itch.io

I'm very torn by the game. I love the aesthetic, you build an incredible atmosphere, it's on the sweet spot between cute and uncanny. I'm normally not a fan of time advancement in games, but I think the dusk period is incredibly beautiful. The night suddenly jumping me because I lost track of time and then had to hurry back with only the candle illuminating my surroundings was absolutely superb! Felt exactly like it would have when I was camping at that age.

I don't know how to put stuff in spoiler tags here, so spoilers ahead for what made it fall a bit flat .-.

the low fossil count very quickly disincentiviced me from digging for fossils after I kept just repeatedly getting the same 3 forest, river and ocean fossils. Once I understood the puzzle mechanics and that the next clues seemed to be given after a rest, I just did one clue per day and rested. I think burying the clues, then using the normal detection mechanics and unearthing them would make it feel more in line with the general experience. That also resulted in me having bad luck and just never finding two fossils, which I spent 5 in-game days searching for :/
I think that the ending was also a bit lacking. I totally understand that animating the living machine chasing you would've been more of a nightmare for you than for the player. It just felt like something was missing to bring in the real urgency. You did such a good job with the screenshake and chose the music well, but it just being timed just didn't quite hit. I should say I got both endings and love the writing in both!

Anyways, I'm really happy you made this game and I only went into this much detail because those were the small things that kept this from being my favourite itch game. It's still gonna be somewhere in my top 5 though!

a few questions

Are things like the inventory, xp or stat system implemented by now?

Also, was this made with AI?

Well, it's certainly a video game (affectionate)

I lucky with the purple key, because after the orange one I thought "bite the bullet and see if I can actually progress here", which was correct! Dunno if I should've continued down the trip hallway, turned around, got the speed shoes and promptly chose the wrong door lol

I really like the character and their walking animation, I think the title also helps because it sets expectations correctly. For a small snacky experience, this was really neat :3

Really fun! Had a good chuckle several times, very charming :3 Also now I know that the boiling point of Sand is apparently 2230°C, so that's neat

Genuinely a wonderful game! I think it even very much surpasses the animation it adapted. Feels great to play and looks amazing. Bloody good work

 I can attack phase 1 with the chain shot. But as far as I can tell, every boss has a brief moment of invulnerability. It just so happens that phase 1 moves so quickly that it's just barely possible to even reach to hit a second time. Most of the time, that's too short for the invulnerability to be gone. But it's tight either way.

Honestly, I'm not sure if that needs fixing. Of course it would be nice for everything to be perfectly executable with 0 RNG, but currently only I seem to run it in any serious capacity. So it doesn't really matter in the end if I can two cycle phase 1 if the RNG can swing for 4 attacks each cycle (as compared to the WR phase 1 which I think only had 2 attacks total over 4 cycles?). I'd rather see how the speedrun develops in the near future instead of rushing to fix things that may just need to be understood correctly.

Thank you so much for engaging with the speedrun side and offering your help! It already means a lot that you even watch the speedruns at all :3

And I'll take you up on that offer once I actually get consistent (and maybe more people submit runs) ^^

I wrote that ruling just to make my life easier. Currently, I'm the only person that actually submits runs and I do it through the itch launcher as a standalone program. I didn't even know that the web browser uses an emulator. Obviously a web browsers submitted game would be verifiable, but I doubt people would read "play it through itch" and jump to the conclusion, that the web browser version would be denied.

but again, currently, this is all theoretical. In the end, I wanted a simple to understand ruleset and wait for other runners to share their perspective. It's all up to change if/when others submit their runs

on a side note, 1.4 helped me achieve a massive 9:43. Not in-game time, Real Time!!!

Really cool game! Got addicted to it, so now I opened a page on speedrun.com with a run clocking in at 11:03 real time, 7:29 in-game!

Wonderful little game! I 100%ed it! Wonderful graphics, it plays great, just superb!

Just tried the newest patch and man, the tweaks have really helped the game. Personally, I love the new rotated screen. The eating for stamina also finally made that mechanic click. It's something proactive one can do and it's quick enough to naturally flow into the moving of goods. It also just feels right.

For future tweaks, I think the only thing I'd like to see would be an option in the menu to also hide the arrow and the current objective. From how I played the game, it was rare to have multiple objectives at once and the few times that happened, it was generally current money job + making time for the upgrade unit. So I'd love to have the option to have less guff on my UI. And with it being an option, it could be switched at any moment if a given player feels lost or whatever.

Got a game crash when I want to play my first save from yesterday.

