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I'm so torn on this game. I've finished almost every game in this jam, but I really struggled with this one and never finished, despite it being clearly well-made and interesting. I think there's just something about the number of actions, amount of planning, and time it takes to demolish construction and fix mistakes, and how extremely important building placement is.

I also hit a really sad bug where I failed after a very long run and reset (with bonuses). The game then incorrectly dropped me to 0 settlers when building the first settlement, and I had to reset without any bonus (I assume, since the bonus isn't visible).

This game is pretty fun, up until the idle donut section, where it slows down. (I didn't finish this game.) I rated the game for before that part, though.

For the action sequences (defending and mazes) the game uses the OS's settings for keyboard repeat and delay. For the next game, look at how Project Iridium works and take that - it just repeats movement on a custom interval as long as the key is pressed.

This had a big impact on how much I enjoyed the action segments, which are most of the game. Instead of holding in a direction, I had to mash arrow keys over and over, which is physically painful for me. Eventually, I just gave up and held down the keys, despite it feeling very slow and making some of the spiral mazes take a very long time.

I have a repetitive stress injury, so I had to use an autoclicker for this one (Clicking is fine, mashing click on one thing isn't.)

The first time finishing each new run was fun (rapid clicking aside), but repeating it wasn't so fun, since there's nothing new after the first time. I ended up bringing up an older run and letting it idle in the background.

Fun at first, and I like how you're jumping forwards and backwards in time periods instead of always going forward (and the UI matches this).

After the first time travel, though, it just repeats itself until the end, and all upgrades / energy usage are based on a single formula.

More fun than I was expecting. Making the game deterministic is a really good idea.

The UI around saving/loading setups confused me, and it stops being useful since you can't save layouts before reshuffling.

Great game with a fatal UI flaw. The tooltip on "Reset" explains that time crystals are based solely on the amount of rocks you've collected. I didn't see this for the first two resets, and was ready to write the game off.

After seeing that, I realized I'd spend 3-4 minutes progressing, then the last 1-2 minutes completely focused on collecting rocks. I took a different upgrade path every reset depending on how much time I had available, and this kept the game interesting right up until I crashed it (after getting the last upgrade, so I still "won").

It's also possible to do quicker runs in the beginning and get 2-5 crystals, which is optimal, but maybe not as fun.

If you can find a good way to message this, I think people could have a lot of fun with this.

This was fun. The start could really use a build queue of 2+, as upgrading / waiting 30 seconds / upgrading gets really tedious. It picks up quickly after the first timewall, though.

The use of the countdown timer was a really good choice, and something I should have found a way to add to my own game. It mostly doesn't matter after the first few minutes, but I don't think that's a bad thing. Artificial urgency can be just as good as real.

It's short, and I got stuck due to the UI being confusing at the very end. The last buttons to press don't look like they can be clicked. It's helpful to make all the buttons in the game have something in common to prevent that.

I like the writing! It's silly but enjoyable.

Time is very central to this, but it's mostly in the story. It would have been nice to see a little more time manipulation in the mechanics themselves.

There isn't much going on here, since the prestige mechanic doesn't speed up or evolve the game, beyond opening up some upgrades (though they're just increasing some numbers). It would have been nice to see something change with each era, beyond the text.

I didn't play all the way to the end, since I accidentally reloaded the page, and it looks like the save system isn't working.

It's also possible to soft-lock the game by buying too many gold upgrades. The first resource goes into the negative and doesn't recover. Bugs are a fact of life in game jams, though!

I'm bad at these types of memorization games, so I can tell this isn't really for me.

However, I made it past the first two watches, couldn't buy anything from the shop, and now I'm looking at a clock where I can set the hands... but moving them around doesn't seem to do anything.

I don't think I'm going to be able to finish this one.

Just the one, but maybe [B]arry won't be the only one in this world in the future...

This is why getting people to playtest games is important! When I played through it, I only restarted twice:

• Once, after looping and upgrading a bunch of times, and only to day 20 or so, and
• Once after getting automation.

This is mostly because upgrades take effect on the next loop or restart, and nothing in the game tells you that explicitly. There are lots of possible fixes. Simulating it after automation is one. I could also immediately re-run the first phase and give you the resources you would have, even in the middle of a phase 2 run.

If I keep working on this, I'm replacing the first 20 minutes. It's not engaging at all. I just couldn't risk changing it after balancing phase 2+.

3 loops is enough to get random typos, screaming, and glitched-out sentences. They're intentional, but this is good feedback - they need to be unmistakably intentional. Lots of ways to go there.

Could you message me on the IGJ Discord? I haven't seen that bug, and couldn't reproduce, but I'd like to grab your save and track it down.

Yep, that's a design flaw. It should only auto-sort once when it runs out of space and tries to store something, not on an interval like this.

I've never seen this done before. I'd love to see how far you can push this idea.

This seems like it could have a ton of potential as a bigger game. It's really short, and I wish I could drag across the map to build things.

Please keep working on this!

I mostly ran into balance issues with this one. Ideas are the bottleneck, and I'd leave for a few minutes, come back, and skip 5 upgrades. Resetting wasn't really worth it for the small boost.

No bugs that I could find.

Liked that you put effort into the descriptions!

ah yeah, good point! I meant to add an on/off button for automation but forgot. It'd be a feature change at this point, though.

Hello