Ah, so happy to hear! It's incredibly heartwarming to see people enjoy the story that we told here. Answering the "How the heck?" - Experience + passion. Regarding in-world text, it is not a new idea, but it isn't a common thing either; I personally only remember such a trick in "What Remains of Edith Finch". For this game, it was indeed a perfect storytelling tool: easy to make, stylish, and powerful.
Thanks! Hope whatever you are making turns out great! Our game is basically Obra-Din with time pressure, in terms of deduction, it works very similarly, but then you can "cash in" some extra knowledge that you gathered that doesn't add to the main puzzle in return for extra time. Normally in detective games, you only have the final puzzle and whatever doesn't fit into it remains just narrative noise, so I figured why not to use this extra info as a resource that you can exchange for something valuable...
Ambitious and interesting idea, I am a succer for space games. Making the player rotate with time is very creative to impose the pressure, although for it to work better, you had to place some objects that would work as waypoints to remember and use for navigation. In general, there are many creative ideas, like the things you should avoid looking at, but for these mechanics to work, they all need tons of feedback and tutorialization. I like the spirit, but that's indeed too much for one person to pull off. Notes for future: 1) First, make the core mechanics function on a playable level (include feedback, UI prompts, etc) For example, here I would make the interactive panels have a white outline and show a UI prompt "scroll the wheel to change the value" once you are in range. 2) Add basic tutorials if needed. It is very simple to just make a floating text that sums up the main mechanics. For example, I had no idea dark blobs I was supposed to not look at, I thought my stress was increasing from movement. 3) If there is important info player needs to know (remaining oxigen lvl, power lvl etc, stress level) consider outputting this data in one place that is easily accessible. Rn you gotta both go somewhere to read the values and to interact with things and it makes it too much to tackle at once.
The thing is, you can keep typing numbers into the keypad, they just move left out of view. Therefore, I assumed I gotta combine the numbers from everywhere in one long code and input that into the keypad. Also, there are letters on the keypad that completely threw me off track. I guess I was overthinking it, having too many clues around, trying to make sense of all of them at once, haha. Thanks for the tip I'll play it some more.
Okay, i got a ton of different numbers, but I got no clue how to arrange them... The art polish and style is insane, also the quality of everything is top notch, deserves a win in both art and sound. With the puzzle design, it feels like I just have to do a lot of trial and error rather than deduction (maybe im just dumb). If I was to make puzzles, i'd make sure the first one is easy to get so that there's at least some progress to be made, cuz being stuck with 20 numbers and no idea of how to apply them was challenging my patience. I will give it one more try later on, as the game deserves it.
Thanks! Yeah, we knew from the start that with just 3 people this concept would be on the very edge of what's possible in 4 days, so we didn't get enough time to patch everything. but the only other option we had was to settle for something less cool and we don't do that here haha.
Hey thanks, glad you enjoyed it! Yes, we made all of the assets ourselves except for the base character model and a car model. We got a very good artist who has many years of experience, so he did all of those amazing environments. I'll poke him if he feels like sharing his process.
So glad you liked it! I wish we had a few more hours to properly test everything, but we were crunching like crazy before the deadline. If you just avoid this broken box you should still be able to experience all of the content as to every scene, there are multiple entrances that you can take. (Box leads you to the same scene as bike or car objects). We are going to release a patched version once the jam rating is over so all those issues will be fixed.
Hey, as the game designer of this game, I'm crazy glad to hear that you liked the gameplay formula! If you want to chat about my design process feel free to contact me on Discord. My name there is: evgenistan
Yeah it gets a bit glitchy especially when its at minimum size. We'll keep working on the project and fix this and other imperfections. Thx for playing!
Nice art and aesthetics. Gameplay didn't quite land with me though, I'm not really an inventory-organizing guy I guess. Either that or I didn't understand the mechanics correctly. Does putting items into the hero's inventory instead of the chest do anything?
I really like the visuals and style! The gameplay is pleasant but rather conventional for this kind of games. The scaling twist is cool but I feel like it has more potential for strategizing and interesting gameplay choices. For now the game just forces you to change scales and basically switch gameplay type A to gameplay type B. But overall nicely done!
We are planning to expand on the mechanics to make a bigger game out of the concept and release it on Steam. We will post a link to the project's twitter page later today. Thx for playing!
I think you could accidentally collide with an enemy that was just next to the screen border. You don't see them but if you get close enough to the edge you can still collide with an enemy and get reset. Thanks for a good review!
It took me a while to understand the mechanics, but once I did it became fun. I would suggest making player HP green and placing his sprite on the opposite side of the board since for 3 rounds I thought it was just another enemy and didn't get where my own HP was. I like that it has strategy and a block-placing mechanic gives a new layer of puzzle to the gmaeplay
Interesting puzzle mechanic that motivates careful considerations and strategy! The only thing I would wish to be different would be the number of levels as I feel I want MOOOOREE!!! Great Job!
I'm super glad you enjoyed it! I was like "damn what shall our UI be? Whats our game even about? Application windows? Then ill just make a bunch of windows and call it a day"
