Finally got around to playing Gestate last night. I adore the art style, sound design and atmosphere. You executed the PSX aesthetic perfectly. Little things like the sound when you add items to your inventory, the way it moves to your hand, and the buzzing sound when you're near corpses are some lovely tactile touches. One thing is perhaps the bars/inventory boxes could use a little more style (Like a frame that matches the text style or something).
Stupidly, on top of having a few drinks at the time, I didn't read all the instructions on the page before I started playing so I was a bit confused for a bit. After reading everything I was able to make some progress. I really love the unique concept, though I will say after a decent chunk of time I did lose motivation to continue and ended up not completing the game. I don't think I'm qualified to provide any technical solutions, but overall I think the gameplay loop wasn't engaging enough to keep me invested the whole way through. Perhaps I was playing wrong/missed something and it's not meant to take so long to reach the objective, but I think there either needs to be more to it or it should be easier/quicker to win.
Best of luck, and great inspiring work! Looking forward to playing the final game. :)
Thanks so much for playing, Alex :D
We're definitely with you about the UI needing some sprite work, right now they're basically placeholders, thematic stuff like the hunger bar being intestine-like would be so sick, and more occult-ish themes too :)
our main goal moving forwards is more variation between days, as like you said it gets a little repetitive. I can usually win in about 5-7 days by just seeking out rabbits and birds until trust is maxxed out, and then hitting it with poison and hedgehogs until i need to raise trust again, but evidently the player isn't really given the understanding of the game to optimise their approach like that, so I will make note of this as something to work on.
Since the Game-Jam we've been mainly focused on setting a strong foundation to build new mechanics and features onto, so that's why at the moment it seems like a really minimal game with a weird amount of QoL / tactile stuff, we've been making sure we first redesign any inherently flawed systems before we extend from them if that makes sense.
Thanks again for taking the time to try this out, your advice is going to really help us with improving the game :) I look forward to seeing more of your work too ! keep killing it out there ;D
My pleasure! I love the idea of the intestine bar. Excited to see what you guys come up with for the rest of the UI :)
Interesting. I'm usually quite bad at management-type games and don't play a lot of them so it could also be that I just don't have a feel for the gameplay. Other players would likely be more intuitive.
I understand and appreciate that approach :) There's certainly an awesome foundation here so I'm looking forward to what you build upon it. I've never competed in a game jam so I really admire you guys.
Thank you, keep killing it too haha! :D