itch.io

Thank you for playing and commenting, it means a lot to me :)

And I'm glad this worked well as a caricature of service work.

Ah, I feel you on that, losing progress is so easy to happen and frustrating as all hell.

I was playing the web version in Firefox on Linux (Manjaro KDE), so, could be something with the compatibility there. Will try the downloaded version too, later, to see if the bug persists.

A really nice and tranquil, meditative experience. The music takes it - the dynamic changes especially were very atmospheric. I also enjoyed the setting of those old pirate radio stations.

One small thing: There was a bug where when you leave the broadcast seat in the back while keeping space pressed, it would continue to broadcast, but you could still drive and pump gas, sort of trivialised the challenge a little, but did not dampen my enjoyment, grooving out to driving down the endless road while broadcasting those pirate waves

Nice work :)

Wow, this is really, really good. It has a nice gameplay loop, and feels appropriately eerie and depressing, while also addicting to see number go up, helplessly accepting your position and starting to enjoy number going up.

If there is one thing I would criticise, it's that I was perfectly able to invest heavily into sustainable things and employee benefits, all while having absurdly high benefits of over 35% for a ridiculous amount of time. I think what would give this more of an edge would be to include rival companies that basically force you to truly optimize your growth instead of just growing, as is the dynamic within capitalism.

Also - the help butten never worked for me, unsure if it's not properly implemented or something went wrong on my end. It was also hard to understand sometimes, what makes the board happy - and it's regrettable a member of the board will never change their opinion once you reach full strikes on them (at least from what I could see), even as I stuffed their fat faces with dividends and profits.

Oh, and the aesthetics were also great, big props to everyone involved!

In summary - I love it, easy 5/5

It's a really cute and well-made game! I played through it three times, and unless there is another, secret ending (which there might be?) I think I got them all. I enjoyed it a lot, the writing and art was really good, and the interactions felt meaningful.

I guess my only criticism would be, that it only very tangentially relates to the jam, there is a little bit that I discovered, but unless I missed something big, it's more on the periphery. That doesn't change at all that this is an amazing visual novel.

Quite fun, has a bit of "What We Do in the Shadows"-charm! Am excited to find out what will happen next. Although, I must admit, I was a bit puzzled why Victor would not just feed but decide to go along with the demands for money.

Loved it, it's very much a short and sweet experience, and I adore how close to home and real situations it is. Indeed, anyone reading this should contact a union - even if you are self-employed or out of a job, having the connection is always worth it, not just for you, but for us all.

Okay, I tried three times, but I did not manage to keep the farm even once, phew, this is tough. I did get the nightmare, though, which makes me wonder if I did something wrong and there might be more content to get.

Either way, ignoring the glitches, this is a fun little take on the "you can't win" scenario.

Such a bittersweet and inspiring experience. People tend to really underestimate how much hope and creative energy was set free in the very beginning of the Soviet project, and how much of a complete and utter defeat it ended up being, a proper tragedy, when it became nothing more than another machine exploiting its people to accumulate national capital in the 30s. How would workers' clubs look today, indeed? I imagine them like a mix of an arcade+restaurant a la Chuck E. Cheese's, only without the commercialisation and a bit of a different focus, with a makerspace integrated into it. Maybe some kind of hostel facilities, too, for visitors.

Oh boy, now to head off for my amazing Ramen sponsored by Amazon!

Liked it a lot, can't wait to do this again in a few months when they come out with the next charger cable! The questionnaire was questionable though, some of the answers almost felt subversive and satirical!!! :O

That made me feel very unsafe, and I hope the next state-sponsored questionnaire will remove answers that could make me feel uncomfortable or like I am being challenged! Thank you very much for your consideration.

A really nice collection of excerpts and annotations! Chosen well and with nice, relatable additions. Really good job!

Really well done! The monotony and senselessness is on point. The art style is also quite nice and fitting well together. The only thing I could imagine adding would be that you can actually work up to the 500$ if you are insanely perseverant - only for the music to not be a way out at all, like getting a few cents more per day or something from streaming.

Like it a lot :)

Thank you for having a look at it, will continue to update in the future :)

Thank you again! That is weird - those strings certainly don't exist within the code, so either there is something really funky going on in the processing/rendering of the text, or maybe you misread by accident? Not pushing it onto you as your fault, just, that sounds like the most likely explanation to me at the moment. The font is not the most legible after all, and the gameplay is designed to induce additional stress.

