sorry about that! i honestly have no idea what could cause the game to still be softlocking there. i'll have to think about if there's any way to make the game more accessible on systems where my code isn't working for whatever reason.
kerfuzzl
33
Posts
60
Followers
1
Following
A member registered 97 days ago · View creator page →
Creator of
Recent community posts
i meant to reply to this comment a while ago. i really appreciate the detailed response! a lot of this is super interesting to me.
i think (for me) the most interesting point you made is that being zoned out is a light trance state, and that, as i understand it, being focused (or "in the zone") is as well. in my experience these kinds of mental states are not only possible to induce through games but pretty commonplace. off the top of my head, i can say i have definitely experienced both of these kinds of states in minecraft, for example.
obviously as someone who has no experience being hypnotized specifically, i have no idea if it's possible to go from a state of being "in the zone" to any other interesting kind of trance state. that definitely seems like the most accessible kind of altered mental state, at least for someone like me... i can easily get "in the zone" in most creative games i think (e.g. i definitely have felt this kind of state when building stuff in mario maker or littlebigplanet).
along those lines, i think, you know, it's easy for me to accept "oh yeah, being zoned out is a trance state... that makes sense!" as i'm reading it now. but when i go into something that is explicitly stated to be hypnosis related, rather than say, a really chill kind of game to zone out to, i still do not know what specifically i am meant to be feeling, and i think that's part of why i come away thinking it didn't really accomplish anything at all. i think getting inexperienced players in one of these more commonplace mental states and then being like "yo, heads up, if you're zoned out right now, fun fact, you're in a trance state... do you want to go deeper?" might be a more effective strategy.
again, of course, i have literally no idea what i'm talking about. but. this definitely made me think. again thank you so much for this detailed reply!
at first i was confused at the fact there were buttons for adding new quests and skills. but after reading the description, i'm totally on board. a gamified todo list app sounds like a really cool idea, and what's more, it does actually function as a todo list app, already! so it's a perfectly cromulent product as far as i'm concerned.
this was fun to play through. i like the vibes of being alone on an entire planet doing a very unique job. i especially liked revisiting the different places multiple times, to find new objects to consume and destroy old hated foes, so to speak.
i find the concept of such gigantic breasts kind of impossible to visualize. this is definitely a double edged sword, both a strength and weakness of text as a medium... you can just say that the fox girl has boobs the size of planets, and like, i can just take that at face value. but it does feel a bit abstract due to how difficult it is to visualize things that large.
one little twist in the storytelling that i appreciated was the way the story communicated what happens to living beings inside these matter-consuming boobies. like, this was kind of my concern throughout the story: aren't these boobs kind of dangerous? when the story mentioned the diplomats that came out naked, i wasn't quite sure what it meant, but then the story nicely ties this up right at the end. i thought that keeping this question open and then answering it at the end was just a nice bit of writing.
fun little game. reminds me a lot of playing spore back in the day.
i think one idea to make the game slightly more grounded would be to have each color of creature correspond to a specific size (although these could be cyclic). that way, you can tell how large you are getting with some consistency, as right now it's kind of hard to feel like you're getting any bigger than the creatures around you.
one fun mechanic for me was watching the creature that ate me later get eaten itself. i think this game could actually make a pretty fun idle game of some sort, watching these creatures run around and eat each other, with different behaviors and what not.
the creatures themselves are definitely very nicely put together. i think the procedural animations
(as i understand them) that you have are pretty cool.
one thing that surprised me going into this is how hard it is to actually aim your tongue at the prey. this definitely gives the game a bit of nice challenge in its current state.
Find the badly drawn furry porn 2 jam comments · Posted in Find the badly drawn furry porn 2 jam comments
i have not been able to find the badly drawn furry porn.
i briefly looked into standard ways to crack 7zip files. i don't think i have a very good setup for that at the moment. and, seems against the spirit of the puzzle anyways. at least, from what i would guess.
i do appreciate that the funnymothmeme says the first letter is "p," and then practically every other image or file you look at has a p-word somewhere. this was quite funny to me. and, of course, this is an ironic meme... so who knows if it is even relevant to the puzzle.
nice!
i think the edging mechanics work pretty well here. the movement of the bar is tuned just right to make it feel like you're about to make this pony cum, and then, well, stop before you do.
i managed to get through all the customers, although the $1000 fee for the last one was a little hefty, especially because i don't think they really pay out nearly as much. i basically just farmed coins off of a single dominant customer for like 15 minutes to try them out. and, i mean, it was fun too! just not super productive in terms of actually earning cash.
i also did not know how to avoid cumming early for the submissive customer until reading that other comment you left.
i think the pixel art is pretty charming for this game, especially all the sex graphics! i'm a big fan of the leg tremors of course.
