itch.io

Thank you for checking it out and your kind comments! I’m sorry to hear you had issues turning your character. I never encountered any bug like that myself and I know others are able to play it, but maybe there is some weird bug you hit? I would suggest at least restarting the game and starting a New Game and see if that fixes it? But anyway, thanks again for playing!

This is very impressive! I love all the different items and the durability forced me try so many different ones out. I love the visual style and all of the polish it had. Well done!

Yeah that totally makes sense! A lot of times character creation can end up taking a full session, so I totally get for a game that is meant for players to jump into easily not having that. Having a few special skills to choose from to customize your character some would be a fun way to handle that!

I really like this! It’s a short and simple, but spooky and atmospheric. It feels like a weird little artifact of a platformer, with enough unknown to be uncanny, if that makes sense.

Thank you so much for checking it out and the kind words! I will admit that the red sigil puzzle design was unfortunately the result of rushing at the end of the jam. I spent most of this time just building out the game and then had to design those puzzles last minute. I would have loved a little extra time to onboard the player better there, tighten the design, and perhaps even change the rule to something a little more parseable. But anyway, thanks again for checking it out!

This was short and sweet and did a great job setting an unsettling atmosphere for how short it was. I think this really could have been enhanced with some background music or sound effects. Still, well made and very effective!

Overall this seems like a really solid and interesting system! It streamlines some things compared to a system like D&D which is nice. I really like the Schrödinger’s Gear mechanic - I think that’s a clever way to allow for some variability and player-led storytelling throughout. I’ve played some Scum & Villainy and they have some similar mechanics, and that type of stuff is always fun.

I think it would be awesome if you were able to work with an artist to add some images, as I love a source book with cool pictures :) Also, unless I missed something, I did not see any character classes (although I did see reference to a pilot and gunner, so a little unsure). Speaking personally, I love systems with character classes because I find figuring out your class to be one of the most exciting parts of an early campaign. So potentially could always add something like that in the future?

Wow I am blown away you made this in 2 weeks. Really impressive in pretty much all regards. I thought the pacing and length was perfect. Crossing to the Eldritch realm was such a cool moment.

This is an extremely minor issue, but I actually had trouble with the game pause menu. The mouse cursor was not shown so I had to sort of randomly move my mouse all over to try to select different options. I would suggest either exposing the mouse cursor, or at least letting the arrow keys select different options there. But again, that’s a super minor nitpick, I really was extremely impressed with all aspects of this game!

I really like the overall concept and I think managing the flashlight is really great! The game did seem to jump in difficulty really fast so I found it hard to actually survive, but I really do think this a neat idea!

This was short and sweet and I really liked it! I love the visuals and was impressed with how effective the narrative was for its length. Good job!

This is honestly incredible. I just think the design of this, along with the art and music, just form a super fun, tight, and great little game. I found the challenge scaled appropriately. I love that while most of us went to unsettling and macabre, this game went for cute and funny. I think it’s so imaginative! Well done!

I really appreciate you checking it out and I’m glad you like the vibe! I was inspired by games like The Witness where you sort of have to contemplate the puzzles for a while to try to understand what rules are even being communicated. However, I did not have enough time to really tighten the design or probably onboard the player in a very intuitive way. It was a very fun foundation for me to play with some ideas and maybe I’ll elaborate on them in the future!

Thank you so much for checking it out! The Witness was definitely a big inspiration - I wanted to make a puzzle game where you have to figure out the rules of the puzzles and your knowledge set builds over time. Unfortunately I did have to rush a lot of the puzzle design at the very end of the jam, because it took me so long just to build it all in a working state. I wish I had had a few more days (or weeks) to really tighten the design and make some of those later puzzles a little more intuitive.

And I totally agree with you about the sound effects! Next time I’d like to work with someone for the audio as its the one aspect I am pretty clueless on and had to rely on 3rd party assets.

Oh I appreciate it! This was my first time distributing a game on Itch (well and anywhere really) so I’m sure I did not do a great job packing it up

Thanks for checking it out! I was definitely inspired by games like The Witness where you have to spend time studying the puzzles and see what worked and didn’t work to uncover what the rules are. The red sigil is the most challenging to figure out. If you’d like the rule for it, I’ll post it below:

This was such a fun and tight little card-battler! I can definitely see the potential for added cards and effects but this is a really solid foundation. It was a challenge, but I managed to beat it. I really like the visuals and the screen effect. Great job!

Oh that's so interesting! I definitely would have guessed it had an influence. It does indeed make an easy way to explain the game to people.

Waypoint Radio is a podcast by Vice Games and I personally think it has some of the best commentary in the industry. It's focused on cultural criticism of games and often veers into other territories like politics. The host recently played Totem and talked about it, which is how I discovered it. You can check out that episode here https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3azqwj/the-value-of-making-art-in-a-crisis-waypoint-radio

Thank you so much for posting this! I love knowing the inspiration behind creative efforts and this was really interesting. I am astounded that you built this in such a short time frame! It crossed my mind that it might be cool to actually have to construct sentences word for word (and not choose from a list of options) but I think the possibilities would have been too endless and perhaps the game might be unplayable.

I am curious - was the film Arrival any inspiration? I can't help but notice the similarity between the two and the same comparison was made on Waypoint Radio.

