itch.io

Issues I noticed:
- Music Still cuts out after playing once. I highly recomend looping this.

- Music and SFX conspiciously absent from the factory.

- New enemy types introduced to quickly. In the jam version, you'd have to deal with a few waves of dust bunnies before other enemies were introduced, and they'd come one new type at a time. Maybe that was too slow, but in the new version, mutliple new enemy types are introduced before the first wave has been dealt with.

- Size variance introduced too slowly. It feels slower and less varied than the jam version. This isn't as big a deal, but just feels a bit slow.

- I lucked out in the jam version and got the rotating vacuum right away. Playing without it here I found there was a significant problem in that the best way to deal with enemies was to always move left, but that meant not cycling back and getting the drops that I missed. I think either you need to increase the default pick up radius (so your starting vacuum always picks up all items that get dropped by using the default vacuum) or make sure that rotation always gets offered in the first set of upgrades.

- There were serious frame rate issues within a few mintues of play. This didn't exist in the jam version, but made the game unplayable before enough dust was collected to unlock permenant upgrades.

Sorry for more negative than positive here - I really like the game and want to see it succeed.

Great idea, fun game.

The biggest problem for me was that speed and number of dolls was the same for each level, but the number of dolls with defects kept increasing. Dealing with a defect was a single click, whereas dealing with a normal doll was many - with the net result that the game got easier with each level.

Great idea, well executed - but I found even the easiest level slightly to fast. Never underestimate how much your players will suck at first, and so give a slow ramp up in difficulty. Most players are willing to wait a little for things to get hard for them, but some players (myself included) don't have the patience to 'get good' if it starts hard.

I normally don't care for visual novels, and was about ready to put this asside. And then it drew me in, the mix of writing and audio and curiosity - and I played it all through.

I also got stuck on the Friendly + Social + Loud + Grumpy level. What I'd recomend is that you record what the player should have learned when placing (making personality explict, like saying Social is +100 for each neighbour, but only add that infomation after the player has tried placing it somewhere, so you still get the experimentation)

I clicked around the screen trying to 'advance the slide', clicked on the placeable blocks but didnt' see how to place them, and eventually went back to the previous screen. I don't know why I didn't try pressing the 'Press This Button' button... but on onscreen instruction to finish the level for the next tutorial probably would have encouraged me. If you really want to go all in, you could even hide the placement blocks for the first tutorial level, so that there's not the feeling that the player might need to engage with something they don't yet understand.
All that being said - I don't think I said this before, but once I figured out the game, I had fun and it was hard to put down.

So... in order to get to the second page of the tutorial, the player needs to know how to place blocks, which is explained in the second page of the tutorial?

When I go to the tutorial, I only have an explanation of the controls at the top left of the screen - nothing about how to place blocks, and no clear way to advance to another page of tutorial (if that's where the information is).

You didn't list the controls anywhere that I could find, so it took me a while to figure out how to place blocks, and I never figured out how to remove a single block (if it's even possible). One recomendation would be to not reset the music when you reset the level, but just keep the music going in the background - the experience will feel less interupted that way.

I love that you got z ordering in so that things went in the right places (though there's a few places where it worked less well, like placing something behind the bed or under the desk), and I know it would have been twice the pixel art, but sometimes I wanted to rotate something to face the other way, like having the TV face away from the camera.

Can you elaborate as to why? As in, is there potential, but that potential is being hindered by one or more issues, and if so what? Or do you see no redeeming features?

Great presentation, good idea, let down by poor game balance. I never felt like I had enough time to dodge the whirlpools with the speed I could move up and down, so it ended up feeling more like luck than skill.

I feel like this would have benifited greatly from having the help for the currently placing object be onscreen while it's being placed, or even just a what placing in the current square would do to ones score. It would make learning the game much easier.

I feel like this would have benifited greatly from having the help for the currently placing object be onscreen while it's being placed, or even just a what placing in the current square would do to ones score. It would make learning the game much easier.

I'll have a think about how to make this clearer in the game, but for now, for your understanding, it sends two blocks if they are both the same. Otherwise it only sends one.

Overall, very good. However, I found the speed and momentum of the character hard to manage - the puzzles were fun, but most of the time I felt like I was playing super meat boy with how often I died because of my inabiilty to execute.

Good vampire surviovor-like. Interesting and varied enemies (more so than in any other vampire surviors like I've seen). Nice power ups. Only real complaints is the music cuts out and there are no sfx - and that after around 30 minutes of continuous play, the upgrade speed gets way too low - not sure what balance is missing.

Also, suggestions would be that rather than having the dust meter be a percentage, give me discrete numbers so I know what my goal is in exact terms, and that larger and harder enemeis could drop more 'dust' pieces so that the player feels better for killing them.