Will have another look into if something might cause messing up rendering text either way, thank you again so much for the feedback! <3

Okay, I played for a little over a month and reached CYCLE GOD before I assumed there won't be any more progress :D

I liked it quite a lot, the monotony, the stress, the keymashing, the unthankful customers, my game is actually quite similar. Very good job!

Hey, I remember you, you made the awesome Camus Sisyphus game!

Love this one, could imagine this expanded as a full on museum-walking-sim, where the areas change over time, depending on where the player spends their time.

Good job!

Love it, very small, quick, simple - and the message is succinct and biting.

Without proper organising and consciousness, superficial anti-capitalism will always be marketable. #girlbossmoments #sotrue #yeahitsucksbuteverythingelsemeansgulagandterrordontyouknow #coffeewithoutcream

This looks quite interesting - can you leave a comment when it is playable?  All I see is "This game is currently unavailable"

I like the concept very much, reminds me a lot of my own game, actually! The buildup to the finale is a bit long and gets repetitive - and unless I missed something, I don't think there were any proper consequences for turning people away. That makes the decision to pay for them interesting, because it really is only up to the player's conscience, but it also kind of fails to deliver the idea I think. What could work well is keeping track of all the people you turned away and why they had to get through, and then confronting the player with a statistic at the end, like "before the evacuation, you caused 6 people to lose their job, 3 marriages to divorce, 5 cats to starve" or something like that, just showing how impactful limiting access can actually become, and how the person in the toll booth will eventually have no way of changing that, due to their own financial circumstances.

Also, I tried saving up money to cover people's payments at the end, but I was kind of sad that this wasn't an option.

But overall, I love "drudging through work"-simulators, and this was an interesting take! Good job!

I do like the basic idea, trying to imagine a world outside of capitalism's dynamics is I think always an important exercise. Unfortunately, I was not able to finish the game - on the page with the final advice for the player, the text went beyond the bottom of my screen, and I was unable to scroll down. Also, while the overall setting and the ideas are interesting, I fear it might end up too removed from people's experiences to properly imagine this state of being - what I would have tried to emphasise more would have been a better exploration of transitioning states, and the organisation behind the scenes that makes it possible. That is just my gut feelings, though, I could be wrong about how people will view this. Either way, very interesting read and great project! :)

The artwork and music were amazing, the storytelling worked really well, building up the suspense. I had some small bugs in how text was displayed, but nothing that hindered the experience. I like it a lot, especially for your first finished game, this is great!

It's an interesting twist on a simple game, and the scenarios chosen were well thought out. If I had a working printer, I would have loved to print and play it with some like-minded friends. The explanation inside the rules about individual responsibility is an important touch, the only thing I personally would have added, is highlighting further that this very dynamic of "corporate greed" is not a moral failing as such, but something that develops necessarily from the mode of production, when you produce to extract value and are in competition for maximising it.

I like the aesthetics a lot - at first I was a bit confused on what to do, thinking it was a matching game where I'd have to line up matching emoji. At least if I didn't miss something, that's not the case, and you just have to get 4 on top.  That makes this more of a small virtual fidget toy with animations I guess, as clicking wildly gives you the same kind of success as thinking and manoeuvring does. That's no harsh criticism, though, because that does feel quite fun in its own right :)

Thank you for taking a look and giving feedback <3

I'll definitely continue working on it, but it might take a while - I definitely overshot the scope a tad bit for a jam project and overerestimated my own energy reserves when starting out. But it will continue to get worked on! So stay tuned.

Thank you so much for playing and giving feedback, really means a lot to me <3

Oops, I think I accidentally introduced the difficulty bug while pushing a small update right before the jam, will have to fix that one after the jam period, should be a quick fix. That's what you get for being tired and only testing the absolute basics 😅

I thought I had eliminated all the ways the customer interactions could lock up, will take a closer look, thank you for reporting!

The cheerful mix *should* only be referred to as "Crap" mix, I'm uncertain what happens there. Weird interaction that I haven't heard reported or encountered myself before, can you give some more details so I can look into it?

Again thank you lots for the feedback!

Ah, no sweat, it was a last minute question, after all. Good that I took initiative, then. Am pretty spent for the day, but am excited already to check out all the entries in the coming days :)

Hmm, there is nothing substantial I can change before the deadline anyway, I'll just go ahead and beg for forgiveness instead of waiting for permission 😅

So, I had been creating a game for Zeno Jam 8, which incidentally has a very well working theme for this jam, and have been working on a sequel for it to submit for this jam. Unfortunately, due to a bit of personal issues, mental health and inexperience/overambition (it's only my third game) in the sequel, it is not even half-done, stuck in a very, very "you can see some ideas but there is basically none of the main mechanics implemented"-state, because I got hung up on creating the fundamentals that will be necessary later in the background, as well as some initial stuff to set the feel of the game, in the time that I was able to work on it.

