Post by beseda in Until the vacation jam comments

GMTK Game Jam 2026 » Entries » Until the vacation

Viewing post in Until the vacation jam comments

Hey, thank you for sharing your experience. I feel guilty about that bug... I've never hit it during testing otherwise I would have fixed it.

I see that you picked the female protagonist - glad that this option is useful to you.

Please note that the second NPC is the last conversation - you did not miss any content. I prepared a few more maps but kept spending too much time on context and worldbuilding instead of the actual gameplay so in the end I cut them out.

Did you enjoy the turn based tactical dialog gameplay itself?

Like Reply

songbirdlover2 days ago

Ah, I see. Glad to know I saw everything. No worries about the bug, it's hard to catch everything. Especially in a game with so many mechanics such as this one.

Yes, the gameplay was cool. Admittedly, I still don't understand most of it (like the bar and circles at the top, though they were explained, went a bit over my head.) I think I got the gist of balancing the stats, and I liked reacting to the colored circles and symbols. Sometimes multiple symbols would flash, I assume this means you have to act multiple times in one turn? It wasn't very clear on feedback so I ended up inputting the same action twice rather than doing one then switching to the next one. Explaining everything step-by-step through a tutorial is nice, it's just hard to grasp everything in one go, I think it would've taken a few encounters for me before I really understood what I was doing. Not your fault, just the plight of a new player.

Like Reply

beseda1 day ago (4 edits) (+1)

Fantastic! That's all I hoped for at this time.

To clear any confusion:

- the circles at the top are a representation of the progression of cognition and by extent - of the conversation. Regardless of the subject matter, understanding as a process operates in a sequence.

- the bar is the turn timeline. In Child of Light the longer part is the wait time and the shorter part is the cast time. The character executes the action at the end of the timeline. However for conversations it is more like the breathing cycle (in/exhale). If I'm the listener the timeline works similarly to wait/cast but if I'm the speaker it's actually the opposite - talking is longer. The timeline is suitable for an interject/interrupt mechanic (probably as a quick time event), to be implemented.

- symbols for the needs flash twice. You need to respond to the most recent one. There are alternative designs for this - in Deus Ex they flash multiple times and you need to select the most frequent. That is because in DE there is voice acting and the duration of the turn is longer. For this game I selected the simpler way.

Like Reply

itch.io

Viewing post in Until the vacation jam comments