puzzles i was able to successfully solve: 000, 003, 005, and kind of 006 (i followed instructions.txt no problem but had to check the spoilers to figure out what in the world it meant by "the codes will fall in columns." i thought this meant something was supposed to vertically line up in the file...)
now i'm on 007 and i'm considering looking at the spoilers for this one too but i might just call it here.
if i had sorta thought more about it i may have been able to solve 001 and 002 but i just could not think of anything to try when looking at them.
and, for context, my brain was already kinda fried before i started playing. so maybe if i were more fresh i would have solved more.
i think 004 kinda tricked me. i thought that the "balance the budget" line meant i should try to group up the dollar numbers into two groups that, when group one is subtracted from group two, gives zero. this seemed like the right approach, as it's completely doable to split the numbers up like this. after adding them up, i them summed up the rows in the ID numbers column for both groups, and took their difference, and got a 4 digit code--and 4 digit codes had seemed very common up to that point in the puzzle.
but apparently the actual solution using the CSV file was much more convoluted than i had thought of. i don't think i would have ever thought to try removing the zeroes and then summing the digits in groups of 6... just doesn't seem like the kind of thing that would ever cross my mind.
not sure how useful any of that information is, but hopefully it at least provides some indication to you of what the puzzle's difficulty levels are, for whatever that's worth.
i really enjoyed the kinda jargon-filled writing and all the robot (i think that's what the characters are?) worldbuilding stuff. things like sticking wires in places, and transferring memory back and forth, and what not... it's good silly nerd stuff.
i did find some of the writing kind of difficult to understand (although, again, this may be due to my brain being fried). for example, when i first read chapter 2, i kinda thought nepenthe and aleph were siblings due to the lines about that. i think part of the reason for this is that, like, this is a sarcastic line from both of them, but i think sarcasm does not come through as well when reading a long text (that is formatted partially like a technical report) in notepad. everything feels dry and literal, at least a little bit.
of the puzzles i could solve i definitely enjoyed them a lot. my problem with these kinds of puzzles is always, like, i want to try the other ones, but i can't do that without going through the spoilers. but then of course once i do that there's really no way to come back to the other puzzle and try it again later.
i think having more hints would be at least worthy of consideration. e.g. puzzle 004 might have gone a lot differently for me if i knew i was looking for text. i think one thing to consider would be providing a little command line app that lets you quickly test different passwords for each puzzle, and this app could also provide hints (e.g. after you miss a puzzle like 5 times with a numerical answer it could say "not a number"). i think the ability to see where you're going wrong is what makes traditional puzzle games so much easier to make progress on than these kinds of puzzles where if you're wrong, you have absolutely no idea if you're even on the right track.
although, such a thing would detract from the beauty of a game that is completely cross-platform just by virtue of being nothing but text files and zip files. which i do think is really cool. so maybe just a longer spoilers.txt with more incremental hints would work better.
i loved the "Qt mark" joke.
so, this game mentions something about hypnosis being like dreaming, and if that's really true for those who, like, know how to be hypnotized--that's absolutely fascinating to me. i've always thought that dreams are an unbelievably powerful ability of our brain, and that like, if we could use them as, say, a VR interface, it would be really cool.
and so like, if hypnosis can be used to induce and control a dreamlike state in a person, in a gamey way... like, that's really cool to me.
but, as you might be able to tell, i did not myself experience quite so much beyond the normal suspension of disbelief when playing this game.
i find i have a really difficult time relinquishing my brain or body to anything. i think my main experience whenever i've tried to interact with something hypnotic, is that i kind of get a headache as i overthink whether there's something dangerous about interacting with it, and then not much else happens.
i think i did manage to get into a somewhat relaxed state while playing this, but that may be in part due to the fact that i've been spending all day on some unrelated responsibilities for the past two days straight. but i do think there was something there. the experience felt slightly different from that of playing other games, in a sort of zoned-out way as the game seems to describe. just not so different that i would consider it super dreamlike or super hypnotic really.
like, i'm not quite sure if i'm really supposed to be able to feel the waves and the sun, etc.
but anyways.
everything that i can comprehend in this game is pretty nicely put together. the text is beautifully rendered, the controls are super satisfying, the sounds are great. everything is super polished. definitely seems like a great way to package a hypnosis experience, even if i can't figure out how to get it to work.
not too much to say besides this game looks great and is super fun to play with! diana is a great looking deer and is super fun to pose.
i really love how this game demonstrates that adding more clothes can make a photo sexier. it's so fast to go through each photoshoot and i think the game interface encourages trying out different outfits, meaning that it's easy to try a lot of different things. and as a result, i found some poses and clothes combinations that felt pretty sexy without knowing they would turn out to be that way.
i always love to see SDL2 games or similar. i feel like they often feel snappy and responsive in a way that big game engine games just don't quite match, and this game is no exception. it feels lightweight and fast.
