itch.io

in fullscreen, while dragging a clicked mouse, it was way too easy for the cursor to leave the “allowed” cursor zone and thus reset a control to its default position. this happened every time i used the horizontal yaw control. the cursor should be properly constrained inside the allowed zone so there is no “invalid” state/position the cursor can be in. worst case, if you can’t properly capture the cursor, when it goes outside the allowed zone, remember and hold its last position inside the allowed zone rather than simply zeroing the position out.

similarly, the affordances (hitboxes) for the controls, particularly the forward/back throttle, were too small and easy to miss.

notice i’m not criticising the clunky mech controls; i’m criticising the non-diegetic layer of mouse controls on TOP of the diegetic mech controls. i love the art/sound and clunky mechs in general, so i wanted to like this, but the mouse interface just pissed me off too much

Maybe blues can “conduct” green signal?

Bug?

This is fun but I can’t proceed

the cooking is very satisfying once you get the hang of it, and the physics inherently leads to some surprising depth. you could take this in some interesting directions, like oily things leaving a low-friction slick, or overcooked things increasing that side’s friction, or heat concentrating in the center of the pan, etc etc. one of those “model a real situation” mechanics that very naturally gets richer the more you model reality.

it has a captivating & distinctive setting/voice; absolutely gorgeous audio & visual aesthetic throughout. i love the headgear and jackets

minor niggle: having to repeat conversations to retry a cook is rotten UX, along with the jrpg-ass “click twice to read text faster than a five-year-old”. if you want to force a pause for contemplation, have characters take a drag of their cig, or blow into & rub their hands! manually clicking through a “…” speech bubble has never once in my life made me stop to contemplate

this left a really positive impression on me and i’m super excited for the games Water Museum and cdbunker are working on

bug reports:

• 1st cook tutorial keeps spawning a growing number of eggs
• right-click violently resets frying pan orientation

reminds me of the Paul Auster novel The Music of Chance

This is fun. Got really close to finishing 9 before giving up. Being able to delete links independently of nodes would help a lot. Another UI suggestion: allow us to hold a mouse/keyboard button to temporarily treat the node under the cursor as if it were sending to debug (so you can almost-instantly visualise some subgraph’s effect).

Also, this would be fantastic with an audio representation of the waveform! As always, anything that can put out very annoying pure sine waves needs a volume control, but it would be very neat for people new to audio synthesis to be able to learn what these waveforms actually sound like. A nice default would be to create a brief, softly-decaying pulse of sound across 1-2 seconds each time the waveform changes as a result of user input.

clue: from other food

Fixed and added a really sloppy state diagram because I’m doing a computability unit and need practice ;) (It’s hyper-inelegant but the only way I could get things visually compact in this dinky webapp) I was expecting to get to chalk via the inversion of cheese from the idiom “chalk and cheese”, lol - getting really stuck on that problem was the motivation to start exhaustively notating the transitions. Also chalk is actually edible! (Maybe not appetising to most unless you’re asking kindergartners.) It’s limestone (CaCO3), so it’s what some antacid/heartburn pills are made out of. I feel like the spiritually hideous but delicious Kraft mac’n’cheese powder has proved chalk and cheese aren’t so dissimilar after all.

While writing the text description, it really made me pine for a text notation/encoding/markup language capable of cyclic references (and therefore representing any directed graph) that isn’t YAML, which is a sock full of steaming horse shit.

SPOILERS - all solutions


















\

I didn’t find them all but these are enough to beat the game if you’re stuck:

progress:
	bread -> breadboard
	burger -> cheeseburger
	raw_meat -> cooked_meat
	raft -> yacht
	straw -> stick
	stick -> brick
	torch -> flashlight
	oven -> microwave
	sledgehammer -> jackhammer
	scissors -> paper
	rock -> paper
	scissors -> rock
	egg -> chicken
	archor -> submarine


