itch.io

This is such a great tool. I discovered by accident a neat "feature": you can put this tool on one monitor and your game on the other monitor, and use one controller to control play both games at the same time. So you can compare them in real time and adjust yours to match Kit's movement.

Very cool concept and beautiful style. But I feel the balance is so off it's frustrating right after the tutorial. There's so little time before the deliveries expire that you're constantly stocking up, missing the single launch window before the delivery expires, and having to go back and change the stock and try for another planet.

It's such a tricky concept to get your head around, I think the game should be slowed right down. The speed it runs at when you press shift should be the default, with a button to speed it up if you're waiting for a rotation, and there should be a pause button that lets you scale the asteroids, just so you can pause and think through.

Thanks! I'm working on getting it to work on mobile web.

Such excellent theming. The constant stream of dialogue from RitaDelilah was extremely funny. Now I have a headache!

Incredible work for a 4-day jam. Quite short and simple but the FMV adds so much life to the game, and everything is so polished.

(Except the green arrow which is so comically crude compared to literally everything else in the entire game.)

Thanks! The lag when bots get into large groups is unfortunate and I couldn't resolve it during the jam. I've actually fixed it since the jam and can report it's a lot more fun to play, but we can't change the games during the judging phase. I will push the new build after the judging is over.

It's very impressive to have a mini factory game in a game jam, and certainly embodies the scale.

Having said that, I feel that it was missing far too many quality of life features that I'm used to in games like Factorio that it was quite frustrating to play. And it is a much longer experience than most small game jam titles; I played for about 30 minutes just enough to get up to Crimson, but I don't have the patience to proceed.

Specific QOL issues:

• I keep accidentally deleting things by left-clicking on them (even when the bin is selected). It should be much harder to delete, and also I think it's unfair that you don't get a full refund (which you do in Factorio for example).
• I can't find any mouse or key to stop holding an entity for placement (e.g. to be able to set the configuration for a refiner). The only way to do it seems to be to select the bin, then deselect it (which as I mentioned above, sometimes causes the entity to be deleted even after you deselect the bin). Should be able to right-click to stop holding.
• No way to rotate entities after placing them. Because you can't get refunds, this wastes the purchase price to delete it and place a rotated one. Also, when you place an object at a certain rotation, the next one you place resets back to the original rotation.
• You should also be able to rotate an existing entity (for free) by simply placing a new one on top of the old one at a different rotation. This would make placing belts immensely easier (currently if you want to make a belt turn a corner you have to get out the bin, delete it, go back and place a new belt with the correct rotation).
• Some of the recipes are wrong - e.g. Amethyst Enrichment says it takes a Hexagon Amethyst and a Diamond Azurite, but it doesn't work when you wire it up - it actually needs Hexagon of both. Similarly, Crimson enrichment says it takes Hexagon Crimson, Diamond Amethyst, and Circle Azurite, but it actually takes Hexagon Crimson, Hexagon Amethyst, and Diamond Azurite.
• The fact that you can only get all resources from the core and there are only 12 slots is very limiting. I found that by the time I was waiting to get 10k Azurite to build a Crimson extractor, I was maxed out on all my slots with nothing I could really build to speed things up, just waiting ~10 minutes for it to accumulate. (It didn't help that I wasted about 3k Azurite having to delete and replace expensive buildings due to them being rotated incorrectly). I may have a suboptimal setup, but I had a single purifier working at capacity and not enough extractor slots to justify building a second one.

I like the minimalistic style and you've nailed the factory progression mechanics. There is a sense of satisfaction of having a fully productive base like in Factorio.

Nice simple game, thanks for sharing your thoughts on YouTube.

The juice is good and it feels polished, the numbers going up is just satisfying enough for the ~5 minute play time. In terms of game feel, I would have two pieces of feedback.

1. It feels bad to hit an "almost destroyed" block and bounce off, especially if you just hit a corner of one that you can barely see. Ideally you would "smash through" blocks that are almost destroyed, i.e. the amount of reaction force that a block puts on the player would scale down with the health of the block.

2. It was always a bit of a surprise when a run ended and snapped back to the shop screen; it feels jarring and sudden. I think this is a combination of a few things: the health decreases super-linearly (the deeper blocks deal exponentially more damage, so you can go from 40% to 0% in no time at all), the health bar isn't very prominent (I would maybe make the player character flash or show visually when close to death), and there's no animation on death, it instantly goes to the shop (I would add a short death animation so you realize what's happening).

The mic isn't working for me. :(

I've tried using Chrome, I've enabled the Mic permission, your settings shows my microphones in the list, I've chosen the correct one, I'm holding left control. It isn't showing up in the volume level bar or moving any objects. I've tested the same mic in the same browser with Google Meet and it shows audio input. Not sure what else to try.

