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A jam submission

Parents Not Home (Touch friendly)View game page

Yue, Elvis, Siddharth
Submitted by Yue — 1 hour, 50 minutes before the deadline
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Parents Not Home (Touch friendly)'s itch.io page

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Comments

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What did this game do well?

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I enjoyed the story of the game and how it incorporated puzzles. Also it was really cool that you could play on touch screen.

I like the plotline you guys had written out!

The plots and resource systems are well designed. There are numerous elements integrated into this game.

It looks like a visual novel + rpg. I liked the arrangements in the house. I think it really has potential in other weeks' game jams.

The mouse click to control the character movement is an interesting feature that I have not seen in 2D exploration game. The map is huge with beautiful layout and many areas to travel and explore. The background music is relaxing. Each component is clickable and gives hints that leads to solving the puzzle of the game.

A lot of depth as a puzzle game. Got my brain cells fired up, solving the riddles in the adventure house. Things to explore, Actions to perform were well hinted. A really nice story and background music to go along.

I liked the game, but it did not tie into the theme of level design.

The game has some really fun thoughts and willing to put out something new out there.

There are surprisingly complex resource system implemented here, though that's for last week's game theme.

There's a lot of writing, and that's cool. It is also very unlike the other games for this week.

I'm impressed with your decision to go for a puzzle game in 1 week! There seems to be a lot of thought put into the level and the background story, which was nice to see.

I like how this game guides the player with dialogue and subtle hints that are intertwined with the overall story.

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What could this game have done better?

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I feel that it could have been a little more clear with what had to be done. Sometimes, I was confused/lost on what I had to do next.

My first impression of the puzzle aspect was that it wasn't very intuitive, but after i got the hang of it a little more (i did cheat once by looking at the solution) it did get a little better.

This game does not fit well into this week's theme: level design.

I walked around killing enemies and traded for gold for a while, not really sure how to proceed in the game. It doesn't level design in this game.

Although the mouse click is good, the character movement is slow and sometimes stuck when colliding with object. I can benefit from having the character walk faster since the map is huge. The goal of the game is unclear as there is no hint on what I should do at the beginning of the game.

The level feels very monotonous - kills monsters, trade with someone using the monster parts, get coins. The story is really good, but the coins and monster meat felt like they were added just to have some goal. Did not really tie into the game theme.

There was no difficulty increase. It felt like we just need to explore the level and click on objects to get out of the house. While the story could be developed into something really good, it just felt like a side quest that we can add in any other RPG.

Would love to see it get developed into something big, but since the theme of the week was Level design, it felt somewhat lacking.

The core is how a stage is designed and varied which this game did not show. It gives one stage that can collect and solve puzzles, thus stage design is a bit bizarre.

The game stage design is suppose either having a tutorial or setting up enough weenies to guide player through the puzzle, but this game does feel kinda lost when you start.

I'm not quite sure how this follows the prompt, or at least I can't figure it out without some very heavy stretching.

The textbox is too wide for comfortable reading, especially since there's only two lines per box. Following a Disco Elysium-style vertical textbox would have been better.

This also just isn't a genre I'm very familiar or comfortable with, so it makes reviewing this game very difficult.

A lot of the puzzles seem very obscure to me and require several steps of moon logic. It's very excessive.

Unfortunately, I think this game has the same issue as a lot of old puzzle games, in that the solution is very hard to parse from the user's perspective, which leads to lot of aimless clicking around the level until something happens. It's also not helped by the fact that you don't have any kind of quest log or reminder, so at least for me it was very easy to forget which details of the stories you hear are important and which are just fun background details. But again, I think there's some real potential here!

I think that in the beginning there could be small indicators that give the player a little more guidance on where to go and what to click. (i.e. an indicator over the mailbox once you go outside)