the pixel art is absolutely beautiful. the animations seem crazy detailed to me. like, how are there different death animations based on where the enemies hit you?!?! it's great.
there is one aspect of the game i greatly dislike, which is the mandated "r to restart." imo the restarts should just happen automatically, and should ideally take less than a second. but requiring to press r is especially bad. this is because i have to basically lift up my entire hand from where it is comfortably resting on x and z (or, at least, awkwardly stretch it from its comfortable position), and move it to press the r key, and then of course move it back to x and z. this feels like a gigantic interruption in the otherwise smooth control scheme, and it makes dying feel much more punishing than it actually should be. i don't want to sound like i'm over-exaggerating but i truly do believe this single feature basically broke the flow of the game completely, just because of how much of a physical interruption it is.
i suppose i should have considered rebinding the controls but i think i kinda forgot about that possibility.
anyways. there is a lot of great stuff here despite my gripes with the restarting. the gameplay itself is difficult but rewarding, although i definitely went on the easy mode with the checkpoints. i did grind out the boss fight though, which was fun if a little grueling. i think the spear is a very tricky weapon to learn how to use, especially due to the fact that tapping the attack key as fast as possible is kinda what you want to do to minimize downtime. but, this makes it all the more rewarding when you eventually figure it out.
really good stuff.
one of the most interesting aspects of this, to me, is that, despite not knowing they would eventually be the abuser, i chose the "friend" route--and this happens to line up most closely to my own experience of abuse. sure, it's just one data point, but i have to wonder if the contemplative atmosphere of the game + deeper psychological patterns would lead the average player to choose their own most relevant route. idk. just kinda cool.
the early shot of marco's teeth legitimately kinda frightened me. i thought that was great, as bard was seemingly also frightened in that moment. very effective use of the visuals.
on a general note: as soon as i saw this game had saving i wasn't sure i was going to do it in one sitting. but i did. i think the story really hooked me in, and i think that's great.
i also think the afterlife is such a great lens through which to discuss kink. like yeah, once you're dead... kinda doesn't matter how crazy your kinks were, and so it's a very sober way to discuss them in that sense. the vore in this game felt positively enjoyable and nonsexual, which may not be what you were going for, but i do think the context of the afterlife kind of makes sexuality moot.
along those lines: i've heard the whole "vore is comfortable and warm" thing before, and i kinda get it, but i think this game really does that well even for a (slightly) more general audience. it makes vore, like, the most natural possible conclusion to the game's story, and it feels nice, in like, a narrative sense. and i think that's really cool.
one thought: i think that the fishing minigame would benefit from the net maybe following the momentum of the mouse? like, i really wanted to "throw" the net in, and i think it would make the game more immersive (which would hopefully ground the player in the story even more).
great little game!
i found this game was waaaay easier to play downloaded then in the browser, because there's no way to make the browser version fullscreen. what this means is that my mouse will end up outside the game window, and then i will have to like, carefully move my mouse back in to the game window. by contrast, when downloaded, i can just slam my mouse pointer against the edges of the monitor to quickly get to either side.
the only issue is that when downloaded, at least on my computer, the edges of the screen are cut off. this didn't end up preventing me from winning, but i did drop a few toys that i couldn't see.
i'm really glad the game does amp up the difficulty with multiple items. trying to juggle them is quite fun! i also just generally love the idea of this super long character who can stretch out and bounce sex toys into their ass.
press z to undo! sorry that this isn't in the game itself, but it is on the game page. (although, wait... i guess you can download it from this page... maybe that's easier to miss than i thought!)
i really would have loved to add a reset button, and i'll definitely add one if i end up expanding this game at all, but i simply did not have time during the jam due to some serious technical debt in the code.
lots of people have already mentioned the difficulty, but i just wanted to quantify it a bit more. day 1, there's six ingredients, meaning there's 6 * 5 * 4 = 120 combinations. technically some of them are duplicates, e.g. sometimes two of X plus one of Y doesn't depend on the Y, but this isn't a hard and fast rule as i found out. so, the player is basically required to search through 120 possible combinations to find any item they don't know, which is a lot.
for context: it takes me about 3.5 seconds to try a recipe. so, to try all 120 for just the first day would take me about 7 minutes. (of course, some of these can be tried on level 0 so it's not all bad).
similarly, level 2 has 9 items, so the total number of new combos is (9 * 8 * 7 - 120) = 384 which would take me 19 minutes to test all of.
there are a few tweaks that i think would really help:
1. make it so that you can see the ingredients that you just melded. this way, you can write them down in a notepad document or similar with the outcome. i actually really love games that require note-taking like this, but it is trickier when you have to remember exactly what you just put in the pot.
