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A jam submission

Are you there?View game page

A game about rocket, moon, modules and talks!
Submitted by Snappy Sloth (@Snappy_Sloth) — 14 minutes, 7 seconds before the deadline
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Are you there?'s itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Overall#114.0004.000
Theme interpretation#174.0004.000
Innovation#203.7923.792
Graphics#274.1254.125
Gameplay#383.6253.625
Audio#543.5833.583

Ranked from 24 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

GitHub repository URL
https://github.com/Snappy-Sloth/GameOff-2020-client

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Comments

Submitted (1 edit) (+1)

I’ve had a lot of fun going through the whole game, I made it through the end! :)

I got hooked on the story, I really liked the narrative and relationship between the player and Astro.

Very immersive experience and innovative, it has a escape room vibe.

I would suggest to let the player to move between screens (panels <-> terminal <-> documentation) using the arrow keys (or A-D keys), in my view it would allow the player move faster and unlock more challenging puzzles to solve.

Great job!

Headquarter is typing…

Submitted

Great concept and theme interpretation, we got a bit lost in the manual and the controls, but enjoyed the in interface and the game overall.

Submitted

So I haven't reached the end just yet, but I really wanted to rate and give my thoughts on it so far. The visuals fit perfectly and I had a lot of fun rushing to read through the manual. The story intrigues me, I enjoy chatting with Astro a lot, it feels like having a good friend among the stress of the mission. The different tasks one has to do are decently varied, the only one that confuses me a bit is the light flicking one, I can never seem to grasp how to do it without frantically flipping them at random haha. I think that the game is missing a stronger sense of consequences that increase in risk over time as it feels like there is not much of that at the moment. Overall, a really wonderful game that I plan on seeing to its conclusion.

Developer(+1)

We're really happy that you enjoyed the game on all the aspectts of it. First time we're doing a narrative game, it's important to us to have comments and criticism on it too.

We hope to make it a complete game on the next months. We'll try to share as much as possible our progress on Itch and Twitter.


Thank you for playing it!

Submitted

Cool game! loved the diegetic aspect of the instructions! I’ve never played a game like this, and its fun and tense trying to balance the instruction reading with the tasks! Good work!

Developer

Glad you enjoyed it! Thank you for your comment :)

Submitted

Great looking game! Very complex! I'd suggest a different system for flipping through the pages. I was having difficultly selecting the correct page to view.

Developer

Thank you for playing it! We received a lot of comments on the manual screen, we'll work on that on the next version of the game ;)

Submitted

The Skeuomorphic visuals on this are great, clean and work so well. 

The mechanics are good and emulate Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes as a single player experience perfectly.

The only real criticism I have is shuffling through the pages can be quite tricky and it's easy to select the wrong page and have to resort. It does add tension when the alarms are going off and you're pressed for time, but I think a "next page" button would have been very nice.

Good Job!

Developer

Oh, you teach me a new word :D

We'll probably rework the manual ergonomy, yeah. Thanks for your feedbacks :)

Submitted

Sweating

I really enjoyed this game! Reading through the manual while the alarm is on… so much pressure! But still, great job on making this. I can see the Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes inspiration which I think really matches the space theme.

Developer

Ah ah :D

Thank you!

Submitted(+1)

Good job, it's a very polished game! I enjoyed a lot.

Some feedbacks:

  •  The inspiration from "keep talking and nobody explodes" is pretty obvious, a bit too much (I think even the font of the manual is the same?), You could try to give a bit more of your own personality. 
  • Navigating through the manual was a bit annoying. I understand that it's designed to make it stressful and in that sense it is effective, but after a while it was tedious. I wish there was a way to get better at navigating through it, so that it is hard at the beginning but gets easier with experience. Here, even after 2 hours or so, it felt pretty messy, although I sometimes got lucky and clicked and the right page right away, I mostly had to swipe around to get through.
  • I didn't finish the game, so maybe there is, but I felt a lack of consequences for failing (or taking a long time to finish) my tasks. After a while, it didn't bother me so much to be stuck for a long time and the "stress effect" wasn't as strong. Maybe add a time limit to each day?
  • Finally, and maybe my most important feedback, I think it was too long. I pushed through because I really wanted to see what would happen, but a bit after hearing I had to continue until day 20 or so I gave up.  The mechanics of your game works very well in short sessions, but they quickly become redundant IMO. That's what KTANE do very well, the sessions are short, and since it's a multiplayer game it's always fun to try again later. But honestly as a solo player I wouldn't try to go back to finish it. If I had been able to finish the game in max 1 hour, I think I would have enjoyed it a lot more. Or maybe find ways to change the gameplay throughout the game, like in Papers please, that allows you to enhance your UI to make things easier when the challenge gets harder. Or embed your mechanic in another kind of less stressful gameplay to give time to breath to the player.