Code Error:

___________________________________________
############################################################################################
ERROR in
action number 1
of Draw Event
for object con_onboard:

Variable Index [0] out of range [0]
at gml_Object_con_onboard_Draw_0
############################################################################################
gml_Object_con_onboard_Draw_0 (line -1)

Having played this for two hours now, there are some things I'd like to say about it. General praise will be below, but I'll start with stuff that I would think are "easy" changes. Of course, it's game dev, so nothing is "easy", but here goes: 

- The flight mini game is great, but I think the screen of that mini game should be rotated so that the ship points up and not to the right. Your physical ship points up, when you hit the scrap in the mini game the trash comes from above and the commands to move the ship are bank "right"/"left", not "up"/"down". It might seem like a minor thing, but it helps immersion on what is one of the most interactive parts of the game.

- The dialogue text is hard to read to me, especially in full screen. This is because of the border on the letters which is very prominent but has too little contrast, making it weirdly bleed. I don't think it needs the border at all as most of the text in the game doesn't have it and is easy to read, though it might need a black or other high-contrast colour instead of the current one. A lot of text has display issues, making letters having seemingly random 1 or 2 pixel thickness, no matter if it's on base width or full screen.

- Some of the menu options are inconsistent in their interaction. Some menus (like the selling menu) need you to hold the interaction button, while most other menus go for a more streamlined button press. The buying/selling menu also has the problem of not exiting when using the esc key, instead bringing up your pause menu.

These are mostly inconsistency problems, so they might be easier to fix as the code to solve those might already exist.

There is other stuff that might pose a problem, but most of those are alpha problems that are deep rooted and might not be easy to fix. I won't get too much into them, as they might or might not just need more evolution of the project.

It is important to say, that the game flows quite well at the moment. There is almost always something engaging to do, be it tetris-ing your cargo and ship space, flying from planet to planet / playing the travel mini game and fixing your ship.

In essence, this is a good prove of concept with problems that were to expect as this is a really early alpha version.

Aside from that, here is the one unreasonable request: I would've liked to be able to mod graphic files, as I think it's good practise to polish existent pixel art. If you are looking for someone who can help with that part of the dev process, I can drop you some of my pixel work or rework your stuff if you want to see if I can match your intended style.

Man, this is really great! One of the things I like most is the adjustability after you make a mistake. A level or two in, I did understand the controls and fall-off well enough to avoid death for the rest of the game, while that adjustment and finesse necessary to get all the gold tokens was a welcome challenge!

This is absolutely adorable! I found it challenging enough to be engaging, but still very accessable for people who don't play too many puzzle games.

Yeah, Foolish Fire explained the treadmill "bug". I'm not saying that I expect a Jam game to be as polished as a full release game.  It just seems a bit weird that your pixelart and platforming is so well made, but instead of getting some depth into the platforming mechanics. Instead, it's wasted (in my opinion) on joke upgrades that don't change anything of substance. That would be okay if that would go along with mechanical upgrades, but instead it's just jokes that, for me at least, did not land once. Especially when a lot of the upgrade jokes are any combination of useless and annoying. There are also little things like the elevator joke on the side being too far away, so you can only read the last two words, etc.
Add to that the fact that a lot of time is wasted on the players part because you have to wait. Wait for the platforms to get into usefull positions. Wait for the treadmill to move you left. Wait for the elevator. That just destroys any of the pacing you manage to create with the tight controls.

That's the reason why I'm even complaining. Beneath all the jokes that never landed and questionable pacing design, there is beautiful pixel art, great controls and an interesting mechanic in its limitation that might be able to be crafted into level design that webs like a metroidvania by just getting the ability to go right after 2/3 of the game.

Don't like it. The attempted comedy falls flat, the game, while short, still overstays it's welcome because there isn't really anything to do. The platform challenges are uninspired and sometimes buggy (ducking on the treadmill works until just at the end, where you can just randomly die).
The pixelart is definitely the best thing about the game. It's charming and clear. Shame that kind of care seemed to, aside from the art style, go into the completely wrong things instead of making a more engaging and enjoyable experience.

It's a nice little game, though I don't see much of a hack and slash basis. At the moment, it is mainly a puzzle game with enemies as puzzle pieces. This could've been changed if the enemies actually damaged the player or something like that. The one real problem I have with it is that the character is always moving in the north-west direction which is not only a bit jarring, but also a really weird way of moving that doesn't really seem to support the underlying mechanics other than forcing the character to move diagonally and that could have been achieved without that.

It's very simple, but it's fun. Sadly there was never a real need to quickly change from upgrade to upgrade, but it's an interesting idea. Luckily, that's what the Game Jam is looking for, because neither the visuals nor the soundtrack/-effects are to be considered because by God, if I have to hear that damned ice upgrade one more time I'm going to set something on fire.

It's an interesting concept though the execution is lacking. The path you can see before you is quite narrow, so it's very frantic to even play the beginning. Adding to that is the mechanic that you not only have to watch out for cars not hitting your car, but each other. Which is probably the reason for me getting this

quite often. On every ~3rd attempt or so, the game doesn't even let you play because somewhere, two cars you can't even see yet are colliding.

I'd love to see this kind of touch/mouse based racing/driving game for mobile when it's a lot more polished.