So the "throw subweapon" thing. Is the silver dagger at the start of the game not a thrown weapon? Because no amount of pressing "C" seems to want to throw it.
I love the aesthetics, but I have to admit it feels kind of like a guessing game. Now that I see your response to the comment below, I see the logic you were going for--but at the same time, why bottom to top? Why not top to bottom, or left to right?
Not having thought of that logic at all, I ended up just trying all the options one by one. Then I made it to the second plant, where...the third time a bee visited, I gave had it pollinate a flower, which gave me a berry, which I gave to the bee, and then...nothing happened. So it feels very guessing-game again.
Does it work on a non-phone? I'm assuming "up" and "left" are directions to swipe.
EDIT: Oh, ok, dragging the mouse does work. On the other hand: I started a game and got "NOT NOT NOT RIGHT". So I did nothing. The timer ran out, and nothing continued to happen; it just sat at 0. I swiped up, and the game told me I lost.
I like it. I'm also being just demolished by that stupid rat, which is hard to get close enough to attack and which keeps jumping on top of me. (I can't tell if I'm missing something or just need to get better.)
I think there's a bug around the +/- in the "experiment" tab: after prestiging (ascending, reworlding, whatever it's called in this case), several of my tools (rope and handles, I think) are rising rapidly without the raw materials declining.
I like what I could see of it, but I was having a very hard time understanding how I was interacting with the poles. I think it could use a tutorial/introductory level.
The room that starts with six coins: how can you get around that second bend? You can't turn to face the right without walking into the darkness, but throwing a coin at the wall to the left doesn't let in any light.
I didn't quite give up on the first screen...well, I didn't get out of the first screen, but I did jump up and see the second screen. I kind of wish the window scrolled with the frog, so that you could see above him. As it is, I got to the top of the first screen and didn't know where I should be aiming for on the next one.
But that's my take on things, not necessarily yours.
So I really like it--the problem I ran into was that my keyboard doesn't have a key between shift and Z (on the third row, QWERTY layout). And my bottom row is Ctrl - Fn - Windows - Alt - Spacebar - Alt -Ctrl. So I had to kind of make up keys to go there.
I then ended up with a different problem, which was that when I tried to move to an adjacent ALT key, the...potatothing?...told me that ALT was "too far", because it thought I was pressing one of the other ALT keys.
Still, it's a very cool concept, and I'll probably return to it and fill in something other than alt keys for the bottom row and try it again.
One thing that strikes me about the comparison of capitalism to religion (and I really like the "illusory promises and explanatory power" link) is that, in many countries, religion is not enforced by the state, whereas capitalism more or less is.
That's not wholly true, even setting aside countries where religion is enforced by the state: my government does not literally require me to exchange money for goods and services. On the other hand, escaping religion is merely a matter of saying "no thank you" (and just stopping; it's even easier to do than continuing to practice, which takes ongoing commitment and effort), whereas my government has in fact set up numerous structures to make it very hard to simply decide not to capitalism (legal recourse from landlords, for instance). I could grow my own food--but not in this small living space with no backyard, I would need, well, to buy land, and...yeah.
So that's a thing I'd love to see explored more, if you expand this essay.
(Also this is easily the weirdest comment I've ever left on a game site.)
Honestly, I've removed the 2s and have a 5% ace draw, and my War win is at 17%. I don't even know what's going on there; I'm just letting my coin flips finance the losses.
Aww, thanks! I can't make games to save my life, but boy do I know how to nitpick. I figured it was worth using that skill for good. :-)
So just quickly, in terms of "a puzzle where all the pieces start off active already and you just have to pick the right ones to deactivate": so, yeah, you certainly wouldn't be able to do any kind of "light up when some of the right words are active" (because at the start they all are), or "dim when a correct word is deactivated" (because you'd see it instantly). What I was thinking was that you'd get the feedback specifically when you had the right number of words selected--so for a four-word verse, you wouldn't see any feedback until you'd crossed out all but four of the words. And you couldn't cross out everything and erase things one by one; you'd only get feedback when you were back up to four.
So if the sentence is, I don't know, "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" and the target is "King of despair", the feedback would be something like:
(showing) Ozymandias, King of Kings: (feedback) nothing, because it's too many words
despair: nothing, because it's too few words
King of Kings: "2/3 right", or something like that
name my works: "nothing right"
Sure, you'll have players who just go "ok, my name is...nothing. ozymandias king of...two. ozymandias king kings...one, so I know 'of' is right and--" but really, anyone who wants to systematically just try every combination is going to do what they're going to do.
Anyway, play around with that. Maybe "one word right" doesn't warrant feedback, so that you can't put in three words, see that you get nothing, and eliminate all three at once. Maybe things only brighten up if it's something like "at least half the words" or "all but one word"--but even those things would be helpful. ("I tried 'name my works' and there's no feedback. I can't rule out all of them, but I do know it's also not 'name my kings' or 'name my despair' or anything else where two of the three words are right"--see, pretty useful!)
Play around with it, see what strikes you. Y'all're probably going to find something you think works well. If this was the result of y'all writing a first game, you've definitely got the instincts to keep going!
I admit to using a small parser trick: first, you can issue more than one command at a time (to be executed consecutively) by separating them with periods. This is often really useful for traversing well-traveled rooms: "n. n. n. e. n. w. d. open door. up." rather than typing them all in consecutively. And second, up-arrow scrolls back through your previous history.
