Definitely one my favorite games I’ve played so far. I felt like you did a great job in all five rating categories. I could see you taking the concept so many different places.
It’s funny because when I was making that beginning computer sequence I had it in the back of my mind that I needed the “on ramping” of the player into the game better.
Yeah, I agree and the puzzles ended up being more proof of concept not yet fully fleshed out. My initial idea was to have more component types and maybe forcing the player to have to switch between looking at the board and the schematic which would be more complicated to decipher with the extra part types.
Some others were damaged boards with pinholes or rows disabled. I like your various sizes and shapes idea.
Great job nailing the win98/xp aesthetic. The CRT flicker is a nice touch.
A few thoughts I had:
Resolution/Screen Real-Estate. It feels very constrained.
Maybe I wasn’t doing it right, but I would hit the node button to submit my pattern and I’d have to wait for the audio track to end before the check is run? It’s not clear to me if my solution is wrong or I’m simply playing the game wrong. I think more instant feedback when the player hits submit would help.
If you want to use time to challenge the player, I think having a couple untimed rounds to let them familiarize themselves with the game would be helpful.
Thanks for playing! Also yeah, I think I see what happened.
The first capacitor and last LED are placed horizontally within the same connected half-row of the breadboard. Since they do not cross the center trench or connect two different rows/nodes, both leads are electrically on the same node.
On a real breadboard, that bypasses the component: there is no voltage across it, so the capacitor/LED is not actually part of the circuit path.
I had plans for a little tutorial to explain this, but ran out of time.
An interesting narrative woven throughout both in dialogs and the environment.
Feels like I’m getting inconsistent results when clicking on items in separate playthroughs. For example, in my first playthrough, I clicked on the book case and then I was looking at the bookcase. In every playthrough since I haven’t been able to look at.
Yeah, I had it on my todo list to come back to that specific interaction because I felt it wasn’t communicated well enough, but didn’t have time to get back to it.
It was confusing, but that was because I only read the first page of the tutorial. Didn’t see the continuation arrow on the right. Anyways, I wasn’t folding at all and started getting angel cards. Seemed like I won everytime with them, so I bought angel chance fortune and chip stealing joker. Bought a mystery joker once, but it doesn’t reveal what it does in my hand, so I had no idea what it was doing.
Right now, I think the game needs a lot of work to improve visual communication. Pretty much +1 everything said in futurecreep’s post.
No problem and thanks for taking my to short critique well. Play with controller does feel smoother.
I should’ve explained that because of the nature of the game, when playing with controller, we have 2 demands being placed on the right thumb – aiming and shooting. If we want the player to be responsible for both, I think it would be preferable if shooting was done with the right trigger so our right thumb is free to aim.
That said, my best runs are ones where I never let my finger off the trigger. It might be worth considering auto-shooting like Vampire Survivor type games.
