So I’m still in the middle of the game, but I can give some feedback so far. I’ll rate when I have finished it. Note that there is a lot of feedback on the Star/Moon tasks, since they make most of the beginning. Without playing the whole game it’s hard to tell how important the small issues are, since it depends on how much you have to repeat the tasks.
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First, the game is much bigger than I expected, but not so surprising considering it was made for the 3-week Lunar New Year Jam. It could even be NaNoRenO entry, I guess having 3 weeks instead of 4 preventing you from polishing some stuff like the star catch/water puzzle, but that’s it. Now to be honest, I feel like it’s a bit weird to double post your game to two jams. Technically it’s not promotion for an old game (what FFS discouraged) since the game was made in January, but it’s not a project that was particularly late on schedule either. A posteriori I’m still glad I could discover it, and since you explain that properly in the entry description I guess that’s OK.
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Nice insertion of narration and special events between missions. Unless it’s the opposite, puzzles are inserted between narrative events? It’s fun to play without knowing the main game genre, as I don’t know how things will evolve.
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Nice tutorial integrated in lore
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It would be easier if we saw columns and rows total change live when incrementing/decrementing numbers. See indie game Energy Balance.
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Star catch and water puzzle visual is a bit raw, compared to the beauty of the rest. Even if you want to emphasize on the abstraction of numbers, there are ways to mix art and figures. Well, some consider puzzle solving an art and that a grid of figures alone is beautiful; I kinda agree, but that I think that works on a white sheet. Since you already have a background and all, maybe it would be worth stylizing the grid?
- Interesting idea to skip the intermediary missions after the tutorial to give to the player a taste of time passing by doing the same stuff… Howeve, I think it would work better if you let the player repeat the core tasks at least twice. For 2 reasons: to make it easier to imagine oneself doing the same thing 100 times. Because the difficulty curve is very steep otherwise. The grid size bumps from, say 5 to 9 or something. It coud go through 7 for instance (forgot to screenshot, so not sure about exact size). And the character (Selene) is supposed to be used to that, so there is no reason to make the character feel lost at that point. However, the idea of skipping repetitive tasks to advance narration, and also to make the experience shorter for people testing many jam games, is very good.
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Stars disappear too quick. I know there is a bonus to increase time from 0.5 to 0.7s, but that’s still a bit harsh for a game whose core is not dexterity. Fortunately I can rollback in Renpy with mouse wheel up to retry!
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In water sum balance puzzle, there is often plenty of imbalance and you must spend your points to raise just one column… There is a power to enable decrementing, but it would be ven more powerful to have a power that changes the sign of a number (when I read “change sign +/-) I thought it would be something like that. Of course it doesn’t matter too much if that game since there is a lot of leeway.
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It would be nice to see constellation cost in brackets besides their names, so we don’t have to click on them to know the cost.
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Misc typos: “you cna imagine”, “asing these questions”, “quieter becuase”, “IDENTITY YOURSELF”. Totally understandle for a jam game, just in case you want to fix them after the Rating phase is over.