Which means that I could up-arrow to something like "look. examine vase. examine flowers. smell flowers. etc. etc. etc." and have it do all the relevant room-examining things at once. Made things much easier.
OK, I still very much love the concept. I do appreciate that you're looking to improve solvability, too, because I do have to admit it was...well, heavy on the walkthrough.
Part of the problem -- no, it's not a problem, part of the joy of the game is how poetic it is. But the poetic language does become an issue from a solvability perspective: when the right answer is mostly the feeling of the words, it's very hard to tell whether I'm feeling the same things you are. That turned out to be even more true when one of the intended words was "a" (was it "I found a friend"? something like that?) and I was trying more poetic combinations ("found my little friend"? "I found little friend"?).
And the more words there are in the solution, the harder it is to tell which ones I might have right.
So I think the key to improved solvability is feedback. Let the images fade or brighten as the solver gets fewer or more of the intended words correct, because right now there's no distinction between "I have one of the six words wrong" and "I have six of the six words wrong".
I think framing the hint system as a "hint" system is also kind of making your lives harder. Without looking at the hint, you could be trying to achieve anything: making the plant grow, making the station emit music, and so on. So the things you've hidden behind a "help" button are less hints and more basic instructions; I'd stop hiding them.
Anyway, there are a lot of ideas in this game and there are a lot of directions it could go. Good luck with it!
How do you end the level? I thought that after opening the gate on the right I'd just walk through it, but somehow I just ended up off the screen to the right without anything happening.
Typing "smell" gets the error "*** Run-time problem P10: Since the Lab is not allowed the property "sniffed", it is against the rules to try to use it."
At the end, "shielding" is misspelled.
I really like the subtle sense of creeping horror. Nothing changed, minor changed, nothing changed, what the hell is that, nothing changed...
To that end, though, the ending was a little anticlimactic. I guess I was expecting something to happen? I don't know.
Well, you're very committed to the hide-the-text motif, since when I start the game, there's no text at all! (Well, there's a "help" thing off to the side. When I click that, it opens another box with no text at all.)
Also, if you go into "options", there doesn't seem to be a way out of it.
I hope these things are fixable, because the concept looks so interesting!
I think this is a good starting point for a game; I think the mushrooms are a great variation on the usual "here's a maze you can see, navigate it" plus the occasional "here's a maze you can't see at all, navigate it".
I think there's a lot of room for it to grow, and not just with more levels. The main thing I felt was a lack of stakes--there was no real pressure, no disadvantage to just hitting every mushroom as you go. (In a sense, there's no way to lose, and winning feels more like an accomplishment if it wasn't guaranteed.) I'd hate to see "time limit" be the stakes, and I'm not sure that "something is chasing you" would add anything, but it's something to think about.
"The player can decline" only really works if it's obvious that it's an instant death card. I got something about the release date of a game, clicked "accept", and was told...I don't know, I've never heard of the game, I have no idea why that would kill me instantly.
I agree with Kitkatarine: I think the premise is good and, if you decided you wanted to polish it by taking something more than three hours, there's definitely promise here.
Well, you got farther than I did. (I didn't find the E2S14 block.) After I left the...let's say shop...I wandered around and couldn't even find my way back to anything. There's a whole lot of empty space out there and not a whole lot of landmarks. Or map.
I did find that if you press "1" you get a yellow box around...you and your blocks, I think? I literally can't tell if it's important or debugging.
So addictive! Finally got over 1000 (and I know I can do better but I also need to do things like "eat" and "sleep").
What's the size of the screen? Like, if the entire screen were full (which in practical terms it can't be), what would the number on the rectangle be? I'm wondering what percentage of the screen I filled.
For some reason, all cards after the first seven are half-sized. (Even at full-screen on a laptop, that makes the numbers on the cards too small to really distinguish.)
The game is incredibly buggy for me: the first few times, I found that clicking the fullscreen arrows in the lower right caused the game to (permanently, until reloading the page) lose focus; clicking on it did nothing. Then, by ignoring the arrows, I was able to click on the "play" button on the level select screen, which caused it to start flickering between level-select and title screens. Now, when I reload the page and click "run game", it's just black.
I suspect this is all details of Unity and not really a deep-seated flaw in the game, which means it's hopefully easy to clear up!
Small playability issue: I keep ending up with my cards covering the bottom of the field. (Maybe particularly on boss levels?) A zoom in/out would be helpful there.
Larger issue: more than once, I've run out of plays and had the game not recognize this fact.
That's cute! It's nice to see a pachinko game with an end condition beyond "just keep racking up points", and I really like the balance involved in trying to get just the right amounts of things.
Unfortunately, it's not saving the setting for "blacklist zero letters". Even more unfortunately, I just faced one too many rounds where the previous word had only one vowel in it, and that vowel was now blacklisted, making it impossible to play anything useful. I feel like it's rendering the game unplayable.
Oh, good, because I was just going to look at the answer to find out why I couldn't solve it. :-)
"VIIIXXXID" seemed a little broken: it felt like a guessing game. (8 31 D? 8 30 1 D? Vertically or horizontally?)
Other than UNEVEN and that one--and, well, level 26 being impossible--I really like this. There aren't enough word puzzles out there, especially in puzzlescript, and this is a really nice way to do one.
Yeah, I was going to report this when I finished (and then I never finished): the answer expects it to be spelled vertically. That's just an error, really.