invert:
	straw -> steel             # Light and soft vs dense and hard
	feather -> brick           # Light and soft vs dense and hard, again
	stick -> rubber_band       # Brittle vs elastic
	microwave -> fridge        # Heating vs cooling
	raft -> anchor             # Floating vs sinking
	cow -> bull                # Masculine vs feminine
	breadboard -> chalkboard   # Physical (cooking) vs intellectual (learning), I guess?
	wall -> window             # Functional and opaque vs aesthetic and transparent
	flashlight -> solar_panel  # Emission vs absorption


combine:
	bread ->
		board -> breadboard
		cooked_meat -> burger
	burger ->
		cheese -> cheeseburger
	brick ->
		brick -> wall
		straw -> oven
		stick -> sledgehammer
	chalk ->
		board -> chalkboard
	straw ->
		straw -> haybale
		stick -> torch
	stick ->
		stick -> raft
	paper ->
		paper -> book
	milk ->
		raw_meat -> cow
	raw_meat ->
		raw_meat -> bull
		feather -> chicken
	rubber_band ->
		rubber_band -> ball
	wall ->
		wall -> house

Arrows are progression, mutual arrows are inversion, + means “combine with self”, and any name means “combine with {name}”:

finally someone made “mushrooms are made of mush, and rooms” into a videogame

oh this is just absolutely delightful. just got to the reversed processes

If you’re the same Snuke that made mao.snuke.org, thank you so much for your work, I had soooo much fun with it!

About a week before I played this for the first time, I’d been through a period of intense despair and frustration at how needlessly arcane and byzantine and historically-burdened and inefficient humanity’s entire computation “stack” was - from the inexpressibly stupid and slow way we all write code using text editors, to the fact there’s no decent way to send a file between any given pair of computers sitting metres from one another, to the fact that the only real operating system out there names its OS directories things like “etc”, to the utter insanity of how hard it is to simply draw pixels to a screen using the 50-year-old piece of shit language that is still the current lingua franca of computers.

I started to become really infatuated with the completely unrealised power inside the idea of OISCs, and an overarching simplicity-focused computer philosophy hardware/OS/language/interface/culture, and hatched a pipe dream OS/package manager/ecosystem/social organisation where every time we trade away simplicity for performance, we do so explicitly, using a machine-readable dependency tree of underlying “optimisations” or “hacks” or “realities”. We could still, for the moment, build atop disgusting capitalist nightmare mazes like x86, an instruction set dictated by idiot parasites, the rules of which we have to forensically dig for, let alone understand and wield easily. But our code could, at runtime, programmatically stop making the assumption it’s running on, say, a graphics card, or assuming that it’s wise to avoid performing square root operations, or that changing data on “the filesystem” will be orders of magnitude slower than on “a register”, or that it’s even running inside a von Neumann architecture at all.

We could reach the promise of Turing equivalence and any software could run on any computer, however slowly, by just switching to deeper and deeper modes of emulation / translation as we are forced closer to the root of the “realities” dependency tree.

The computers we all actually run could be fully, deeply, trusted because we could understand, at every smallest-possible step, each new bootstrapped level of abstraction as we climb from lambda calculus, or a Turing machine, or a single instruction like SUBLEQ.

We could make cross-platform GUIs in the fucking 21st century without resorting to running an entire web browser just to get flexboxes and subpixel text rendering.

Ordinary users could never need to think about “installing” anything ever again if our package manager could fetch and execute the ENTIRE chain of dependencies, all the way to entire operating systems, for them.

Unless we have a socialist revolution in the next half decade or so and avoid the impending fascist barbarism and annihilation from growing out of global warming’s imperial clashes, the world will never see how much computers could help us until long after we’re both dead, but I just wanted you to know that the elegance of your design here had real impact on me, and there’s a seed of a far better future buried kilometres beneath the surface of “toys” like these.