A really cool idea with some nice hard choices for the player (R is necessary but also takes on a big risk as you lose your guns). I like that you can choose how to position the guns, and you can accidentally blow up gun asteroids, adding a "don't shoot the civilians" aspect.

I didn't really get a sense of the game fitting the theme of "scale" - hitting R didn't feel like I was growing bigger, it just filled up a blue bar. I'd like to see the growing actually adding slots for more guns and asteroids, but also making you a bigger target. (If that is in the game, it wasn't really noticeable.)

Also some animations to show what R is doing would help - initially I was confused what R was doing and thought it was just restarting the game.

> oh, v quick comment on the disasters: they're meant to be unavoidable in some cases, acting as a hard timer that doesn't look like a hard timer.

Hmm, if there's going to be some disasters that kill everyone and others that are avoidable, I think I'd rather know which one is coming. Perhaps the one that's going to kill everyone should be called a "catastrophe" so that way everybody knows a big one is coming, changing up the social dynamic to "we need to get out of this level now".

As it is, I think we largely ignored the disaster timer, just reacting when they happened but not really taking any action while the timer is counting. Whereas if we knew a "catastrophe" was coming, maybe some people (with lower HP) would be more inclined to cooperate to exit the level.

Hi droqen. I'm very glad to have "rejuvenated" your energy on this game!

>  i love the idea of different levels -- that sounds very doable and rich space for new social constructs

FWIW what I was thinking of was less along the lines of "you finished Level 1, now on to Level 2" and more like Mario Kart or Counter Strike where there are a bunch of different levels to choose in the menu, or they just rotate around after 10 minutes or so.

Since you asked about play-by-play, I'll tell you my favourite little moment: one of my brothers and I were stuck on the top floor of the tower with no ladders down, wall on the left, high drop on the right. One of us had to jump off to push the arrows. I had 1 heart and my brother had 2, but I was on the right so I had to jump off first. We had a pushing struggle for awhile and in the end realised that if I pushed him up against the wall on the left, I could squeeze past him and he could jump off non-fatally. But in all this time, the other brother activated some machine (don't remember which) causing the one up top with me to lose his second-last heart and now one of us was forced to suicide.

Looking forward to your May 11 game!

I played Inconsiderate Climbers with my brothers the other day and had a blast. I really liked the slow discovery of both the mechanics and the social constructs in the game.

Mechanics: We didn't initially realise that the various machines were doing a specific thing; we thought random stuff was just happening all the time. Once we realised the machines were doing something, it became a lot more interesting because you had incentives to use someone else's machine, or block them from using a machine. We also had a discovery moment of how to use the arrows.

Socially, we started trying to block each other from getting points, but eventually evolved into a more cooperative environment, once we established the idea that you're not trying to be the first to win, just trying to win, therefore it's OK to let others get their points as long as you aren't hurting yourself, and they might reciprocate.

It brings up an interesting thought about the whole "non zero-sum game": it's more of a mindset than a mechanical difference (it's only "non-zero-sum" because it says it is). Technically, basketball could be said to be a "non zero-sum game" since scoring a goal gives you points without deducting points from your opponent. It's only "zero sum" because you "lose" if you have fewer points than your opponent. IC looks like any other race to the top until you get a mindset of "it's OK for the other players to get points, I'm just trying to win myself," and then that opens up the entire social game (not just pure selfishness). I guess the problem is, that concept is only really communicated in-game by what happens when somebody wins (the game continues). Before I see that life goes on after somebody wins, I feel an intrinsic need to be selfish. I'm not sure how the game would best communicate that.

It's also not clear what some of the machines do, even after a lot of play. Some seem fairly random (is the 3-white-balls machine literally just "do 3 random effects"?) And some of the "disasters" seem unavoidable. The beams of light sometimes fill up the entire screen, and the rising water similarly can sometimes go all the way to the top, drowning everyone. I think those disasters should be less lethal.

I like how the different machine goals effectively give players different personalities. If you've got the lightning machine, then you're trying to hurt people and I've got a natural incentive to stop you. If you've got the heart machine, you're just trying to keep yourself alive, but you're also in natural competition with everyone else who also wants those precious hearts.

The next-level arrows are particularly good design, requiring some degree of collaboration between players. I like how N-1 players can collaborate to thwart anybody's machine activation by simply agreeing to move onto the next level before they can get to the machine.

Sound effects would definitely be good. It feels weird to play a totally silent video game.

I'm not sure the game has particular longevity. I feel like we've sufficiently explored the mechanics and there doesn't seem to be anything left to discover. Perhaps there could be some different "levels" with different machines or layouts, similar to how a racing game has different tracks.