So I am generally a fan of programming games, having written a number of them before. I definitely appreciated the writing in this game, with the various acronyms and names and URLs, they all contribute solidly to the tone of the terminal filled with tools.
As far as the gameplay goes, though, I couldn't tell if I was making meaningful progress or mostly running into bugs. Some examples:
- Level 1, I can pick up the Normal-blue-Nothing, then pick up the blue-stone, and then picking up the pink-stone fails, and then I can just "next" to win the level, even though the task was apparently expecting the blue-stone to fail. Also, playing through it again to review what happened, it looks like if you keep dropping the stones you get additional dialog that I hadn't seen before.
- Level 2 I imagine was just cut due to time?
- Level 3, once Tibbles escapes, if I just try to do "hold Tibbles" it fails. It appears that if I hold something else indoor, then switch back to Nothing indoor, and then just do "hold Tibbles" again it works. I really don't have a sense of why this made holding Tibbles work--I didn't move the robot to the yard, Tibbles was still listed as (yard), but apparently I somehow managed to succeed...?
So the main feeling I get from the levels is that I mostly don't actually know what works or why. Which is fine, but it doesn't match the normal rigidity I would expect from a programming related game (as computers are nothing if not predictable... although robots are certainly not the same).
I get the feeling that the inconsistencies here are part of the story of the game, and the original intention was that we will eventually figure out what is wrong with the sensors or at least move in that direction? And if so, that definitely explains it! I think the game does a very decent job of building a sense of mystery, both with how the itch page itself is laid out and with how the initial messages we receive are mentioning things going awry but that they don't know why, etc, etc. In that case what the game really needs is just, I guess, more of the story, which is obviously difficult or impossible to due in the game jam timeframe.
So that was how the game played out for me. But I do want to emphasize that I really do like the vibes! The terminal is nicely done and the writing of all the in-game tool text / help menus / etc is very on-point. I thinkt he sound and music work effectively here too. Running commands to get stuff done can be surprisingly fun, especially if you can capture that feeling of banging your head against the wall until eventually things just work. Good job!