Holy cow. I really liked that ending. I was able to save all the patients except for one. I don't remember which one it was. I did have a weird bug that after every successful treatment, the AI said congrats on treating my first patient. Still stand that this is the best game of the jam.
Play game
Cosmos M.D.'s itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Creativity | #1 | 4.692 | 4.692 |
| Overall | #2 | 4.108 | 4.108 |
| Use of Theme | #3 | 4.615 | 4.615 |
| Gameplay | #3 | 3.923 | 3.923 |
| Sound | #5 | 3.462 | 3.462 |
| Art | #8 | 3.846 | 3.846 |
Ranked from 13 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Comments
This is easily the top submission of the jam. I played long enough to treat the first patient. I don't know if it was done intentionally, but the player could use a bit more direction. It took me a bit to realize that I could click on the Green Scaled Lizard. I did read that there would be hyperlinks, but maybe an example of the game's version of the hyperlink could have helped. I am coming back to play this when I am on my desktop with a larger resolution. Itch's overlay got in my way when I was playing.
5/5
Submitted
Data RecoveryThanks for the feedback. I would be interested to see what you think after a proper playthrough. We had enough time to add 13 patients total.
I will think about what else could be done re: the hyperlinks. As you say, the AI helper does mention them but they do not look like normal links we are used to (we tried that but the normal blue color clashed with the interface/text blue). I'm also considering whether the data files should be unlocked automatically and just use the link as a quick access - right now the link is necessary to unlock it - this would give the new player two ways of finding the relevant files.
Just wow. So many descriptions and ideas along with a good looking and well functioning UI. I would have liked to get some kind of feedback sometimes if any of the selected treatments were right or not. To be able to do it better in a second run.
Great Job!
Submitted
Christine's PathThanks for playing and I am glad you liked it.
We made a design choice not to give feedback to the player as we were worried about the player brute forcing solutions rather than solving them through deductive reasoning. Saying that, this is our first puzzle game so we are not sure if it was too hard or too easy. We will keep your feedback in mind if we make any changes to the game.
OMG where to start, i spent like 2 hours playing this game. I killed the penultimate patient though T.T Was really convinced they ate the poisoned ox meat but apparently not? Anway let's move onto the review:
- Use of Theme - 5
- You can't get a better use of the theme than this imo. It goes very well along the intended interpretation by the Game Jam host.
- Gameplay - 4
- I think depending on the person this game can be either very engaging (for someone like me) nor very boring for someone with a low attention span or is a lazy reader. I spent so much time reading through all the files and making connecting charts to figure out who knew who and where they were. It was so much fun! The only issues were some typos here and there, some dates that made no sense, like the date of birth would be after the date of admission, and the missing files mentioned in the game page. But all of those can be overlooked and they didn't ruin the experince one bit. Seriously a really good experince.
- Creativity - 5
- Can i give a 10/5? Seriously how can you come up with this whole detailed story within a month? It was so immersive and well thought out, the plot twists made me gasp out loud ahahah. Seriously congratulations on the writing, if it wasn't good i wouldn't have finished it.
- Art - 4
- The art of the game consists of an just an UI but it complements the game perfectly. I would change some of the icons to something a little bit more alusive to what they represent but other than that i really enjoyed it.
- Sound - 4
- There was only a bgm and a typing sound (that i remember). They did the job, the bgm was a bit annoying after an hour though xdd. I would have loved something like a voice recording just for variance but i understand that with just a month to develop it would be maybe too ambitious.
I hope you expand this game into something bigger because i'm invested in the story now ahaha.
P.S. i hated how conveniently some key information was always corrupted ahahaha.
Submitted
Not On My Shift!Thanks for the feedback ShadowGrif. Wow 2 hrs! You really got into it so far as to find inconsistencies on birthdates.
You got it right she did eat the Ox Meat. After looking at the files and discussing with my brother we noted that there is an inconsistency in the ox file. It eats Soldier Wasps but the treatment section erroneously mentions the Carpenter Ant - it should be the Wasp treatment. We honestly were crunching out so much story content in the last 72hours that it was probably inevitable that these errors crept through.
