itch.io

I'm very glad to hear that. Thank you for letting me know.

Thanks! That's very good feedback. I've always struggled tuning and balance of those sorts of precision skills. I spend so many hours testing the game as I build. So it's hard for me to put myself in the headspace of a new player.

Thanks! Yeah that was one of the last pieces of the design to click into place. I'm glad you enjoyed it.

Thank you! It's a weird mix of mechanics, so I'm not sure how it'll strike everyone. So I really appreciate hearing you liked it. :-)

Thank you so much! That means a lot to hear.

I'm hoping to do a sequel in January. I have enough specific ideas that I want to add that adding any single one of them would feel weird. I'd rather bundle all of them together into a full game.

Thanks. :-)

Yeah the Y is very picky about where you place it. It can have very high DPS if all three shots are consistently hitting, but there are only a handful of emplacements where that's possible.

Awesome! Thanks for the feedback.

I hope to swing back around for a sequel before too long. :-)

Thanks! I'm glad it became clear and enjoyable. :-)

Thanks. :-)

That's a good point about the functionality of the X button. It's easy to forget things like that when I'm working on a game constantly for days in a row.

Thank you for the feedback! I'm glad you liked it. I agree that a zero leak indicator would have been great. That, plus hard mode, were the two next features on the cutting room floor.

I'm glad the emphasis on experimentation and randomness over mastery was enjoyable to you. That was definitely a goal of mine. :-)

Wow! There's a lot going on in this one. I'm impressed at the amount of content you made. Thanks for making a detailed tutorial.

I wound up running out of money shortly after getting the mortar. Given more time, I'd suggest making sure to teach the player how to make significant amounts of money before showing them things that are expensive to buy. ;-)

I like the little brewing minigames. They're not complicated, but they add a lot of flavor to the game.

Very impressed with how much you got done here. Well done!

Once I figured out how to play, I found a lot of functioning systems that seemed to have quite a bit of depth to them. I'm super unfamiliar with the Minecraft genre space, so it's hard for me to evaluate this game in that context. But I liked the loop of working on upgrading your items so you could dig and harvest faster. Eventually I dug myself way down into the earth, and was amused to see how things changed as you go down.

I like the way the water rearranges when you clear out the space underneath it.

Not sure if it's possible to make the window resizable. It was very tiny on a 4k.

I thought I softlocked myself because I placed a piece of sand on myself when clicking to try to use my ship, and got stuck. Then it took me a long time to figure out how to open my inventory to do crafting. Should definitely put that on the itch.io description page alongside the other controls.

Good job making this. :-)

The music was an excellent selection. Gives a chill, exploratory vibe.

Gameplay is pleasantly reminiscent of LucasArts adventure games. Collect a bunch of items, then read text and try to reason about which items work for the puzzle in front of you.

Given more time, I would have loved to see different descriptions of what's wrong with the machine parts, so you'd need to reason about what resources to plug in. That said, I still liked the moment of recognition: "Oh I see this resource says that it's cold. I have a pretty good guess where that's going to go."

I too, hit the softlock. Came back through again and finished the game.

Very calm and pleasant experience. Nice job.

This was very cool. I like the idea of crafting your attacks on the fly. I particularly like the simple color combination rules combined with the intuitive status effects that those colors apply.

The fact that your resources respawn instantly makes a really strong emphasis on your click dexterity. If you're an APM god, this game is probably a lot easier. I'm not saying that's good or bad, just pointing it out. If you wanted to deemphasize clicking skill, you could have a resource spawn cooldown to limit how quickly one could click their way through things.

I could see there being a lot of depth in here if you wanted to explore further. Stringing together combo attacks with multiple colors, adding more reactions back and forth between the player and the monsters, etc.

Well done!

Nice. One of the things that's making me very happy is having different people tell me different things are OP. Tells me I succeeded at making things people enjoy using. :-)

Thank you for the feedback about the onboarding experience. I definitely feel like that's something I want to work on if I expand or sequel the game.

Nice. Yeah I figured the time constraints were a factor. :-)

Great job by the whole team!

Thanks for the detailed thoughts. That's very useful feedback for me to think about.  I'm glad you had fun!

Very cool. I like the allele-based gameplay, and the atmosphere and writing are great. I eventually stopped playing because of the lack of an encyclopedia to review which things I'd bred to what results. But if that were present, I could see myself going through all of the content.

Notes from when I was playing:

The machine being available by hovering the mouse near the left side of the screen was really hard for me to discover.

The water icons were a little stressful, as I had no idea how to water the plants.

Oh, it took me a full bankruptcy and getting back to the quest screen to realize there was a watering can. It's really tiny and looks like one of the pots.

Once I figured out how the breeding letter pair selection worked, it was really slick. But I wish there was a little display at the bottom or something that told you what you'd filled in so far.

Would love to have place where I can check what alleles yield which results, so I can deduce how to get the results I need with less trial and error.

