected the right answer for 2/3 trials", you'd get a little mini story about what happens to your village including the ramifications of your choices.

I gave your game a shot. I feel like your movement speed is way too slow. Also the control prompts that pop up seem to be reversed for me. When I'm told to use my right mouse button to do something it was actually my left mouse button that did whatever action like picking up a box or activating the fragments.

Another major place for improvement is your pickup/place mechanic. As it is, the boxes block off most of your view when you're carrying them which makes it hard to line them up. Also they don't stay in a consistent place relative to the player's facing. Take a look at Portal and the way that that game turns the box to line up with you so it doesn't end up at any weird angles. Also possibly consider adding some transparency to the boxes when you pick them up so that the player can see past them.

Lastly, after unlocking the door with the key, the game seemed to end for me. There were no visible object and I was just sort of in space. Couldn't jump or move. Is this actually the end of the game? If not, it's a bug.

Anyways, congrats on releasing your first game!

Hi I played your game for a few minutes and saw you mention you were having problems with its direction on Discord. Here are some things I'm thinking about.

• Your art is really attractive and attention grabbing. I like it a lot.
• Generating power and making drinks takes a real long time. Probably too long. It doesn't feel very good. I get that you're trying to make a clicker where you'd presumably get power automatically and stuff, but you can still afford to cut some time out of the initial delay I'd say.
• Consider why you went with the theme you chose. Why did you want a robot bartender serving drinks to aliens? Just because you liked the aesthetic? If I were making your game, I would consider how the theme should inform my design. Here are some examples:
  • If you want to capture the "essence" of the food industry, I'd add some more significant preparation steps. Just clicking a button to create a drink isn't very exciting. I'd maybe make drinks require you follow through a couple of steps. Yknow, chopping stuff up, cooking stuff, etc. To keep the clicker elements, I'd also add robot assistants or something you can hire that would automatically perform specific tasks. Another food industry task would probably be inventory management. Ordering the right number of ingredients and stuff. I think both of those things could be fun in a video game if done properly.
  • The robot part of the bartending is already explained above (rote tasks/automation are very robot-y things) but what about the aliens? If nothing else, I think they'd serve as a great opportunity to inject some comedy into the game. There can be bizarre ingredients and the preparations steps for them can be crazy stuff that'll get a laugh out of players. I know I said chopping and cooking above, but you could come up with some nutty food items. Like a pancake that you have to do a ceremonial dance around to make it edible or something. The thought of a robot doing a weird dance around a pancake is pretty entertaining, am I wrong?
• The street that the robot bar is on is pretty low-traffic. That's an opportunity to add some clicker elements too. Big milestone purchases for players could see them moving their bar to a new location with more foot traffic. It could unlock a new tier of upgrades and be a general sign that the player has moved forwards. If you wanted to really play into your space aesthetic here, you might make your space bar a space ship bar. That would make things make more sense when the player is relocating every so often.

If I'm honest, your game isn't very fun right now. That's probably obvious though, considering nothing is going on. That said, I think the art style and concept is pretty interesting and I think there's an enjoyable game that can be made out of a robot-space-bartending simulator. Best of luck with that.