Oh, and I wish I could damage the snails while they were zooming.

Great idea. Great game. My only anoyance was that once I got the bow, I seldom had enough room in my grid to turn the music back on without rearranging things. If hope you do more with this, including things like temporarily taking away a keyboard control, or making it neccssary to bind two actions to one key to get through a situation.

Good puzzles - I don't think I've ever seen this sort of variation on 'programming' puzzles before. Such a small addition making for such a wide variety of new possible puzzles.

The music and sfx really make this game. It's also just the right difficulty level.

Good game, had trouble putting it down - though I introducing 'switches' as a mechanic felt like it was breaking the story, for what it's worth.

Interesting idea, let down by difficult to use controls (very hard to jump left while switching to background) and too many enemies coming from nowhere.

Another thought is to take a look at the game 'Magnetic: Cage Closed' as a comparison, as it has a very similar core mechanic, to see what you want to do differently (or the same).

I suggest you edit your game description to explain about the hot fix.

Great idea, just a little too hard - when a car comes quickly from the top or bottom there isn't enough time to activate turn signal and get out of the lane. Not having any space anywhere to go and getting boxed in can also be an issue. I think these things are fine, for a later level, but starting the player out with it already hard doesn't invite me to replay many times.

Definitely too hard for me. Had trouble with the first level, gave up on the second.

Wonderful wonderful idea, but I found some of the color distinctions to be too subtle for my eyes. When it's just dots on a bean, white and popcorn are too close, as are pink and peach. It kinda fits the scenario in a funny way, but I'd rather not be frustrated with my inability to distinguish colors.

I was unable to figure out the rules for when I was allowed to place a block and when I wasn't, so it was an excerise in frustration. I knew what I needed to do, but kept losing the ablity to place a block for no reason I could understand. Single touch from a monster throwing me back to the start menu didn't help either.

Strongly reminded me of VVVVVV but I liked the idea of adding puzzles to that style of game. I didn't have a good understanding of when I could go through a door and when I could not - from the first room with a choice of three doors, only two of them worked. Also, after going through a door I could not go back through it, meaning when I got stuck in the corridor with spikes at the top and bottom (my reflexes aren't nearly good enough to deal with that), I had to quit in order to backtrack.

As for the puzzles, I found there was a huge jump in difficulty with the third puzzle, and being unable to rotate or change the gravity on the mirror blocks, I didn't see a good way to make it work, so eventually gave up.

Great atmosphere, but I think I soft locked myself on about the third level - when you die, you come back with 0 health and enemies stay in the same position, meaning that once they were blocking my route I couldn't get them to unblock my route.

I couldn't figure out how to make progress in any of the levels I tried - I could posses something, go off and explore with it, but then when I stopped possesion I was back where I started, still unable to do anything. And no way to restart the level either, without dying (or, if stuck in a place I couldn't die, quiting and reloading the game)

I was unable to figure out what to do, other than scanning with the radar.

I think it needs some more mechanics which allow for 'perfect' plays, without wasting any blocks (but I have no ideas what those mechanics would be), and then a mechanic that encourages the player to pursue that style of play (like a score). And then probably a tutorial as well. I'd prefer an 'invisible' tutorial, but I'm not sure how I'd go about that.

As for the music and sfx:
- the sfx is from: https://kenney.nl/
- the music is from: https://patriciataxxon.bandcamp.com/album/necrosphere64

Wonderful game.

I found a progression bug - I bought the rocket boot upgrade before the fuel tank upgrade, and I'm now being told to buy the rocket boot upgrade even though I've already got it, and I can no longer progress through the quest.

If you control-click to see the shortcut menu, and choose 'open', you should be able to play even though we've not been verified.

Fixed

Would you rather be credited as Ellr or as Nathan Gibson?

How would you like to be credited? 'Florassence', 'Shruti' or 'Debsruti Majumder'? 

How would you like to be credited?

Have you thought about making the infill of new tiles come from a different direction?

With infill happening at the top and blocks falling down, towers end up being 'thicker' at the bottom than at the top. This makes towers that shoot vertically or diagonally 'feel' more powerful than towers that shoot forwards (and I think the top scores would support this - everyone uses wood, and often dark towers and water).

If infill came from the 'front' and everything 'fell' towards the back, then towers wouldn't be rearranged vertically except by direct player action, and choosing which row to place towers on would become more predictable and strategic. I suspect it would make horizontally shooting towers more balanced against vertically shooting towers as well.

I suggest infill from the front rather than the back, as you generally want your most powerful towers in the back, and giving the player what they want is often a good idea. That said, if the enemies removed more than just walls, pushing towers forwards and into the line of fire does become interesting... but destroying towers creates a significant positive feedback loop where if a player starts doing badly they will have trouble recovering.