This was a lot of fun, I love the unique concept and the surreal atmosphere! The FMV graphics were very nostalgic and the gameplay is simple but addictive. I also really enjoyed seeing a new type of alien each playthrough, it added a lot to the game's replayablity. I'd love to see more of this game in the future!
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Interplanetary Convenience's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Fun | #19 | 3.429 | 3.429 |
| 90's | #19 | 3.857 | 3.857 |
| Overall | #20 | 3.333 | 3.333 |
| Most improved | #22 | 2.714 | 2.714 |
Ranked from 7 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Comments
The first time I played it I lost, or so I thought. The cutscene that plays if you get everything right made me think I had made a mistake, so only when I lost several times by actually making mistakes did I realize that cutscene meant I had solved all the puzzles correctly and the game was supposed to end like that. I’m not sure what to do about it, probably add “thanks for playing” or something like that to it. And now for the feedback which I split into a couple of categories, some of which refer to the categories we’re supposed to give the game scores in:
Improvements: Looks like you made the whole thing during the jam. Good job on achieving your goal of making a game and finishing it!
Fun: I found the game challenging, but I could solve most of the ciphers. ANd while horror games isn’t something I’ve really been into, I do see how the slow animations help making the game uneasy.
And the randomness adds some replayability, which I find nice.
I did record video so I can look back at what I did, so here’s some mistakes I noticed I made (separating them from the rest of the feedback in case anyone wants to skip reading them as they might be spoilers, so here’s one paragraph of mistakes):
It seems I struggled understanding spacepigs. 4 is plus and 2 is minus. So 12999 2 5671 has two two’s and no fours. That’s two plusses and no minus. An even number of plusses and minuses, so I thought that meant cheese. and 12999 is above 10,000 so I thought it was chupacabra cheese. That made the spacepig very upset. I guess I might have misunderstood what to add and subtract. And I know elephants are said to be afraid of mice, but the closest I could think of was sasquatch and apparently that wasn’t right (I’m guessing it would have been chupcabra).
90’s: The low resolution and use of FMVs does feel very nineties. Well, it’s not that much of a console game since it’s probably not meant to be played with a controller (and I don’t have a computer-compatible controller, but keyboard and mouse worked).
I think the FMVs look a bit modern though, in the sense that 32-bit consoles would have played compressed FMVs with JPEG-like artifacts, but I guess these are GIFs, a file format from 1987. So I guess they would have been technically feasible in the nineties. Not that 32-bit consoles had GIF-decoding hardware, but I think there would have been ways to store those animations at a reasonably low bitrate while being able to decode them in real time without a bunch of JPEG-like artifacts.
Art: I think the 3D models look sorta like the prerendered ones you’d see in cutscenes in games from the nineties, but maybe a bit less serious, which I feel like it adds a bit of a humorous touch, which I’m not sure it’s intentional, but it kinda goes well with the names of those aliens and might be a nice contrast to the horror theme that’s also going on.
Fonts (a joke category I’ve been including in my written feedback for some games in this jam): Text in images looks like it’s rendered in an outline font without antialiasing, and the line saying “community to consume as pop culture” seems to have some glitches that I guess are intentional, and some letters in the larger font (most of the letters in “CONTINUE”) look like they got some pixels cut off or the line thickness got inconsistent. I’d probably have rendered them with anti-aliasing but at 4-bit colour depth (or implemented my own anti-aliasing, or used pixel art) and if I used an outline font I would use hinting, but I think you did that, at least for the small text (the large font’s inconsistent line thickness could hint at a lack of hinting though).
And I see that some text (the text that isn’t part of images) uses a modern font that I kind of see as non-nineties, but that’s okay because for text I think readability matters more than the 32-bit look (the whole reason I include this category in my feedback was that I noticed several games using unhinted fonts with anti-aliasing at low resolutions, where the blur of the anti-aliasing combined with the blur of the low resolution made it less readable than what actual games from the nineties had used).
And I might as well point out that at least some of the images of text don’t seem to have alt texts.
Submitted
Cuts for a countryHi, thank you for all the feedback, this is very helpful. I'll add notes to the game's page that address the issues in the current version, and if I make an additional version, these issues will be at the top of the to do list, and also sound FX after that.
-SpacePigs: This was a total oversight/mistake on my part. I meant for each math problem to just be two sets of big numbers added/subtracted, according to the 4 or 2 in the middle. I messed up by also including 4's and 2's in the big numbers. But, the 4's and 2's within the big numbers aren't meant to be + or -'s, they're just meant to be part of the big number they're in. I'll add the solutions to the game page because I messed this one up bad. Here are the solutions:
4249 4 5765 = Chupacabra Cheese
6268 4 2613 = Sasquatch Cake
12999 2 5671 = Sasquatch Cheese
-Elephants are afraid of...: This solution I'm also going to put on the game page because as I wrote it in the game, I did have a slight feeling of "Maybe this is kinda esoteric..." I was thinking elephants would be afraid of pianos because piano keys used to be made of tusks.
Solution: Piano cheese.
-"And I might as well point out that at least some of the images of text don’t seem to have alt texts."
Could you elaborate on this? Some of the texts aren't images, if that's what you mean.
Thank you again for the feedback, it was really helpful.
After I realized I could use a keyboard instead of a mouse (using the tab key, the enter key, and sometimes shift-tab), I thought about screenreaders (tools that read text aloud so that blind or dyslexic people can hear what’s on the screen) and decided to check if text like the story text were encoded in a way such tools could easily read.
Simply selecting the image, right-clicking and then selecting “show source of selection” showed that it had these properties (I added an extra space here just to make sure the image doesn’t somehow end up showing inside this message although I think it’d be unlikely to do so):
< img src="images/story.png" data-raw="" height="350px">
To tell screenreaders what it says, I’d probably have added the following before the closing angle bracket (adding a space after the the quoting marks with “350px”, and you’d probably want to include the whole text, I’m just shortening it so I don’t need to type it all):
alt="In a future... mixed up."
It’s possible if such an alt text is missing that a screenreader might look for it encoded in XML inside the image file, but I also checked for that and I didn’t see any text there either (and I would think adding alt text through the HTML would be more reliable.
Of course, another issue for players who can’t read well might be the “the end” text having a timer, so if someone is able to read but only slowly, then then maybe a “return to title” button might be easier for them to use. I wouldn’t be too concerned about the animations being timed, since those don’t force the player to read at a particular pace. Even the fact that the game was probably designed for mouse input but plays fine without a mouse probably means it can be played by some people who would have been physically unable to play some other games.
Edit: And the “congratulations, you made the sale” text is also on a timer. There’s plenty of time to read it, but if you want to completely let players read at their own pace, I’d probably give that one too a continue button. I’m not going to subtract points for accessibility issues though, since “normal” people can play the game just fine and I’m normal enough to not have trouble reading any of the text in the game (except for the spacepig cipher description, which seems to be an issue for everyone). There are two other games where I did have trouble reading text, one because of tight time limits and one because the font was unreadably small. And games playable without looking at the screen are pretty rare, and I don’t think I’ve seen such games in the jam, this one probably comes closest, so I wouldn’t punish it for the lack of alt texts.
Fun game! I like how it's randomized which characters you'll get. It would be nice if there were some sound effects and/or music. Overall, nice work!
Submitted
INFRA: Evil UnearthedThank you. I was originally going to include growls and close-up face for all the aliens if you got an answer wrong, but I wasn't sure if that would be too cheesy. And I had a song picked out, but it would have only played on the main screen. If I do another version, I'll add some sound/music somewhere to it though.
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