Very charming foundation of a game. I enjoyed the sensations of being in this workshop. Could really use a moment-to-moment gameplay loop and/or a longer metagame with twists and turns to keep the player engaged. But definitely very solid at what it is.

A lot of character in this one. Love the art style and the flavor text on the ingredients.

Clicking on the cauldron to advance brewing was a good way to add physicality. Would be great to have some sort of minigame there instead, if time had permitted.

I can squint and see where this would be going in order to keep attention longer. If there were requests, or market fluctuations, or hints to unlock unique/interesting recipes, I'd be more compelled to keep going. As it was, I got a decent idea in my head of how the recipes work, and then sort of ran out of steam on wanting to fill in the recipe book.

TL;DR very nice little game. Really needs better onboarding via tutorial or on-screen tips. You could even just add some more text to the web page, in a pinch.

I love the use of the chemical symbols in the recipe diagrams. Felt nerdy and appropriate for the content. Nice art style; felt very unified and clear. Love the chunky machines.

It took me a while to realize that the point was to split/add the atoms. I was running around looking for an iron deposit for like 8 minutes.

I really want there to be keyboard shortcuts for each build type. Also, it would be great if it kept the item on my cursor after I place it, so building a chain of conveyor belts is less of a chore.

Finally automating construction kits, once I figured out how things work, was really satisfying. :-)

Needing to burn things you're not using was a nice touch. Made me think more carefully about what was going on.

500 is an awful lot to expect the player to create, since creating the first single piece of fuel/O2 means the player has solved the puzzle. I'm about to walk away for a while to let it run until I win.

Very intriguing concept. I was excited about the idea of finding combinations that are effective and sending them to battle. That said, I couldn't really figure out how to make them work. I tried several times to make the mega legged bot. :-/

Two suggestions of potentially lightweight changes that could improve the experience:

Make the enemies much slower to spawn. Maybe even spawn them only once the player has spawned something. That would give time for the player to think and not be overwhelmed.

Allow the player to double click on a brick to move it into/out of the recipe. Having to click and drag (particularly with the possibility of missing between the slots, and thus having wasted the click) compounds with the stress from the fast moving enemies.

You've got a neat idea here, and a lot of the parts are almost ready. Well done setting up an exciting foundation. :-)

Thank you for the write-up. I'm glad to hear you enjoyed it. :-)

The biggest feature I wish I had had time to do was a hard mode that would do different tuning but the same maps. That way you could replay them once you've beat them once with much more challenge. Maybe I'll make a sequel. X-)

Thanks! I plan on it.

Came back through and finished. I really like your narrative arc and difficulty curve. Well done!

My only complaint is that there were a lot of times where it felt like my button presses weren't making it through. I had to be really careful and precise, particularly on one where you had to jump over a door repeatedly.

Very cute. I liked cleaning up after those pesky humans. This seems like it would benefit from a timer, so that my efficiency of getting the trash can into a useful location to move the trash into it quickly would be rewarded.

Nice job!

Agree that the chill atmosphere was very pleasant. It wasn't the mechanics/gameplay I was expecting. But as I figured out what was going on, the puzzle of how to get through the physical space was interesting.

The close perspective taught me to play very carefully and keep my shield up a lot. Reminded me a lot of Zelda 2. I liked the experience. Well done!

Wow, that was really solid. I think the low rez made figuring out what was going on a key part of the challenge, in a good way.

I never successfully beat Sneak, even after I figured out the pattern. Grrr.

I like the art a lot. As others said, the game-breaking bugs prevent me from evaluating much beyond that.

+1 to tulevik.EU's comment about the core game loop. The tension as the light shrunk landed very nicely. Thanks for submitting!

I like the experience of figuring out the mechanics of the game through experimentation. Also, the visuals had a pleasant theme. Reminds me of the old NES game Lolo a bit.

Yay! Thank you.

Thank you! The transition effect was something that was only possible at such a low resolution. I'm really happy with how it turned out.

I copied the screen buffer from the GPU back to CPU memory. Then grouped pixels by color in the before and after image. Then made particles such that each before and each after pixel was represented by at least one particle. Finally slid the particles across the screen, smearing their color from source to destination.

So yeah, totally possible with  4000 pixels. Impossible with millions of pixels. Also helped by the fact that my color palette has 9 color groups, with 7 shades each. So I could group e.g. all the browns, and have the particles slide through the shades as they travel.

Nice. Yeah I erred towards confusing and dreamlike rather than mechanics driven and gamelike. So you are definitely having the intended experience.

Ahh, that makes sense. I hadn't realized how much momentum you could build. Cool.

Wow, thank you so much. This is exactly what I was hoping for as a reaction, and I'm mostly expecting people to find it bizarre and difficult to engage with. I'm glad you connected with it.

Pretty cool concept. I liked piecing together the game rules through experimentation.

I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding something or if there's a bug, but about 5-8 levels in there was a room where red starts on a crate to the left and blue on the right. I couldn't find a way to get red's door to stay open for more than .5 seconds.