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all ears15 days ago(+1)

can i get a few clarifications on how this game works? i am confused about the rules, and i think there are ambiguities or misunderstandings that are screwing me over. i've answered confidently and then lost enough times to know i'm not getting something

1. i see streaks of rain spawning white particles (like the last screenshot). what am i actually looking at? is that rain or hail or both?

2. if it's 35°c, do the "warm" rules apply or not? if it's -15°c, do the "cold" rules apply?

3. if i think i saw multiple fog colours in one run, do i count both, or only the last, or am i getting muddled up?

i really want to get on this game's level, but something's not clicking.

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koperplyar14 days ago

So hailing was a silly misunderstanding on my part, because i thought that it's simply raining but stronger.
No rain correlates to "nice weather", small amounts of rain is "raining" and significantly more rain is "hailing". xP
(normal rain is something like an emission rate of 5 whilst hailing is around 25)

For the temperature and all factors in general, it's always only the current situation that you need to set the switches for.

The third was because the tutorial runs on a timer and once the timer runs out, the game sets a new environment with a new switch-code.
We did this because i thought the tutorial had a bug, which made you eternally be in the tutorial phase.

(the light on the switchbox is grey in the tutorial! :3c)

I definitively recommend opening notepad and writing each note's on/off together with its must/should so you always get the right code,
mental-switches in the pause menu would have helped the eperience a bunch but we barely made something playable as is. x3 
To reiterate, theres always only 4 factors for the switches: the horn-wave, the temperature, the fog's color and the weather and you only need to account for what's currently happening. :3

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all ears13 days ago(+1)

thank you for responding!!

this helped quite a bit as i was not even aware of the tutorial state at all actually, so when it ends it just seemed like the game was changing state silently? in fact i would say that tutorial being there is currently doing more harm than good because it is too easy to miss that it's happening at all and then the game just seems like it suddenly changed without explanation. your note says the game starts "after the light is lit" but i think most players will think that means the big light at the top of the lighthouse? i didn't even notice there is a light on the switch-box!

i guess i also thought the game was randomly generating the rule notes as well, which would make the game pretty much impossible as there is totally not enough time to go and copy down all of the rules at the start of the run. it took me a while to realise that they were not changing!

and, on top of that i was ALSO sometimes accidentally declaring the weather was "nice" incorrectly because i was looking at the wrong window! i think that one is actually intentional misdirection on your part but added to this other stuff its just another thingy causing me problems along the way to understanding ~

all that combined, plus the previously mentioned stuff, is why i was having so much trouble!

okay, okay. we got it all cleared up. this is actually pretty great when you get past all that! i'm sorry there was so much miscommunication which i think pretty much guarantees players will get stuck on something. for a while there i was actually thinking maybe the game was bugged and killing me incorrectly. if you get the chance it might be worth extending the info on the itch page perhaps, i feel like just a slightly richer explanation of where you got to would help players settle into the experience, in lieu of a better tutorial.

i love the use of weird coloured fog and these unsettling ship horns and also the weather through the smashed window. all good sources of info to feed into the puzzle while also being effective atmosphere in their own right. the first run is super stressful! i really AM a big fan of the timed puzzle, the papers-please, the keep-talking. this one is pretty good when you know what to do. a few simple changes would put it near the top of my picks for this jam. i'm not sure how you would extend it into a full release, but if you did manage it and you got it all smoothed out, i could see myself buying it ⭐

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