Fantastic little game loop. Once you know what you are doing, you immediately feel the need to optimize a loop around the office. Definitely hurt by a lack of direction, though. It took me three or four attempts to understand what I was supposed to be doing and how to properly interact with each of the game elements. If you throw in a solid tutorial, I can see this really coming together. For my part, I came from the submission page where the how-to-play details were not present, so I can definitely understand the lack of direction in my experience. Thank you for sharing your work and vision!
Viewing post in Hell's Intern jam comments
Thanks so much for the thoughtful feedback — we really appreciate you taking the time to share your experience! You’re absolutely right about the lack of direction. It’s something we’ve noticed other players mention as well, especially since the visual feedback for some interactions isn’t as clear as it could be. We’re planning to add a short in-game tutorial or onboarding section to guide players through the basics, so it feels more intuitive even without reading the itch page. If you’d like, feel free to share which parts were the most confusing as a new player — that kind of insight is super valuable for us. Really glad to hear you still enjoyed the core loop despite that!
No problem!
From what I remember, it was not immediately clear how to get coffee. I lost the first run to everyone eventually cycling around to needing coffee and me not knowing how to serve it. A text prompt for "Prep Coffee" or something like that would go a long way.
The presence of "No Spiders Detected" on the bottom of the screen was initially a bit jarring because I did not even know they were a threat. After they appeared, I ran over to one and lost another game while standing next to them and mashing my keyboard trying to find a key that would kill them. Some kind of visual indicator that a jump is needed to kill them or a tutorial would also fix this super easy.
This last one is more of a nitpick than anything, but I was initially confused by the fire holes and how they lit up. After running around for a minute with two stacks of books, I eventually got frustrated and was mashing the interact key only to find out I was burning them one at a time. This could also be due to the fact that my games had very inconsistent audio. Some interactions made sound while others were completely silent. The burning interaction was silent for me, so aside from scrutinizing the handful of pixels for the books I was holding, there was no indicator to me that I was burning books until I had cleared a stack out of my hands. If there is normally audio for this, that would definitely help.
I hope my feedback was helpful. I do not want you to be discouraged by the experience I had as it was all super simple stuff that a day or two of spit-shining would fix.
We appreciate you taking the time to share your experience! We’ll definitely take your notes into consideration.
Regarding the burning interaction, there should normally be sound effects playing, so it sounds like that might have bugged out during your session—our apologies for the confusion.
PS: We hope your keyboard survived all that mashing caused by our game!