itch.io

Hey there, sorry I've been traveling the past few days and it seems like my server crashed. I have restarted it now if you want to give it another try.

Hey there, sorry I've been traveling the past few days and it seems like my server crashed. I have restarted it now if you want to give it another try.

Yes I think the game is really good, sorry if my feedback seemed mostly negative. I think the game general construction of the concept was good, the art was good, and I liked that it was easy enough to figure out the problem instead of it being impossible (like if everyone had a motive, means, and alibi, that would make it really hard to figure out), I really liked that. I was just saying ideas that I think could improve the overall effect of the game from my perspective. I think being able to wander around the apartments would be cool in like a top down fashion, but obviously I could see someone else saying that's just padding out the game, so take it with a grain of salt and all that. Again great job.

Yeah I also considered just adding a server browser but it still would require multiple people to be on the game at the same time without prior set up which is unlikely in a jam setting. I guess if I did set up a server browser I could at least keep a game open to see if anyone joins it and just play with whoever does join. Another option is as someone else pointed out, to add bots, but the game is definitely more "game" when playing with other players imo, in this case.

I love the concept of it, at least the micro MMO aspect, but those types of wait games I definitely bounce off of myself. I totally agree a game jam is a hard time to do that for various reasons. I do think that having a faster paced version of it for the jam might have helped, I know that kind of kills the purpose of the game but game jams have narrow windows to hook people.

I've been toying with the idea of setting up a tiny persistent little micro MMO for a game jam but you know more traditional gameplay of just wandering around killing monsters and I've seen some others who have done some cool ones in game jams, but it's exactly as you described, almost nobody else ever sees anyone else in the world. I will still probably do it at some point, but it's a weird fit for sure.

I think being able to skip the text appearing is very necessary. I also didn't really understand that we were supposed to be picking the right clue for each one. I guess I just expected to gather information from everyone and then pick the right clue for the right person. I also think being able to switch which clue you are looking at without going back to the previous menu would be nice.

Good job on this, art looks good. Theme was fairly solid.

The art and concept is insane in a good way. I could not successfully identify "bad parts". I was only checking for banned parts and bombs. I also couldn't identify what bombs looked like in the x-ray until I saw a few. I also noticed the banned parts list previewer would get stuck showing a dot next to multiple things sometimes depending on the order in which you click stuff. Overall I'm blown away by how good this one is, stylistically and all that but I felt like it was hard to actually identify issues besides things outright banned.

This game was really cute. I think the control scheme could use a little work and the clues themselves it would be nice to be able to see what is interactable a little more easily. Additionally when re-entering places the dialogue should probably not play again unless there's something new. Navigating around via clicking on the windows didn't feel that good and if you were to make it real time walking around you could make it so that time progressed when you changed rooms instead of just using up increments or in real time you know what I mean. Overall very cute game, good job on this.

This one is really good. The mechanic is very interesting and if you had more time I think you could make a nicely progressing escalation of your mechanic. Like for example getting more clones as you go. I feel like you've proven a very interesting idea with this one.

The game looks great with the hand drawn art style and the UI matches with it well.

I had a hard time figuring out who was bad with the information provided and that might be on me. I think it would be nice to have some kind of note review to see what you've been told and by who, but it seemed mostly like information gathering was handled separately from actually buying/selling. I'm not sure what the point of having to return to restock candy was other than to just pad it out a little to make the timer matter more. From a story standpoint I don't quite get the grandma getting in trouble for selling candy but it does seem like this was originally about selling drugs which would make way more sense. I also noticed I couldn't talk to the kid again to get information once again and as such it felt like information went in one ear and out the other. I tried to play a couple times but I couldn't tell, unless it was just the hint that says rumor, because I think I saw that the rumor was only there for people who were cops actually, I guess I'll try one more time with that as my assumption. Okay so that assumption was wrong but I did do better that time. I see now each person basically says something in relation to something the kid says, so yeah it's hard to remember all the things he says and compare that to what each person is saying.