The game I created for Zeno Jam 8 was made almost completely within the time frame of this jam, as they overlapped, and the small update I pushed after that jam period was also within this jam's time frame, of course.

I'd like to still release what I have for the sequel as a rough prototype to present the idea, but I just realised I might just make both games entries for this one - so I can have a "proper" game, as well as a rough concept. Getting an answer before the deadline today would be appreciated of course :D

Thank you :)

Really enjoyable! So far, I got to the first boss, but I will try again for sure. I'm used to shoot-em-ups having slightly more agile controls, but it's only a matter of getting used to the way the ship handles here. The grappling mechanics are lots of fun!

Cute little experience, rats are amongst my favourite animals, so that definitely helped :D

I really like the atmosphere here, cute and tranquil, the parallax scrolling clouds were a nice touch, and the animation on the main character was quite adorable.

If I were to nitpick, the art for the main character noticeably stands out from the other art, I think it's the outline. That being said - it's really a nitpick, and I for sure couldn't do any better.

This can definitely be expanded upon in my opinion - if you find the time and motivation and no other projects are more interesting at the moment, of course. :) As the other commenter mentioned, a dash could be fun and engaging, maybe power-ups? Maybe even a progression through waves with different things to pick up, including hazards? Although the latter could be bad for the tranquil and cute atmosphere here, too.

Nice work :)

I like it, it was indeed very relaxing, the music and graphics worked well together, the animations were great and not too intrusive and the flower types were easy to tell apart at a glance. I could definitely see this on a mobile game storefront. The difficulty and feature escalation also felt nice when I had a quick look over the levels. Achievements are also always fun to have.

Now, if only I wasn't so bad at matching games. :D

Nice little project, overall :)

Nice progress! The basic structure is starting to form properly :)

Wow, it's cool that you are streaming small indie games like this! Now that the jam this is over - maybe you could stream something like the top 5 or highlights that seem cool to you looking over the submissions? (Not just saying that because it would include my own entry :D - there are genuinely some great games here)

Congratulations! For me, personally, your entry was one of my favourites!

Thank you so much for playing, ranking and, most of all, creating your games! I can't even express how engaging and fun the whole experience, from developing to playing your games was!

If you want to have a look, I wrote a postmortem of the developing and the overall experience of YDHTS.

Congratulations most of all to Plide, monninen and Tipu for their 1st and 2nd place! Your games were absolutely running away with it in my opinion, and definitely among my favourites of the jam.

Keep up the good work creating games!

I played on PC, but in wine on Linux - and my PC is quite the old lil' potato, the graphics card especially is many years behind the standard by now.

If something about the jump logic is framerate dependent, that might be what's causing it - but I at least had no visible stutter while playing. Screen resolution could also be a cause, if it happened on laptop, I guess? 

Hope this will help squashing that bug :)

Thank you so much for taking the time to play and comment <3

Unfortunately, I don't have a YT channel - but I could look into making one.

As for how this was done in a week, I think the main factors were:

- I had some programming experience before deciding to do game dev, this helped me most of all with how to use the Godot documentation in figuring out how to do stuff - and with how to google stuff I needed an explanation for

- The basic idea luckily came to me on day 1, shortly after the theme reveal, so quite early - and behind the scenes, the mechanics are thankfully relatively easy

- I could dedicate my full time to this over the week. This is I think the biggest advantage, I basically worked on this from morning to evening with short breaks.

- I quickly realised to tone the scope down (at first I had more plans that would have overcomplicated things, like e.g. a mini resource managing mechanic to prepare for what happens in the ending)

- I remembered from fooling around in GIMP a few years back, that it had an auto-dithering and colour indexing mechanic, which I realised could be used to achieve the style I would be going for, while only needing public domain photography as the input for the main art. (At first, I drew the original coffee shop background myself, realised it looked like puke and that it took way too long on top of that, still have that one lying around)

Maybe I will post a sort-of post-mortem with a few more details.  Either way, thank you so much for taking the time to play and for your kind words, it really means a lot to me. :)

Your statement certainly makes me think there are :D

I "just" climbed to the top, was very hard, but it gave me an ending. Now I am even more curious!