itch.io

a labyrinth of judgement binds the hands of reviewer and review-reviewer alike.

the developer's plea disguised as title disguised as plea reveals a human vulnerability: Please, notice me. Please, help me improve.

i feel it too, but numbers too strike fear into my heart; it took me a day to push through the fear. am i meant to inoculate myself to numbers or can the world change first to suit our bodies? a game is a world.

hatim, will numbers inspire me to be a better person?

Hi elfabzter - I tried something else. Let me know if that works.

no, you can feel free to go ahead and do that! thanks for bringing it to my attention.

i've  returned cruel world to its unreleased state.  perhaps i will do something with it soon.

oh, that's weird. i thought i had opened up downloads to those who had purchased it, but i see that i have accidentally made the downloads available to everyone. hmm. thanks for letting me know.

hi dan qui dam! i like your avatar. i think you've experienced the entire thing. make of it what you will :)

went to sleep, woke up, remembered this, installed it. it is great. problem solved. tyvm.

whoa whoa 1. this seems really useful but also 2. what the fuck it was made by a cool person i know and have worked with in the past???

oh, i forgot i did that! why'd i do that. here, they are re-enabled for existing owners.

yes, i mean internally, unfortunately. some of the games in my list are prototypes that i uploaded to show to someone and i am trying to browse them in order to unearth them from the past! itch definitely provides a better solution than storing all these prototypes on my local machine, because then i lose them completely, but... it's not great.

im also open to suggestions for how i could organize things better on my end, it's partially my fault for not thinking about this ahead of time?? i guess??? organizing and navigating a ton of stuff is just a hard problem that not too many people have solved.

wish i could drag my games around in a 2D space like kinopio my beloved 😌😌

hi, i have uploaded too many games (149) to itch.io and the interface for navigating them is literally causing me to stop wanting to upload games to itch.io...

i may be an outlier, and it would be very understandable to not prioritize my use case, but i thought this might be useful for yall to see. i wish i could search my own games, sort them by date, tag them and search through them that way, but the dashboard simply presents them all in a huge unyielding list. it sucks for me

sounds good :) tysm for playing and asking and engaging! <3

thanks! i'm still not sure how to make it work better as an experiment, because it feels like the subjective and the objective senses of correctness are somewhat at odds...

you have, yes, kind of reached the "end," in my drawn end-state the thicker dull pink lines in your red zone are all along the left and bottom side, vaguely gesturally following as ripples of the brighter pink circles. also aesthetically i would probably not choose to put the blue sparkles touching pink lines like that... but, you have reached what i would consider correct! at this point i am just describing a very loose sense of what i like, haha.

did it seem to you that you wanted to assemble the picture accurately rather than however you like?

alright, this is about as close as i expect to ever get or need to get, within my life, to a perfect score. 3120.

yessss. mass paving ftw. pave right until the moment i'm forced to build. this is the way to live life.

2590 on restore. i'm not sure what the 14-X bonus is, but i found my secret winning technique B)

hi please don't spam submit your game to jams thank you

"Why???"

• Paradise was playing (and playing with, in a Boluk&LeMieux-esque fashion) NEAL.FUN's "Draw a Perfect Circle" and it got out of hand. The only logical conclusion was to immediately host a blitz. Thank you for asking, how nice.

"I made a game and didn't draw a circle, can I submit it?"

• yes

"I drew a circle and didn't make a game, can I submit it?"

• yes

"I thought of a new question and answer, can I post it here?"

