itch.io

Oh! yes! You need to fix this: there's a high probability that the game is impossible because you generate starts where the only actions require gold. Which is completely unplayable. You need to change your startup routine so that it always (randomly) includes AT LEAST ONE action that doesn't cost gold to use.

So .. you start with 0 gold, but all actions require gold. There's no information, and no buttons work. Is this just super buggy and broken?

Ah! That explains it, I was completely confused by that - thanks!

Have you fixed the performance problems? Less than 1 FPS on a machine with 64 GB RAM and a 16GB GPU and 4k monitor is :( :( :( :(.
(it was always slow, but the earlier builds ran OK on high-powered machines)

Liked the idea but needs some significant work in improving the info about what's going to happen.

e.g. I had an enemy villager step next to my knight (docs say this is impossible, knight was defending adjacent squares. Docs are wrong? But this seems a basic gameplay feature).

Very hard to know what's going to happen, you just have to keep guessing and hitting UNDO each time something seemingly impossible happens.

Blockage still broken, still cannot build on planets it returns.

New build now also broke Pirates - after the first time it returns the stolen production, on all future turns it only steals production never returns any.

Latest build performance is even worse (didn't think it was possible) - radeon 7600XT, 6 core 5600x CPU maxed, 13 GB RAM used, on a Radeon total of 1 FPS or less. Whatever you're doing with the rendering you really need to re-think it :(.

Final update: changed the loading screen to have a link to the followup game (where I'm adding all the features and content I didn't have time for during the gamejam): https://tmachine.itch.io/shadowlink-2025

Crashed on turn 53 with no errors, but last message in console: "[Violation] 'requestAnimationFrame' handler took 173ms"

The end-turn button simply stopped working.

The lag spikes get worse the longer you play, you have some kind of memory leak.

The 'glitch' effect makes lag spikes 10x worse while they're on screen - however you've implemented that effect is bad, kills the browser.

Lots of times you cannot attack things and no reason is given. By trial and error it seems each ship has a min damage it will accept, and if you have less than that attack, the UI just ingores your mouse clicks?

Work in-progress: new build now uses ChatGPT to power the NPC characters - so they'll respond to any/everything you say, and it can be a bit easier getting info out of them (you don't have to use the magic keywords any more). I'm gradually converting the existing missions so that they work with the new AI-powered NPCs. Aiming for a new release in jan 2025.

If you're capturing the controls correctly for the major browsers then tab should be fine, it's just not something I'd think of trying :(, it doesn't work in most web games (because you have to disable the built-in browser controls). Same with RMB - it's annoying when web games break the browser so they can use RMB, and very few do it well (also: works badly on a lot of laptops, so most devs don't use it any more).

Standard for 'go back/out' is escape - and doesn't have a special meaning in browsers.

Most games I've played have an on-screen button for 'back' or 'exit', so there's no problem. I'd say 9 in 10 games have an onscreen button, whether or not they also have 'esc'.

Each individual mechanic has a lot of potential, but 'bullet hell' seems a very strange choice for most of these, not really working well with them. Perhaps if it started off slow and you gave people 10 levels to learn and master it, and it got gradually faster over time?

Great graphics, but I thikn it's too fast-paced for most of the mechanics to be worth using. With the enemies moving so fast, and the air dropping down, there's no time to care about potions or powerups or anything really - it's hard enough discovering "can I move to another crate or will it not allow me?" -- only way to find out is to keyboard hunt to remember the shift key while walking, then frantically press updownrightleftright trying to move while you're YOU DIED ... net effect: give up on crates, just run away from the wizards.

Thanks! It's not very obvious, but the early servers you encounter are deliberately missing all the unix commands, it's only the later servers that have a full bash shell, and then ls, cd, cat, ... etc implemented.

Got it - thanks! I liked the ending with the escape.

I found the restroom puzzle so hard because I had no reason to associate it with the solution - why would that be scribbled on the wall there? - I see that you were trying to make part of each puzzle be in a different room, but I think that one was a bit illogical.

For a postmortem I'd have liked to read about what/how you did things, e.g. the crystal changing FOV effect was interesting, and you called it out - but it would have been good to read what your algorithm was for it. Similarly: you said rot.js was a lot harder to get running than expected - why? What happened? What did you expect that turned out to be incorrect? etc.

