Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• Wow, what a huge story for a game jam and with an absolutely wild ending! I kept going back and forth about which characters I loved and which I hated, and the dynamic soundtrack underscored the whole experience beautifully. I feel like there are some plot holes, some character digressions, but with such a short window of time it's truly impressive that such a lengthy work is this polished. What really makes this story stand out is the cast of characters - as one might expect from any heist, but each has an interesting role to play and wrinkles that the reader must investigate on their own. If this were continuing development into a commercial product I think more care could be given to the pacing of each vignette. And as a lover of interactive fiction I would of course like to make some choices within the narrative, and explore some of the protagonist's other consequences. This is a long entry but it does an amazing job of fleshing out the city of Onyx Oasis, and the shades of people who call it home (even those desperately trying to escape). A huge thank you to the developer for such a rich story.
• Overall, solid work. The characters were memorable and despite the short length of the work and the size of the cast, I walked away remembering who did what and why. The use of color text also helped define characters too, so nice choice there. Music worked well to complement the different narrative checkpoints and the text was appropriately broken up into readable chunks. The ending definitely came as a welcome surprise, though it did feel rushed compared to the rest of the story. One area to reflect on would be the main character himself. Out of everyone on the team, he seemed to be the least qualified to be running the heist. Victoria ended up being the anchor for almost every interaction and even acted as the catalyst for the MCs decision to go through with it all. While his motivations are clear, his ability isn’t, but changing his job (similar to Tracy and perhaps merging her character into his) or making it clear that his motivation has driven him to study the casino and come up with this intricate plan would help with this imbalance. If you decide to revisit this and expand, consider adding choices to the game to add tension and immersion. The ending can still be the same. Perhaps different choices reveal how the heist plan was discovered? This would give the player an information payout instead of a success-based payout, so they’d still have reason to replay. If you go this route, consider allowing the player to hop back to the beginning of the heist to save time.