It feels like each person should be saying 1 or 2 things about other people (the gossip the kid says) and then something about themselves. Then instead of having only a sell and don't sell option we should also have an end conversation button besides the X at the top, basically a 3rd button at the bottom right. Then we should be allowed to reengage in conversation with people to regather intel for comparison OR have some in game notebook that kinda summarizes what was said by who about the person you are talking to. One other thing I noticed in some places the textures are a little transparent, like on the lockers, you can kind of see your character through the top of them as you walk behind. One more thing is it feels like there's a little delay when choosing an option and the game continuing, it seems like it plays a sound before it closes the menu, this results in a slightly less snappy feeling gameplay. On a positive note I like that you can skip the slow appearing text.

Anyway I like the art and concept I just wish it was a little more friendly for the player. Good job on this.

While I definitely recognize the massive undertaking a game of this scale is to execute on, I would echo the sentiment that a lot of people felt and that was the real time waiting made me bounce off of this super hard. I basically opened it up, clicked upgrade on all the things I could and then just sat there wondering what I should do next, after a little bit of poking around I kinda felt like maybe there wasn't anything I could do but wait.

I think this type of game would work well as one of those desktop games that sits right above the task bar or whatever, like desktop fishing etc.

Good job on the general polish and feel but for me it didn't feel like there was much game, it reminded me a lot of old Facebook games where you spend energy and then wait (or pay) for your missions to complete.

Cool game, I really enjoyed the first few. I thought it was weird because I only ran through asteroids at one point and they were all gone on my way back. I got a few of the references, that was cool too. I felt like the game immediately escalated to unbeatable around the third job when tons of enemies would spawn and catch up to me and no matter what I did I couldn't outrun them. There was no cover to hide, I tired a few times but it just kept playing out exactly the same. I liked the way the game looked and sounded and handled.

Overall very cool game, but the execution fell off insanely hard. It might have been better to start off with a couple of enemies or gave me ways to deal with them, unless I misunderstood something.

Thanks, our last one didn't go so hot because it required download + opening ports so it was a much harder experience, so we came prepared this time. We also make almost exclusively multiplayer games. As for old AC multiplayer, definitely an inspiration though we didn't have much playtime, the concept stuck with us.

Okay, we have it so the camera pulls toward the player so that objects don't block the view of the player, it should only move when you move your mouse so I'm not sure why that could be, we're using pretty standard camera approach. We just wanted to make sure you could always see the player but I understand that could be kind of jarring. If you walk through the clothing racks for example the camera gets pulled to the player and that probably shouldn't happen.

Thanks for playing, that's a great idea. Our team focuses almost entirely on multiplayer experiences as such our single player aspects tend to lack. I will take this into account for future projects and think about how I can add in bots to allow for single player experiences to partially mirror what multiplayer is like.

Thanks for playing, could I ask what the issues with controls were? Camera based or character movement?

We have some updates that we will post after the jam. Since they were not considered bug fixes we didn't do the initial 48 hour period for bug fixes and additional platform support:
1. Free Camera - Hold Right Click/Left Trigger allows you to move your camera around but the character keeps moving in relation to the last camera position (Sprint is now Shift/Left Bumper)

2. Improvements to activity monitoring - Instead of instantly giving away your position to targets and hunters while doing high profile activities there is a meter visible to you and it fills up as you continue to perform actions and lowers if you don't perform high profile activity

3. Sensitivity slider in round and a pause menu you can get to by hitting TAB in game to modify your sensitivity on the fly

4. Added some extra information to the threat compass so you can more easily identify threat from target

I'm not too much into clicker games myself but it's a somewhat interesting take on it and I enjoyed it. I only wished the endless mode made it so upgrades were unlocked to get to a truly ridiculous scale but I guess I could see that getting hard on hardware. It was really fun. Although I feel like the trust no one part was simply bolted on I thought it was executed very well with the intel stuff. I also thought the progression was very smooth in this game. Overall very good. Give my game a shot if you get the chance.

Edit: One other thing I thought of, it would be nice to have it just automatically click instead of having to hold click each round.

There shouldn't be any zooming in and out as the input for that was not connected, if anything it's probably that the camera would have had an obstructed view of the player so you probably had your camera too low, if you look down onto the characters it probably works better. But yeah if you walk near a shelves or under the clothing racks the camera gets pulled into the character really easy in the more cluttered spaces of the level. Something to polish it up for us could have been making it so that camera deocclusion stuff doesn't apply to most shelves or it pulled the camera up instead of toward the player.