I got stuck after the tooth and the book. I see four vases but nothing saying what they should be.

Excellent game, great use of secrets, and the use of ghost to give hints was brilliant. I hate the slidey jump and the delay on keyboard detecting jump pressed but that's probably just me.

Great narrtive, only minor issue is that the text was often hard to read (white-on-light-colored-background).

Nice art and level design. But playing on a laptop it's too difficult - it would work better if you had classic controls (e.g. up/w for jump) because these controls are too difficult without a dedicated mouse. Also the right mouse button did nothing - not sure if it was supposed to? Overall found it too difficult to play, the attack was too short range and using mouse for it made it slow to perform, the projectiles were often brown on a brown background, etc. Probably fine if you practiced playing it a lot or play a lot of platformers but it felt like it went straight to 'maximum difficulty' from the start.

Great art but very difficult. I found the popup text boxes very annoying - they're slow to animate in/out and so every time you click on something you didn't want to you have to tap lots of times waiting for them to go away. But eg on the bench that often means you tap once too many and it starts the same long boring text again. I think it would be much nicer if you showed a hightlight of which item you would pick up and/or made it disappear when picked up, so we could see it had picked up (and so we wouldnt keep interacting with it by accident), and if you removed the animations on boxes appearing/disappearing, just make them go.

Getting to the end of third room of minigames with guy on table then the game hangs and nothing happens - can bring up the pause menu but can't click on the door. Console log is full of errors about a wrong keyboard handler but I think that's a general problem throughout the game, not specific to the ending.

The rendering is buggy undermining the core mechanic - often one disc renders in front of others, but your collision detection priorities the disc that is in the background :(. Also keyboard doesnt work - nothing happens when pressing numbers, so it becomes quite slow and tedious using the mouse for everything. There didn't seem to be a time pressure, I guess that was planned but not implemented? Seems like a good start but needs some more challenge and something to make it a bit less repetitive - perhaps other characters appear?

Really like the mechanic with the bushes and want to see more levels with challenges based on where you place them, levels with limited numbers, some where you have 1 big and 4 small or similar so player has to choose etc.

Didn't like how quickly/easily I died (got bored with the jumps being too quick and dying too often and having to restart each time). For a game with basically 'no challenge' you can just make as many bushes as you like ... I feel that death should have little impact instead, and then it becomes a calm experience.

Feels like commander keen (especially with the floaty jump), good music, but I'd like to have had something more to do, more interactions early on and more terminals that do things. A good start, just needs to be expanded now with more mechanics. Good work on the palete dithering

Nice complete game. Only downsides were that the camera angle made it very hard to see what suspects were wearing (could maybe show an icon of them when you get close, a side-on view so we can see their clothes) and that I didn't know you had to stand right on top of the crowds for them to do anything - maybe in instructions say 'get close enough to crowds to learn info' rather than just 'interact with the crowds'. Otherwise all good.

I got the same bug, and it was my first task, so it just seemed like it was either deliberate or the whole game didn't work :(. Without the comments I wouldn't have known it was worth reloading and restarting

I also wish there was omething that froze input while people were talking, rather than making them into concrete blocks that magically stop being concrete when they are done - feels weird and frustrating not to be able to walk past them, then they look identically but now you CAN walk past them.

Good full game, I liked the way the powerups interacted with the gameplay. Small tweaks that would improve it: start the player in a dead end with only way out to be toward the terminal, because I started facng away from it and didn't even know it was tehre, went off exploring away from it (probably randomly due to where mouse cursor started). Also more obvious HUD would be nice - it ended up being 'quest for batteries' for me because I didn't see flashlight running out until it was gone. The flashlight running out needs some kind of anim, for me game just froze for a moment then seemed to have teleported me (actually: I didn't recodnise I was same place but dark). So maybe fade the light down while having the flashlight hud blink red or something.

Lots of potential here if you can fix the bugs. Great variety, and ambitious to try and get all this together into a single game. Like everyone I had the AI do nothing - until I picked up the gun, then 50% of guards started working and shooting me. The puizzle with lights I didn't know was a puzzle - there was no reason to believe the objects could be interacted until I randomly happened to walk into one. But then solving the puzzle had no effect. Bug, or just a puzzle that has no obvious solution? But needs a bit more affordance to say which things are interactable (toilet was not ,but random furniture was).