• yes

⭕

• ⭕

i did a little bit of research on how to issue refunds and i see that you never purchased Cruel World... i suppose that you never explicitly requested a refund, only suggesting that, were refunds requested, i should issue them. it seem an unnecessary statement to make, implying that i would not issue refunds were they requested. i don't appreciate that assumption, i don't think the implication is very nice, and i think it's entirely unnecessary to come and accuse me of theft!

you may be frustrated about what appears to you to be a pattern but considering you have no actual experience of me "axing contents . . from users' libraries", no justification for suggesting that i wouldn't "issue refunds as requested", and finally have not experienced "theft" in any way whatsoever, i'd like to respectfully suggest you stop projecting things you're upset about at unrelated people on the internet.

and, selfishly, i'd like to request that you not do it to me in particular, because i don't like it :) -droqen.

also, if you gave me $6 and didn't play the game that explicitly stated it was not really meant to be played past the first day, let me know and you can have $6 back. the stakes are very low here, it's six dollars. theft, lol.

what's been axed? i thought i just stopped selling it, are you unable to access the files now?

at -6, 200 there is a room full of doors, the bottomleftmost of which goes to the next room over. it is enjoyable to go through this door, walk left, go through this door, and repeat for a while.

i made an impermanent game thing for the toy jam, it will not be uploaded to itch.

this link will be active for about 7 days, then it will not be active any more.

https://www.droqever.com/-/tree-climber

very nice islands :) i like to imagine that i am there.

hello, i would like to delete this, but i have reported it as AI-generated spam and don't want that report to get lost as a result of the comment's deletion. i plan to delete this if itch io moderation does not. i'm very concerned about the possible future of more spam like this.

-droqen

hmm. i'm not sure how long a few minutes is or what you mean by brute forcing things, but it doesn't sound like this describes my experience well. i understand that optimization is key and i did optimize at the deeper more zoomed in levels in order to produce more ants at higher and higher levels. i'm happy to leave it with the understanding that i'm not part of the intended audience but i felt a bit bad about my experience being described incorrectly so i am only commenting to clear that up! congrats on finishing something that others seem to be enjoying for the jam :)

q2: a few times. at least once each until i got the ability for ants to carry two resources at a time. then i began to lose steam and figured it wasn't that important to further optimize everything.

q1: hmm. this is a good question but i am not sure i can give a good answer. so maybe i'm not right about my diagnosis and should have not made one? overall, paths seemed like a nice way to visualize specifying specific sequences of actions, but something about it bugged me. i will describe some moments from my play experience:

i yearned for a way to split the flow of ants in a more mathematically pleasing way, but did not want to draw a supremely excessive number of paths - e.g. perfectly optimizing a den that wants 16 of one and 18 of another is only possible by drawing 8+9 paths... i suppose that is not a control scheme thing.

at times i wanted to send ants down specific paths to balance numbers out but i couldn't do that without destroying paths which i didn't want to do.

i did not figure out how to add nodes to a path between existing nodes, i was kinda checking out mentally at this point.

i found a trick where i could send an ant to grab a resource and plant it, and have that one ant repeat the action in that path a few times, to craft quickly. that felt like an exploit, but a good/fun one.

i did not feel very rewarded for trying to make perfect flows. seemed like more of a sheer numbers/waiting game.

this one is hard to get my hands on, i'll try though. in comparing your game to other games i have played, the node-path-ant-control is the only way to gain resource and perform actions, so i must wait for everything. i like when i have a body, and the factorizing supplements that, makes me more powerful. (e.g. i can pick up and deliver coal myself, but it is less work to get ants to help me.) not sure if this is useful, as it describes a fairly different dynamic... as i said at the start im not much of a factory gamer and for me it checks out that the root of my complaint is "im forced to play a factory game with no player-avatar-action component" ;P

hope that was useful.

i played the first three levels. i got pretty much used to the controls. as an attempt to create a control scheme this was definitely a functional game and control scheme, and i could have probably made use of the fireball spell if absolutely necessary. in any case, i did not really use the fireball for anything in the time that i spent with the game.

melee attacks are not that satisfying. i found jumping had quite bad feel, and it was easy to slip off the edge of platforms for one reason or another. finally, when i fall off the edge of a platform, it takes a long time to respawn. in general this created a system which did not entice me to spend much time with it, and additionally consumed more of my time than necessary which more rapidly drained my desire to continue playing around.