Human beings with the capacity for imaginations like Alonso Church’s are forced to pick tomatoes or get crushed by the truck they’re dumping rubbish bins into, in a world where we’re simulating millions of rays of light diffracting through clouds at sixty frames per second to play videogames on our fucking phones, and none of this has to be.

i spent so, so many hours of my life in high school playing the early Metal Slug games through the MAME emulator (because as a young kid the arcades were far, far too expensive) and I am utterly stunned at the verisimilitude of the recreation / homage here. the backgrounds, the subtleties of the pixel art animation, the music’s instrumentation/arrangement, even mechanics like the precise bounce of rocket projectiles… you have been METICULOUS. absolutely incredible work. this is the same level of rigour and real love for the source material as the Alien: Isolation team showed for Alien.

just commenting to commit to buying this when i’m money-safe

I can’t figure out the intended behaviour regarding 3rd and 4th connections to knots, and also whether knots have any directionality. It might be very buggy.

I absolutely loved your SUBLEQ game for Last Call btw :)

this game is horrifically bad. some of the worst writing, mechanical design, and voice acting i’ve ever experienced

ingenious

Love the aesthetic and high-concept, and so far the puzzles feel nicely thought-out, but holy mackerel you need to make the controls and UI consistent. There is absolutely no understandable logic to which keys do what, whether the mouse is useable, etc. Please consistently use “Esc” to exit/cancel, any of {“Z”, “Space”, or “Enter”} to confirm, and if you’re going to support the mouse in the UI, please do so for every button!

Also, don’t animate text speech letter-by-letter, or at the very least, let us hit the default “proceed” button to skip the animation.

Also, if the “options” button in the main menu does nothing, don’t show it to players and leave it to them to figure out that it’s broken!!

looks interesting and i like the design rationale, will have a play of this soon

I really, really, really appreciate you making the modding API so open, sensibly designed, easy and straightforward.

A flawed masterpiece, and phenomenally easy to mod to adjust the game design to your liking. A unique, deep and engrossing game.

Lovely game!

You can't "for the most part agree with Capital" when you very obviously haven't read it or understood the major tenets of Marx' analysis of capitalism. If you'd read any Marxist history or theory you'd know that Marx said that capitalism was an improvement upon the feudal mode of production. You don't know shit, now shut up and read Capital.

shut up and read Capital dumbass

Investors don't "work hard for a living", nor do employers, nor do landlords, nor do usurers, nor do insurers, you dumb motherfucker.

Oop! Someone's scared of the s-word! Someone's afraid of a little worker's democracy! We gon' getcha!

lol I've never come anywhere close to needing a loan of any kind, let alone capital for a business. I'm a socialist. All investors are fucking parasites that should be encased in concrete. That's the inherent moral and economic nature of investment, or any other way in which capital owners can profit from others' labour without doing any work themselves. 401ks are US-specific, moron. They're also just a roundabout way for the capitalist government to let poor retirees starve while rich ones can live large on stolen wealth.

This game absolutely whips

I love this!! So much character and such a great idea. Wish you all the best with its development.

Nope, they're all scum. They don't do any *labour* in exchange for the profit they take from their investee. Money only has exchange value because it represents goods and services with real, tangible utility. All of that utility is created with human labour. There is no labour being done when investors "provide" capital; they allow access temporarily and ultimately *gain* capital by taking labour value from the investee. Workers could instead simply ignore the assertions of ownership by investors, and just freely use those previously-hoarded means of production to create goods and services, *without* paying any parasites. The only reason workers don't do this is because of the violent enforcement of property owners' will by the state. Investors are thus autocrats, oppressors, and parasites - every last one of them should be buried.

This is an astonishingly good game; probably the best open-source game ever made (not counting games which published their source many years after losing relevance). There's a keen game-design sensibility and attention to detail here which is very rare, let alone in an open-source project. It's an elegant, tight combination of ideas from Factorio and the tower-defense genre that feels very much unlike either of those two inspirations. It's very satisfying and addictive to tend to your growing garden of production lines and defenses while layering more and more complexity as technologies and space allows. I hope you make a fair income from the Steam release!

That would be an incorrect assumption. Investors are parasite scum, just the same as employers, landlords, moneylenders, insurers, speculators, and everyone else who takes money from others without doing any useful labour themselves.

Hi Chuntao. All investors are parasite scum who profit from other people's work without doing any work themselves. You get the wall.

how fucking stupid are you