Yeah I've only played it with a group of 4 so far but it was pretty fun, I think it gets more fun with even more people.

Thanks for the feedback and thanks for trying the game out.

Incredible game. There's so much good stuff here, with all the systems for picking stuff up and placing things. This was really well thought out and at first I was like there's too much stuff to go through but I kept combing through as I started making connections it was really cool. The props are really nice, good font choices, really great usage of different styles of paper and the materials look so good. I liked the random phone calls and the ability to skip text typing out during conversations. There's so much good and I think everyone will talk all about them so I won't hammer on them too much. Instead I'll give you an idea of what could be good improvements:

When activating the desk all the notes/pictures were upside down, it would be nice to either rotate things in the orientation you are standing when you set it down, or have them orient automatically to the side the desk is activatable from. I really liked the ability to pin stuff to the board, it would have been nice to have the ability to write my own notes within the game and stick them up there. There are some typos here and there, nothing too crazy I think I maybe counted 3, but at the same time those typos could be from the characters. I think the hitbox for the phone could be better, like a box around it so you don't have to be so perfectly aimed at the receiver. I think it would have been cool to add in the actual usage of the rotary phone instead of just pressing buttons but I could see why you might leave that bit of polish out. I think the picking up and putting stuff down was pretty satisfying but when placing stuff it was really easy to get them floating in funny ways, not a huge issue at all but just kind of funny. Being able to move the mouse around while inspect to either turn pages over or pan around the pages would have been cool, and you could have hidden interesting details on the backs of stuff that way, or even had it as a note surface where you could type your own notes on them. The chairs and boxes kinda got in the way when walking around the office but I supposed that's a little realistic, but maybe being able to move through them would have been fine for this. The last thing was when carrying objects around they were a little jittery while moving, not game breaking at all but maybe could be solved through a different style of parenting or using a different update loop (physics process vs process), I dunno.

Great work overall on this, it feels really complete and polished.

I've been getting rate limited by itch so sorry for the late reply. Yeah that's awesome. I actually barely played AC: Brotherhood, I don't think I ever played the pvp multiplayer but I loved a lot of the earlier AC games and I particularly like coop games, so AC Unity was really awesome for me... I was obviously inspired by AC Brotherhood's PVP, but I didn't even look up gameplay of it recently, I just based all my stuff off of what I remembered from it haha. I also based it on the idea of assassin that you play in real life, we were talking about doing cameras/cell phones like you do in real life for simplicity with a group chat you text to get your next target and to show your "kill" but it felt like it sold the theme more if you had to be approached by your target. 

I obviously had to give your game a go and it's funny because I really did think about making it 2D and it would have been really similar. I really adore your art and yours is way closer to the source it seems even though it's 2D and mine's 3D. We don't really have a dedicated pixel/2D artist on our team so that's why we went 3d anyway.

I noticed you had some I don't know what to call it, but lines that stick through between sprites. I'm on Unity so I only really know how to solve those for Unity, I have only barely delved into Godot.

Good job overall on this jam, I like that you get to respawn and keep playing. I think it's funny cause both of our games have somewhat the same problem, you start a chain reaction of assassinations, did that happen a lot AC Brotherhood? I was also thinking about adding power ups like I think AC had, like smoke bomb and quick costume change, but it was a lot to fit into this jam.

I played your game and here's my comments, I tried commenting on the game itself but itch won't let me because it says I'm posting too much so I'm trying here:

This was a really interesting read, I appreciated the artwork accompanying things. I also liked that it was easy to tell what was going on with all the clues and conversations you could gather. I found a couple of typos, don't know if you want to fix them but they are in these two sentences:

"Elaborate potions for important matters? The picture of some powerful or dangerous concoctions flashses in your mind. Judging from the state of the bottles that were all knocked over, what if there was an important matter that the grand wizard had to immediately attend to?"

"You approach Magnus, the mayor of Crann. He must be desperate to travel this far to help with the investigation, you think to youself. Wizard Alasdair must help him and his townspeople a lot judging from the crowd waiting for the grand wizard in front of the tower."

