This feels a lot like Sudoku for the most part. Either way, I uploaded a playthrough of the game. Thanks!
Playgama X-Mas Things Jam 🎄✋🏻 🪾 | 1000$ Prize Stash » Entries » We Were Here Only Briefly
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What was my problem? I didn't understand that I had to give the item to the person and that I had to click on the person specifically. It wasn't obvious.
In the full version, you'll definitely need a tutorial, and probably help the player through the gameplay loop over and over again.
Forcing the player to make mistakes is a bad idea.
The game should let the player know what they did right and what they did wrong. Your game doesn't do a good job of this. The green and red lights are kind of muted and appear for literally a couple of seconds. The sound doesn't help either. If the game automatically entered this result into the book, it would be intuitive. And of course, it would be nice to immediately show it to the player.
The game has a nice atmosphere. But I quickly got tired. Constantly rotating the camera, constantly opening and closing the book, constantly memorizing the fear-item pair and the fear-item-result trio, forcing myself to enter the result into the book at the right moment.
I'd recommend getting rid of the camera rotation. Place everything that's needed in the window in front of the player. Perhaps even keep the book open at all times (if the book is needed at all).
Well, I hope you give the player a clear goal in the full version of the game.
(And by the way, after closing the book, the player needs to click on the game to restore the camera rotation.)
Thank you for such detailed feedback and for being so engaged — let us try to respond.
From the start, our main goal for this jam was to combine 2D and 3D space. We found an interesting collaborator and wanted to merge that approach with our artist’s work, so we decided not to put everything on a single screen (as in the early sketches) because it didn’t match the original concept.
We also wanted the game to be as intuitive as possible. The characters speak an unintelligible language on purpose — we were trying to explore the theme of fears and show that understanding someone’s words isn’t always necessary. That’s why we initially avoided giving a straightforward text explanation (although later we still had to add one in the game description).
Early on, we modeled a version with automatic filling for fears and answers, but it made the game finish extremely quickly. So we moved that part to the player to increase engagement in the process.
Choosing a 10×10 grid was our way of embracing the jam theme “as a whole.” However, the larger number of cells also made balancing much harder.
And yes — that’s an absolutely fair point: we had very little time for testing (almost none, to be honest). Because of that, the “Tutorial/Onboarding” task on our to-do list had to be reduced to the basics, and we also forgot to add one NPC line that was supposed to mention the key under the doormat.
I think that if the visual direction is interesting on its own, the game could be reworked later — for example into a simulator or something with a similar structure.
The camera was the most painful part: in WebGL, the system cursor doesn’t get restored properly. I searched for solutions online, and the most reasonable approach would be to never release the cursor at all (or to redesign the controls / input system). But by the time I fully realized this, it was too late to refactor, so we had to leave it as it is.