So...surely you're not supposed to just try all 100 possible times until one of them works, right? Am I missing something that gives me a hint on what to do?
Oh, when they overlap. I had also tried this and found myself getting nowhere, because I didn't know which things were supposed to overlap. The screenshot helped immensely, and I'm glad it did, because: cozy!
So...is there more to the game than the obvious? I kind of wanted to find that there was some way to break the cycle, but, I guess not? (Also who keeps leaving letters outside the door?)
Good atmosphere, entertaining gameplay. Surprised at how much strategy there was on top of the luck.
Unfortunately, by level...15 or 16, I'm not sure...the grid takes up so much space that not only can you no longer see the level number or the number of shovels left, you can't even see the edges of the grid. Maybe it needs a panning mechanism? (Get it? Panning for gold? Because you...never mind.)
Oh, I see. I was trying to get to it for a while, because I forgot about the other lever, so I thought this was the only way to go forward.
Once I did go back...I reached a point where I had to set it aside (and there may have been an actual bug, where I pushed the burner up against the angled wood, and it seemed to get stuck there and I had no way out; I just stood on the burner until I ran out of health and could reset). There's a lot I like in here, with the opening of passages and new jumping platforms and so forth. It's also just a little daunting at the moment.
...followup: once I'm in the warehouse below that floor, there's a torch and a bookcase on the other side, but they're behind a...big swirling thing that teleports me out. I feel like I'm missing something fundamental about how to get past it.
It's very easy to miss the fact that there's a clue about the floor, since there are two "!" levers on either side of it.
I pushed the barrel off the platform as it was going up, and now I think I've lost the barrel entirely, which looks kind of unfortunate? EDIT: no, it was just on the lower ledge, so that's OK.
It's intriguing, but...after clicking through ten or twelve questions (each with a somewhat slow "response recorded" after it) and being told "Sorry, you're not compatible, start over", it was a little hard to find the enthusiasm to try it again. When I got that a second time, with no indication at all of why, I nearly quit rather than clicking "restart".
And it was cool to get something when I did...but it was four short lines and then then all of that again? I feel like there's something interesting here, but also there's a barrier to get to it.
Not just you. I got a lot of "try to take this seriously", several death sigils (which...I guess meant I died? because given a lot of random books with no hints, I clicked one of them?), a lot of text with no context. People who skipped to the battles seem to have liked it better.
Nice! A few quick notes about typos: "apparatus"; "coalesce"; and there was one "their" spelled as "thier". But I mention these things because the game was so much fun that I'd hate to have anything wrong with it. :-)
The main frustration was that I went to the laser area last and, because I didn't destroy all the blocks before going down, a block was sitting there keeping me from getting back up. The only thing I could do at that point was hit myself with a laser, which started me from the beginning, which, ugh. Still worth playing though.
Oh, right, language barrier! It's funny, because when I put "lunch box" into an image search I get exactly the thing you describe. And maybe that's what younger people in the US picture? For those of us raised in the 70s-80s in the US, a lunch box is a rectangular metal (or sometimes plastic) box with a handle, for carrying lunch. (Do an image search for "1980s lunch box" to get a sense of it.) It's not a thing you'd put into a picnic basket...but the thing you describe totally is.
Small note: the radio transcript has "Kruger Industries" at the top. (If I had to guess, I'd suspect that was its name until you didn't want it on the same card as Kreutz?)
Anyway, that aside, this is very well done. It was a lot of fun to piece things together (sometimes literally!), and I loved the chains of inferences necessary to answer the questions. (I did somehow get the first two cameras swapped, so my inferences weren't perfect. There's also a weird little inconsistency there about whether they were carrying a picnic basket or lunch boxes?)
Excited to see how it ends up if you keep working on it!
It's cute, but it's practically pure luck. It's impossible to strategize, and you only get to make two choices: "right or down" (for which you have no information) and spending money in the store.
I'm glad you got something working in 1k, but there's kind of not much there.
I can see how it's a rough draft, but it's a really good rough draft, and the mechanics are really interesting! I hope you can come back to it like you plan to!
I was going to complain that the main game is basically "find a zero, use it to find more zeroes, until you're done", but I have to admit there's kind of more to the (pardon the term) endgame than that. What seemed like it ought to be obvious ended up pretty darned engaging!
It's a little weird that there's not a unique solution to each level. At first I noticed this when the last two markers I was placing weren't determined (it could be row A / col B and row C / col D, or row A / col D and row C / col B). By later levels it meant that I could just click and hope for the best without really having to logic through things, and it would mostly work (which is not a thing that works in a usual Star Battles).
Oddly, I hadn't, but also oddly, I'm no longer getting that error, so whatever you pushed seems to have fixed it. (If it comes back I'll give a more detailed description!)
EDIT: Wait, I take that back! I hadn't recognized the name, but I did in fact play it ages ago, so there was almost certainly some sort of old (I guess pre-druid?) save information in there. Well, that totally explains that.
The "discard" thing is particularly important in the endgame; twice now I've had 3/4 of a castle built and had my game end because my hand was six (unplaceable) mills.
Somehow every time I get a mill, the game thinks it's a new discovery. (This pushed its way past "annoying" and into "quirky and charming".) A small issue with what's otherwise quite enjoyable.