I will pass on your Kudos to my brother - he wrote most the story (except the treatment files which I did). He will be happy to hear you enjoyed it so much.
We had a third member of the team that is a music producer but he didn't get time to participate as much as he would have liked. We are going to engage him to see what other music/effects we can add to increase immersion.
P.S. yeah that corruption is awfully convenient. Almost like it was on purpose hahaha
I haven't made it to the end yet so no spoilers please!
I don't think the puzzles are too hard though. I think Patient 3 (Eunice Li I think was her name) was the toughest (and had me wondering if it was designed to be impossible to show the player what happens after a failure?).
That said, I did lose a few more patients because I didn't do enough homework :(. As others have pointed out, I love the attention to detail here. One thing is, I found it hard to tie the story together because (a) I forgot the intro text, and some of those details are absent from the game's description in itch and from the in-game text, and (b) I found it difficult to keep track of which station is on which planet, what ship we are on, and where that ship is.
I wouldn't say the main story needs to be improved!
I just actually forgot my character's name, the ship I'm on, and what system we're currently in.
The easiest way to aid the player here isn't to change the game source at all, but to put it in the description on the game's page lol:
> The goal of the player is to investigate the patients in cryogenic containment in order to diagnose their medical problem and apply the correct treatment so they can be recovered. At the same time, the player needs to uncover what caused the health facility to go dark.
I will update the description. Good suggestion as this is best for the Jam. I updated the description now - let me know if it is unclear.
However, I disagree with view on the in-game content if I were to update this going forward as a "proper release". I think the game should stand on its own so if it is unclear in-game who you are, where you are, then this information needs to be communicated to the player in a better way. Even something simple like having the name/location used more in dialogue or have a starting data file on the UEFS Mercy and The Investigator's contract with your mission would be a good prompt for the player.
In either case, thanks for the advice and I'm glad you enjoyed it enough to consider how to improve it.
The intro really hooked me and I loved your style in this game. This is a really neat concept and take on the theme. I do think the text should be a bit bigger and it would be great to add a key input to move the dialog boxes along instead of pressing the button with the mouse. The UI was super slick too, great job!
Submitted
Planet Recovery ForceGlad you liked the game. I think if we worked on the game further we would revisit the font and sizing.
We were worried that larger text would limit the amount we could display for the player on the patient file. Initially I planned to have multiple tabs to the patient file (Front Page, History, Investigation/Examination); however, as time went on we reduced the information to a single page to save time and player cognitive load.
Would you have prefer have single page patient file (as is, or with scroll boxes) or multi-page file like a patient chart?
Thanks for playing and for the feedback. I'm glad you found it special - we were really trying to do something unique and out of our comfort zone.
I agree re: the font and all capitilised. As we made more text it became an issue with differentiating headings etc. This is my first attempt at a complex GUI - so I will take that onboard and investigate how to get/make different fonts.
I didn't even think of that re: map. That's a good idea. We spent so much time just powering through making cases/puzzles that we ran out of time to expand on the lore and add Icons/Images. Especially since we had not art person on the team.
We some ideas to expand the game, such as simple medical tools that could be used to gather information on the patients (e.g. blood examination) rather than relying on just the patient text file; or even having 2D exploration of the ship/planet sites to find clues. We tried to design with expandability in mind in case it turned out well and we wanted to work on the idea further in the future.
Thanks again.
Unfortunately I have no specific tutorials that I know of that would help. What I would say is that I went from pretty much zero knowledge on Unity UI to this level in the last month and I think it really came down to forcing myself to make a UI only game.
As I encountered each problem, good ol' Google was my friend and just slowly built up my knowledge. Learning how to use TextMeshPro (Unity), StringBuilder, and Coroutines even at a basic level allows all the different animations and text hyperlinks.
For the text typing - I can give you the basics algorithm: it takes a string and adds a character per frame/seconds using Unity Coroutine (return new WaitForSeconds(0.015f)) and StringBuilder.Append(character). The sound is using Unity Audio (PlayOneShot(sound)) just ensuring the volume and frequency has about 10% variation each play with Random.Range() so it is less monotonous. Hope that helps.
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