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(+1)

Awesome game! I really liked how it made me feel - helpless at the start, then starting to manage things, then looking for things to do while I was acing all the maintenance. Took me a while to figure out how the energy and sanity worked as it wasn't very intuitive (usually you sleep to restore energy and maybe sanity as well). This could've been solved by calling Energy simply Hunger, and calling Sanity Energy (though my Sanity never got low enough to find out what it did).

I also was really impressed by how well written most of the lore was. The fonts weren't very consistent however, and some of the special characters like [ and ] didn't display correctly (I'm guessing you took your screenshots from in-engine).

Only thing I would say is that it's a little easy to skim past the tutorial - ideally it's not just a block of text (I admit, I did this too lol) but rather you show the player why something is happening and what to do about it, when introducing mechanics that are not intuitive just by looking at it (i.e. how would I know the you refill fuel from the back if I didn't read the text). Something like flashing the back of the light red when fuel runs low might help. I also think that if you want to make it even more immersive, take as many UI bars out of the HUD as possible and teach the player how to hear and/or see when those resources are running low through sound, VFX, etc.

Overall, very immersive and isolating, perfect for a horror jam. And great work on the pixel art thumbnail too!

(+1)

thank you for the kind words and feedback. your comments on "hunger" and energy restoration through sleep is actually how it ran originally but i changed it to force the player to visit the pantry more...in hindsight I probably should have left it. It was hunger and HP but it felt too common I went with energy and sanity lol. I really wish i'd checked the web build further ahead of time for the font issue (i'm gonna find something to smooth that out in the future) and eliminated some of the harder to read variations. I had alot of fun with this and learned a lot about several aspects of development, and made my first pixel art, but i'm really seeing the importance of getting my tutorials and onboarding paced out better. I think the game would be more enjoyable with just a bit more thought put into helping the player understand how everything ties together, without spoiling any plot. I think playtesting solo is also another drawback, I think there were big blindspots for me as the developer as far as knowing what to do and balancing lore delivery when I wrote and already know the whole story. Thanks again, the next one will be even better!