Hope I was helpful and that you keep working on it!

Developer

Thanks for all these feedbacks!

I can confirm we plan to polish the gameplay to improve it during the game :)

Submitted

I've only known Hayley for a few days, but I would kill and/or die for them.

Amazing game, seriously! The artwork, the sound design, the story, everything is perfect! And the tasks strike a perfect balance between easy ones and hard ones. I think you really hit it out of the park!

The only critique I have is that it's a bit TOO similar to Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes. Even down to the visual design of the manual pages. I think with some slight adjustments, this game could really have its own identity!

Developer(+1)

Thanks for the feedbacks! Yeah, we'll work on the visual identity of the game, we went to the most evident for the jam :).

Submitted

This is one of those brilliant games for which you need some time and focus!... I am just too dumb though, anyhow I had a look at it and it is in the peer review video haha See below!

1:33:00 Are You There?

Developer(+1)

Thank you for the test! I see you solved the first alert by cliking everywhere on the modules' screen hahaha!

You had to first check the manual on the page "Connection problems" to see what you had to do, but it worked for you :D

Thanks again!

Submitted

Very nice game. Did you by any chance get inspired by "keep talking and nobody explodes"? It reminded me of it a lot :)

Great graphics and very nice gameplay!

Developer

Totally! The challenge was to port it to a solo experience. Hope we did well!

Thank you for your kind feedback <3

Submitted

Loved the clean graphics! Was clear you put a lot of effort into making the game visually appealing to play, obviously the resolution issue but that's an easy fix post job. Very nice job!

Developer

Thank you very much, and yeah as I explained below, we realize the resolution issue too late. But thank to like it despite that! :D

One of our first job next week will be to downgrade the resolution to, I think, 640x360, being 1/2 of the actual :D !

Submitted

Spot on simulation of engineers daily life. This is why they get paid so well ^^

Developer(+1)

Haha! It could be but it wasn't the idea at first :D

Thank you for playing it :)

Submitted

This was really fun, and I was stressed as hell! Reminded me a lot of Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, except you don't need friends and it has a fun story!

Developer

Yeah, Keep Talking was one of our references, and we try to adapt it to a solo player game.

Thank you very much!

Submitted

really innovative and fun game!
I liked the idea and the implementation!
really enjoyed the stress of a engineer scrub :D

Developer

Glad you enjoyed it! Thank you for the feedback :

Submitted

Wow, I really enjoyed this a lot! It felt a lot like an escape room puzzle, which was a lot of fun; it was satisfying to feel myself getting faster at resolving alerts the longer I played, even as the alerts got more complex. The narrative aspect was also a very nice touch.

Also, is there a way to save progress that I missed?

Developer (1 edit)

If I'm not wrong, the game is saving at the beginning of each day. If not... it's a bug, sorry :D

Thank you for your kind feedback! <3

Submitted

a really, really good concept. text looked good on my laptop and only the flipping between screens were a bit annoying but I loved it, made 5 tasks in my first day, well done!

Developer

Thanks for playing! We wanted the answers to be difficult to remember and that the player has to come check several time the manual.

What did you find annoying, the fact that you had to go several times or to have to pass by the communication screen?


Thanks for your feedback :)

Submitted

it's a great idea but as you said, going past comms screen was irritating. In ideal world it would all be in the same scene but maybe it zooms in on the area after clicking it? So like you have a main control panel with comms in the middle but instead of arrows have a miniature of the manual and controls which you than click to expand/pop up? It's only my humble opinion but I'd change that transition between scenes somehow, other than that it's great!

Developer

Yeah, I understand. We're gonna think about this and how to improve it. Thank you very much!

Submitted

Good concept, would love to play it but the text is so small it's  literally unreadable. Is there any way to make the game fullscreen? It launches in fullsreen mode with black bars and the game is a little box in the middle.

Developer(+1)

Hey, thank you for the kind feedback :). And yeah, there is a huge issue with the rescale, because the game is in 1280x720, and in fullscreen in HD (1920x1080), it would be x1.5, so the pixel won't be square anymore. So we made the choice to lock the rescale only for whole number (1280x720 => 2560x1440, etc...), and we realize the very last day that our game won't fit for the most common screen : 1920x1080.

So our first big thing to do with the post-jam version is to make it in 640x360, to make it rescalable in almost every resolution :) (1280, 1980, 2560, etc...)