itch.io

Alivest Internet Theory

Very fun! Fairly easy to cheese in a handful of places, but that certainly did not ruin it by any means. Would totally play a full game of this!

Just came back to this today, love the new additions! The new balancing made the first few layers feel much less grindy, and the new upgrades really helped! I also liked the new songs :)

The menu redesign was super nice, and felt much more intuitive also, and I really appreciate you taking our feedback and adding (un)inverted controls!

Though there was one issue that made things almost unplayable until I figured out what was wrong: the movement is WAY too fast - it was to the point where if I tapped a movement key the entire tree would be off my screen in just 1 frame, and I thought it was broken. In the past I had used custom speed 20, but now I had to set it all the way down to 0.1 to get a similar speed. Should probably fix this ASAP.

Btw, I managed to find the song I was looking for, it was the "tires on fire" by coda, thanks for helping me out with that! also the credits was a nice touch for anyone else who may want to find a song. You might want to update it with credits for the new songs too.

But yeah, overall, great stuff!

Seems really cool, but I ran into a couple of issues:

1. some tasks required me to run commands "from memory" that I have certainly not seen before (I was asked to stop accounts from expiring, and another time to make a new account all when the only account command I had seen so far was to change a a password)

2. when an emergency showed up, I answered the first question correctly but then the second part never showed up. In case it's relevant, it was the one where the person could not connect their laptop for a presentation or something similar. Then when I inevitably failed the emergency due to not having any buttons to press, the game kinda crashed - I got stuck on a blank gray screen, with audio still running.

Those were the main things i ran into. I also think the skill system felt kind of underwhelming, and that the upgrades seemed very weak. But all that aside, this was very fun!

8.5/10, would recommend

Very neat idea, but execution could use some work.

For starters, explaining some of the controls would be nice. WASD are rather intuitive, and E to interact is fairly common, but it took me a second to figure out the grow/shrink controls for the blue balls, and I never even found out about controlling balls with "F" until i checked settings (I literally just pushed the heart balls around for the first few puzzles lol).

Another point I wanted to mention is that the third-person camera when controlling the ball is way too snappy. If you ever get too close to a wall, the camera reverses and as a consequence, so do your controls. It makes things a bit unfun when navigating tight spaces. This could probably be easily fixed decently well though by moving the camera closer to the ball (the chambers are way too small for the far-away camera) and also by giving the camera a bit of easing in its movements so it doesn't immediately snap.

*POTENTIAL SPOILERS AHEAD*

Something else I noticed is a potential issue with the puzzle featured in the third picture here, the one with the two buttons, a tiny door and a red wall. Is the indended solution here to grab a ball from the previous room, shove it around onto one button using the controllable ball, and then to jump the wall with the ball you control? Because as clever as that solution is, if it is the intended way, it is very jank for a few reasons. first, shoving the ball around with the other ball is a little annoying. Especially with needing to build speed to clear the lip on the button even with the biggest ball size, it was a bit annoying. Second, jumping the wall required me to grow the ball tot he biggest size and reset the size midair. As much as I enjoy platforming tech like this, it would be very annoying and too challenging for a causal player. Thirdly, if you do need the ball from the previous room, you need to make sure the door stays open. I was messing around with the balls, and the big one wasn't completely stationary when i left the room, and the door eventually closed behind me. I had to reset before i was able to use the heart ball in place of one of the blue balls to take it to the next room before getting the heart ball back using the button (which again, feels like it may be unintended, but i genuinely don't know how else you would press both buttons). But overall, the puzzle is totally salvageable, and I liked it, it just needs some work.

And yeah, thats about all the feedback I had. I also think some sound would be nice, but that's not super important. I really enjoyed this little demo, and look forward to seeing what direction you take with this!

Been playing since yesterday, and this is pretty fun. Definitely appreciate the extra automations you just added, as I was getting a little too good at buying everything at Mach 5 for my liking lmao. But yeah, as someone else mentioned, the controls are reversed. Its not hard to get used to, but ideally the wasd controls move the camera and not the buttons (effectively just reverse the move direction). Also an instruction somewhere to actually tell you do use WASD would be nice, as you kinda have to guess and check rn.

Also, I'm pretty sure you made this in scratch, so this might not be possible, but if it were possible to implement zooming in and out that would be amazing. Theres also an issue where when hovering over buttons and they show dialog boxes, the boxes flicker on and off very rapidly sometimes. This also might just be an issue with scratch tho, so not a big deal.

Something else: can you put credits for the songs used? I recognize most of these as either common royalty-free songs or from Undertale, but there a song or 2 i dont recognize and kinda wanna find.

Finally, one last thing to mention: the buttons on top show their dialog boxes under the other menu buttons up there, making them hard to read. It would be nice to fix that as well.

But yeah, great game dude! Quite the fun little number-go-up experience, and I can't wait to see what else you add!