Good job on writing this, it was an interesting world and made me want to travel there.

And of course here's mine if you got time to try it.

https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-16/rate/4951824 

Do note that it does require multiplayer, at least one other player should give you a good idea but 3 or more for best experience.

So does that mean accepting the quest too early could also be a problem? Or is it that I did indeed need to accept the quest and then pick the right dialogue options?

Hey I played, rated, and commented on your game. If you get a chance, check mine out too:

https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-16/rate/4951824 

Do note that it does require multiplayer, at least one other player should give you a good idea but 3 or more for best experience.

That was pretty hilarious. Definitely mostly just feels like a toss up if you get got or not, since you can't trust anyone. I didn't see any tells or anything but overall it was kind of funny when I would start and immediately die. I wouldn't bet on this game.

I checked out your game and left a comment and rating. I like many others seemed drawn to it even though VN is not the typical style of game I enjoy.

Check mine out if you get the chance:

https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-16/rate/4951824 

Do note that it does require multiplayer, at least one other player should give you a good idea but 3 or more for best experience.

The art was fantastic. I don't think I'm understanding the gameplay because I replayed it and tried every possible conversation option and also assigning the task to every person with each of the 2 options and nothing ever changed. Unless I needed to pick a specific person with a specific choice and specific conversation options. The art and story hooked me in but it didn't really feel like the theme to me, but it really had me going. I just felt like I didn't accomplish anything haha.

I checked out your maze game and left a comment and rated it. Check out mine if you have the time:

https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-16/rate/4951824 

Do note that it does require multiplayer, at least one other player should give you a good idea but 3 or more for best experience

This maze game was really interesting, like it had such a specific character movement system. The visuals were really unique and when I ran out of trust the game got super intense haha. I do not feel like the amount of trust I had was enough to make it through the maze.

I tried to play your game, I managed to make it all the way to the end. I left a comment and rating. Check out my game if you get a chance:

https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-16/rate/4951824 

Do note that it does require multiplayer, at least one other player should give you a good idea but 3 or more for best experience.

An absolute fever dream tbh. No joke there is something artistic to this, I did manage to make it to the end and kill (catch) the boss. 

Hey there I tried out your game and left a comment and rated it. Could you check out mine if you have the time:

https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-16/rate/4951824 

Do note that it does require multiplayer, at least one other player should give you a good idea but 3 or more for best experience.

Interesting, it reminds me of the impossible quiz or a quiz like I Wanna Be The Guy. I think I encountered one bug which was I accidentally double clicked one of the options and it worked the first time which started the transition to the next screen and then it took a heart from me. Anyway good job.

Hey I tried out your game and rated and commented. Feel free to give mine a shot:

https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-16/rate/4951824 

Do note that it does require multiplayer, at least one other player should give you a good idea but 3 or more for best experience.

I feel like there should have been like arrow controls to go between areas or something. The game looked really interesting and it had a lot of really interesting shader effects. The story seemed like the start of something interesting but I feel like I lost the plot a little bit. I do feel like if the game was more than just a slideshow with text it would benefit it greatly, such as just pressing arrow keys to move between screens, or point and click adventure. Good job making something though.

Hey I checked out your blackjack game. I left a comment and rated. If you have the time and someone to play with check out my game:

https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-16/rate/4951824 

Do note that it does require multiplayer, at least one other player should give you a good idea but 3 or more for best experience.

Yeah I do think a little bit of tweaking and you might have it. If there were more parts of the face and they had like specific tells that could be really fun, great job again!

I played, rated, and commented on your game, really funny. If you have time and a team check out my game

https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-16/rate/4951824 

Do note that it does require multiplayer, at least one other player should give you a good idea but 3 or more for best experience.

This is a really solid game all around. The animations are funny and the sounds are great. The little intro song cracked me up and launching monkeys into the zoolag is pretty funny. It's like a super speed tomagatchi, very fun.

Thanks for playing. My one major regret is not changing out the character models for something we made instead, but I'm really happy with what we had and when we played it with friends thought it was fun as well so I'm glad we're not the only ones. We already have a post jam update for it as well to improve some things like being able to free look with your camera to keep the player walking in a straight line and some other UI improvements.