Also took me ages to get past the opening text because I hit many other things before randomly pressing 'space'. Make it work for any key, or mouse too.

And put the instructions on the webpage - they flicked up briefly and were gone, so I had to find controls by trial and error.

Good idea, but really needs a few intro ones to let you know which shapes are what - would be great to e.g. see the bag unpacked at the end if you die on first round and see a colored version of each item, so you have a chance to learn why you died. Otherwise it's just "lose, lose, lose, lose, lose" and feels random until you work out by trial-and-error what each image is supposed to be.

Here you go. First time it works almost correct, except in bottom left where it won't let me walk through the empty squares (thats why I paused and backtracked - wonderd why it wouldn't let me walk through there, but 2nd time it did).

Second time and all subsequent: you can see me run through the guards, nothign happens, then I die on  the same specific tile a few seconds later. If I avoi that SPECIFIC tile then I dont die.

Honestly with Unity I've never bothered with their navmesh stuff - it was 5 years too late, and way too weak for what it does. Much better to roll your own for simple cases (like this) or get one of the assets that does it far better I think (e.g. the A* free assets that have been around for 15 ish years now)

Thanks! that worked, I got the hang of it now. But this is very un-obvious, really needs some explanation in-game I think for others :).

Worth continuing to develop, it's a nice idea for a mechanic. Obviously not really working at the moment, just spam anything til you win, but I'd play it if you developed it further and made battles interesting

I think it would help if you made the door more obviously into an exit, it was only blind luck that I tried walking into it at one point, after assuming that the game was just broken/buggy that 'getting to the yellow goal' had no effect at all (there's a lot of gamejam games that don't really work, so it's a bold gamble to start with it seeming to be broken :)).

I liked the secrets and mechanics, but playing on laptop trackpad the mouse sensitivity was quickly a pain to deal with and after 8 or 9  levels (out of 1000) I lost the patience to keep going, just a bit too fiddly to work through. Reading the comments seems it got more interesting later on, but ... 1000 levels? ... ouch.

Love the visuals and the idea but it's very buggy. Frequently walked straight through guards cone and nothing happened, frequently died when nothing anywhere near. Seems there's a lot of squares that are instant death with no indication/reason for it.

No indication that the attack is limited, but I'm 90% sure the implementation is broken. It's a nice idea but desperately needs some indicator that it's going to happen - simply dying because you tried to kill a monster but the attack decided to not work is not fun.

I never managed to kill anything. The attack only worked for me at the start, then it never worked again. Jumping (without attacking) disabled all future attacks. Clicking the window ... disabled all future attacks. Standing within 6 feet of any monster was randomly 50/50 instant death.  I gave up after about 15 attempts to get past the first monster :(. I don't know if I was doing something wrong.

Obviously love the graphics and sounds.

Although this worked fine when you shared links on discord during the jam (not sure which browser I was using then but I think firefox), the final version just hangs on 'loading' for me (firefox). Works in Chrome, but massive (3+ seconds) lag during the game where it hangs for no obvious reason until you get through the first couple of levels then it seems OK - so I guess some background loading that should happen during loading screen but isn't.

I didn't realise it there was a move counter until late in the levels ,and I think it was a bit harsh to just wipe all progress instantly with no warning or way to go back. Replaying all the levels again seemed like a chore.

Also I had no idea when to use the powerups, knownig that they would cost money I ended up not using any of them. I'm not convinced that tieing them to a limited resource - in a game with instant permadeath - works that well.

I couldn't get past the first level, the top right corner just seemed to randomly box me in, and it was just trial and error of every possible movement in the hope something might work. I couldn't understand what was going on so after a lot of restarts gave up. I think with a tutorial that explains the mechanics this could work great, but at the moment I'm too lost. Really like the art style and sound though. (I had a similar problem with my own game - without an explicit tutorial it didn't make sense to a lot of people, argh)

Nice design for a point-and-click, and puzzles all made sense with decent signposting. Let down a bit by the control system - very many times an interaction failed because your code incorrectly decided I was standing in the 'wrong' place so een though I clicked on something nothing happened, or I got wrong message, so I had to walk away then towards, walk away then towards, walk away then towares, and eventually it would work correctly. But otherwise great - just wish it had 10x the content!