I wanted to let you know that Creaker worked fine after the update and I was able to get through its encounter! I also wanted to point out that after I downloaded the update, when I went to the main menu, it showed that I had beaten Cow when I hadn't yet. I had already talked with Cow a few times and answered a few questions successfully but never made it through the whole thing. If it's just something weird that happened with my copy, then I don't really care. I just wanted to draw your attention to it to make sure that everyone doesn't now start the game with Cow having been cleared.

Wow, I really appreciate how quick you were to fix that! I'm excited to play again! I truly love this game

Hey thanks for the quick fix! I downloaded the update and now Wreckingball works great and I was able to successfully navigate that one (ending dot worked exactly as you described). However I am still having issues with the bottom left option not doing anything with Creaker. It doesn't always happen but eventually I hit a route where clicking it does nothing. I'm attaching a few screenshots of dialogue where this happened in case it will help.

Thanks for looking into that! I wanted to throw out that I am also getting the same issue with some Creaker options not being selectable. For me, they have always been in the bottom left if that is helpful. Usually I can select options in that square but then eventually, some cannot be selected. The Cow model loads fine for me, but my PC does have decent specs. Thanks again, I love the game!

Just wanted to say that I'm running into the same issue with Wreckingball. I only have the end sentence dot, selecting it does nothing, and there is nothing else I can do. I'm not sure if this is an intentional end (I think our convo left us in a happy place so maybe the alien doesn't want to talk more) but if so, I think there should be some type of game over screen in that case.

I really appreciate you reaching out and doing it so quickly! I've just sent you an email.

I'm not sure if anyone else has run into this issue but after about 10 minutes of play the game causes my PC to blue screen and restart. This keeps happening. I have been able to play it by saving and exiting every few minutes. This has made my progress incredibly slow as the game takes a long time to exit and restart, but I usually get about 10 minutes of play time before I need to stop or the game crashes my PC. However my game state seems very messed up after the last time it crashed. There might be slight item spoilers ahead.

I am not able to use locker key #29 to retrieve the monocle. I got it before the crash, but then since I lost my progress, now the key does nothing and I can't get the monocle anymore. I am also not able to add the A key to the piano. I hold out the key but it doesn't create an outline like the previous keys. Strangest of all, when I enter room 206 there is no room at all. Instead it is like the room is chopped off and I can see outside as well as the interior of other rooms. I am posting a screenshot. If I step through I start to fall down through the level and it eventually warps me to the front lobby. I know the game is surreal but I'm assuming this is not intended.

As I am unable to get the monocle or use the last piano key I believe I cannot progress forward anymore. Has anyone else run into any issues like this and know of any fixes or workarounds? Considering I have to segment my play in small chunks anyway I am about to give up on this game entirely. I was very curious to see what happened but might just have to rely on walkthrough videos at this point. I was trying to play through all of the works of Cosmo D in preparation for the new game but Off-Peak would also crash my PC (less frequently than this game). I might just have to accept his games don't work for me which makes me very sad.

I am on the Itch Windows desktop app if that is helpful. Playing on Windows 10 with a PC and a GTX 970  graphics card.

My downloadable version on the storefront is the full game. So I just think the itch.io desktop app needs to be updated

I am playing through the itch.io Windows app and I think it might be downloading the demo instead of the full game. I played 2 matches and then got a "Thank you for playing" screen. I can view the map if I select to continue the campaign but can't seem to select anything. Any idea on how to fix this?

The product filters are cool! Do you think you could label this more clearly and make it more clear which filters do what? I saw the tabs but didn't realize that they were filters and was a little confused by them. Particularly early game when you only have one or two products unlocked, the tabs don't actually do anything so I thought they were broken. You could provide some tooltip text when you hover over them that says "Show legal products only", "Show unlaunched products only", etc. Alternatively you could remove the tabs and provide a dropdown select with the options that is clearly labelled "Filter Products". I like the folder tabs as I think they match the visual style of the game better, but a dropdown might be more clear and reduce UI clutter a little bit. Not sure about that.

I'll second this. It would be nice if the email just had a simple breakdown of which new employees just got hired and how many.

Also, I'm not sure if this is a bug or intentional but I don't see my own company's share % listed, like I do with the other corps. I can get a rough idea from the pie chart but I would like to see my own percentage because that's really the number I care about.

I see that in the newest build you renamed the integer number to "Stocks" which I think does reduce confusion a bit. However, I would actually like to propose that you simplify this system even more and only the percentage to players. I haven't reached the late game to know if there is more importance to the integer "Stocks" value, but right now the 2 numbering systems seem redundant and not super reflective of how the stock market actually works.

Whenever you buy shares in a company you are always buying them from someone else. This means that other shareholders stock numbers should decrease proportionally. It's uncommon for a company to release more shares on the market as it dilutes the value of each share (although they do it from time to time). So there is always one specific total number of shares and those are divided between investors. I've noticed that when I buy shares, the other investors number of stocks remains the same instead of decreasing. That gives the appearance that new shares/stocks are just created as I buy them, instead of me buying them from someone else. I suppose in the fiction of the game you could say that I'm buying these shares from outside investors that aren't the companies listed, but I'm not sure if you gain much from that.

It seems the number that players actually care about is the percentage of the company that they own. So why bother exposing an additional number to us that we should keep track of, when it seems to only inform the percentage number? Thoughts?