I did! Getting to the endgame was the most aggravating experience I've had on itch.io - but that ending, man. It really did give me something to think about!
After an unexpected loss of save data, my character has classes with Gemma, Gemma, Jazlyn, and Jazmyn. Commentary on the RNGness of the (Gen-Z) name generator aside, I think there needs to be a scene where same-named NPCs have a good laugh about the coincidence and/or gradually become a couple. ...double-dating AND being a wingman seems far-off on the development roadmap but I just can't stop thinking about this one specific meet-cute scenario.
EDIT : april fool's gag involves the character blind-dating Rover, the one from The Prisoner.
It's immersive and accurate, in ways I really wasn't expecting - but the places where it breaks with reality for the player's benefit are great. (I wish jobs worked like that in real life - just walk in off the street after an all-night party, your veins throbbing with coffee, and flip burgers for an hour.) I'm having a great time playing it and it's a great December distraction.
I have three suggestions. First, the QOL option to minimize/use drop-downs and otherwise chose the order classes appear in under School and Studying. Not needing to scroll down to find outstanding studying or homework would be nice.
Second, I have a suggestion for what to do with Writing (and I suppose the same format would work with Artistic and maybe Photography too): have the character submit stuff for publication after finding a posting in a magazine/on the wall in Chamberlain. The character would decide to write something and it would appear as a project under School, to be completed by Studying (the idea being that the character decides to organize their art creation using the same scheduling notebook as their classes, and happens to write or draw well in the same circumstances). The kicker though, would be to have the Skill only increase by a negligible amount per session, with greater increases coming after they get feedback on what they submitted (so on a 100-point scale, it'd be a 1 point increase per session, but like 5 or 10 points when their story comes back with feedback or gets published).
The writing projects themselves have certain word counts, say 2000, and each 1 hour session would finish +/- 500 words (a critical fail would be 0); published stories bring in $0.08 per word, so $160 per story or so. To keep this from being a cash cow the odds of successful publication would be low, maybe 1 in 4 (so $10/hr over 16 hours or so of effort). A higher skill level would mean more successful sessions but not necessarily an increase in publication rate, since that's out of the player's hands.
As a side-bonus, it would give the Mail Center more prominence. In the real world, of course, e-submitting has been a thing for close to 30 years; the character just likes analog stuff.
...Oh, right, third suggestion! Campus Landscaping as a job. Gets easier to do with each Physical level and counts as mild but paid exercise. Would require purchasing overalls and a hat, and it keeps the character on campus with opportunities to interact with students (the kind who either like or hate paper towel mascots). The boss comes in only two flavors: Marisa or Zangief.
Difficulty ramps up fast; should probably have the Bullet Hell or Runner tags. Neat that Saws will combine at high enough levels and fire faster. Even for a Jam game the story feels light, but this is mitigated with cute characters and vehicle designs that hint at a larger world (put another way, this is masterful minimalistic storytelling). Hard but enjoyable.
Post-jam suggestions: shield option (bullet-cutting melee or physical shield), convoy members with leveling, difficulty mitigation, save option if the story's extended, branching tuna tank options (non-attack), outrun booster (resets remaining enemies for the screen while they "catch up"), flying enemy/ally miniboss (gyrocoptor?) that seeks to attack but shoots slow, 90 degree perspective change as a win screen, +1 crate with each restart after X fight screens. Story expansion: "Purriosa's Portage" vs rival gangs/shipment companies; "delivery" and "deliverance" have the same word origin; tuna repopulation; Katamari Damacy-like size scaling.
Population degrades so fast that you can't stop to read the upgrade descriptions. That said, I found the game entertaining for the 10 minutes I played it.
A nice, entertaining diversion. Points off for realism though - pretty sure it's a little harder in real life to take over the world like that on as few kilobytes as that, ha!
Not being able to stop a week at any point means you have to let the whole thing play out no matter what.
No indication of what each task will 'cost', and it's not clear what exercise does at all.
No clear goals or endgame besides "survive a year", although this isn't entirely out of step with the "hazy adulthood" feel.
No easy way to tell what each set of points means in terms of gameplay (ex: what do 'Social' and 'Organ' actually do or affect?).
No option to go day-by-day instead of by full weeks (life-sim players can and will get into the nitty-gritty).
UI is not intuitive and there's no tutorial. Though it's not difficult to figure out how to play it, having to go from edge to corner to edge to corner feels clunky..
Character creation options need explanation.
It would also help to allow the player to save on their own in addition to autosaving.
The time-of-day icon art is nice, but it's unrelated to anything else in the game (urban vs. country setting - maybe make it part of her backstory?) and it's better than 'Morning/Noon/Afternoon/Night' icons only in providing some color.
Wouldn't someone like her have plants, or try to buy some?
Art's good and unique, music's weirdly apropos if repetitive, actual gameplay is fairly entertaining for this genre (I wouldn't call it 'experimental', when the game's a 'life sim'). Mima's pretty cute. I liked the simplified character creation options, the art/animation style (giving the moon phases was a nice touch), and the overall direction is interesting.