in the levels that i played there was not much interesting use of scaling, but the mechanic itself was fun to experience. the levels did not feel too good to play either, but i will chalk a lot of that up to the movement and combat mechanics not being particularly responsive or good-feeling (see previous paragraph).

i would like to specially note that while the opening animation is very nice, it feels as though more effort was put into "branding" the developers than into the game itself, and was prioritized to the active detriment of the game, which is especially frustrating, as a player. this has been mentioned by another comment below so i won't give this an excessive amount of attention, but will note: an animation of similar quality that attempted to communicate or express something more related to the game experience itself could have been a big plus.

speaking in practice and not in theory, i came back to the game for a second try while writing this review, played level 10 in search of a more interesting use of scaling -- and found the platforming very annoying, so intended to quit to the main menu and play a different level. i accidentally quit the entire game and in that moment did not want to sit through the animation for a third time, so i simply did not play any more levels. you may interpret and react to this report as you choose. i have obviously spent a lot of time writing this review so it is not purely a "time" thing :)

played for longer than i expected! i don't usually stick with factory style games. i understood the way to progress immediately and was not too surprised throughout the game.

i think what will stick with me is that initial experience of having to scroll, scroll, scroll down to the smallest scale from the largest. it was a long enough scroll that i almost did not go far enough, but eventually i did.

there is also something here which i recognized but is not totally common in factory games, which is the way each layer feeds into the one above it. i enjoyed that part of the system, but ultimately lost my love with it due to its relatively rote re-use.

finally. i suppose that the unusual control scheme deserves some recognition. it's experimental and it basically works but is somewhat unpolished. things that i would find easier in other games are quite awkward in this game. i am not sure how to describe the full breadth of this awkwardness. i don't think that i personally took much from this experiment, but it's always possible for an experiment to highlight a more interesting way forward for a genre. (not that every experiment must lead to innovation - but i would like to note that i don't think it really spoke to me of the other themes of the game either.)

Umm, thanks itch. I'll just post the image a different way.

Hello! Not sure if you're looking for bug reports but this one seems to be major... I've used a drawing tablet as well as a laptop touchpad, and every keyboard button I can think of, but I seem incapable of using these interaction icons. Is this a bug of some sort or am I just missing something?

I came here because I was intrigued by the themes described in your cohost post and wanted to get those feelings! Looking forward to more.

hey chris, i appreciate the message! let me give you a response that i hope will satisfy you.

cruel world had a very clear intention from day 1, and at the time i decided to allow people to continue buying it, it was done out of greed and excitement. it wasn't true to what it was supposed to be, or who i want to be now - or even who i wanted to be then. there was a lot of cool stuff that came out of cruel world, but continuing to sell it was, in my eyes, a mistake.

any external criticism was unrelated to my personal judgement; it catalyzed my decision but was by no means the cause of it. in this case i would say that removing my game is something i did because i wanted to own up to that mistake, to learn from it, to become better, as you say. it has been a long time coming and i'm happy to have done it.

regarding having demos for paid products: cruel world was... i never thought of, or never wanted to think of, it as a product. to approach it in that way is too much of a shift for me right now. if i revisit cruel world for some reason in the future, i ought to consider a demo, if my goal is to sell more copies.

i like demos for commercial games! i remember lots of people saying that demos were a "bad idea" for indie games, 5-10 years ago... i don't know if that advice still holds or if it was ever even good advice. there's opinions on both sides.

i look forward to releasing a game with a demo someday. it's intimidating. i make small games, and i worry that a demo for such a game would be so small that the paid version would be almost nothing by comparison.

anyway, i'll figure it out.

love, droqen.

p.s. please check out Gentle World. you can still check it out. i hope you enjoy our videogame.

Thanks for playing, Alex :) Glad you liked it.

Yes