2. make it so that instead of dragging the ingredients, clicking on one will fill the leftmost empty slot. that way, trying recipes is as easy as "click click click," rather than click-and-drag-and-move-your-mouse-back-to-the-right x 3. (i actually immediately resized the window when playing to help minimize my mouse movement).
3. unfortunately, probably reducing the number of ingredients is your best bet. keep in mind that, for example, going from 6->7 ingredients still adds 90 new recipes. one other option would be to make it so that the "two of anything doesn't depend on the third ingredient" rule always holds, which would narrow down the testing space a bit.
also, one more small issue: the "main menu" button and "quit" button seem quite similar on the end screen, and i accidentally quit after first beating level 1.
anyways. i did eventually get through level 2, with enough note-taking. it seems like customers often ask for day-0 combos which is very very helpful. i don't think i figured out a single level 2 combo that any of the customers actually asked for--i remember i could not figure out large condoms, a fleshlight, and several variants of candles.
as i said i do like note taking games and i was having fun writing down some of the wackier combos that i ended up seeing. i also think that memorizing a mental map of item icons -> item names (so that i can look them up in my notepad) ended up being quite fun, as a lot of the items had funny concepts or names.
and, i like the customer drawings. i think the art really is quite fun here, and i can see why you wanted to add a lot of recipes to show off more silly items.
pretty cool!
i have to say i am not generally a fan of the whole tentacle concept. but this game really sold me on it! i think giving the woman a lot of agency and just dialog in general makes the concept feel a lot more grounded. and, i think making the player the tentacle monster fixes one of the other issues with the kink in general for me: the tentacle monster usually feels completely depersonalized and abstract. but when the player is the monster, well, now we know that we have a personality and an inner world, etc.
one of my favorite moments was when the woman said something like "put me down" after i picked up both her legs. my immediate reaction was to, well, do as she asked... and i think this kind of mechanic really sells that this is a consensual interaction.
so, to elaborate: i think that consent is one of the most interesting ideas in horny video games. usually in video games, the player character imposes their will on the world as they see fit. being asked by the game to relinquish this control is something that horny games do really well. and i think it works especially well here given that the tentacle monster trope is not exactly associated with consent in my mind. but what i like in particular is that it doesn't feel fake. it's easy to say "yeah all the characters in this porn are consenting, as decreed by me, the author," but the interaction with the woman asking me to put her down--this actually sells it to me that it is consensual for real. it is an interaction that can only be told through gameplay, as opposed to dialog, and so it grounds the game, for me.
the tentacle mechanics themselves are fun to play with, and i like the vague puzzle-solving aspects of the game. the way the woman insists she won't open her legs is fun. it feels intrinsically gamey ("let me identify which limbs i need to grab to get to her vagina"), but it's also kinky. it's neat.
so i have a handful of like, small complaints i want to get out of the way first:
1. after seeing the text "welcome back" i was under the impression that the game was going to save my progress. from what i can tell this is not the case, which is not unexpected for a jam game, but it does mean i lost my progress after quitting after my first play session.
2. i watched the intro cutscene a few times as at first i did not even realize the two names were different because they're both orange and a very similar length. i think you should recolor piper's name as gwynn's name matches her hair color which is what made me think all the cutscene text belonged to her.
3. i personally have a kind of hard time dealing with the amount of progress that you lose when you mess up an expedition. this may be because i simply didn't play long enough to get more comfortable with the mechanics. but, i did find it a tiny bit stressful to play through knowing that if i mess something up i'll have to do it all over again.
but now for what i did like.
i think the core gameplay loop of scouting out different things is fun and has a surprising amount of depth. e.g., scouting plants to make scouting the animals more efficient, or scouting rocks to scout more rocks in the future. these little gameplay patterns were nice and i think there's a lot of room to add many more. (i only got through the first expedition so perhaps there were even more variations in the later ones already).
the general way that exploring dark tiles gives you energy which then must be expended on scouting is a cool way to handle this kind of system. it is the kind of thing that slightly stresses me out, due to the limited number of dark tiles, but i do think it is a very effective way to implement exploration gameplay. there's a lot of fun choices about where to go next, e.g. trying to reveal more tiles around something to use the companion versus just trying to scout something with a high energy cost to earn at least some xp before capping the energy bar.
i really like the fact that making room for your companion makes scouting more effective. it's a very natural way to make the companion an important part of the player's experience. it also makes the scouting feel more strategic, as e.g. when i scouted the familiar i made sure to clear out a nearby rock first so there was more room.
the way that the spell slots each correspond to a specific shape of potion is a fun little mechanic.
if i have time i do think i want to come back and try to do more expeditions. i think it is legitimately quite fun to go through the game, but just difficult to find the time to do it in one sitting.
ah nice! i kinda figured that may be the case. but that's super cool that you rated every game! i honestly don't think i have what it takes to rate every game especially in such a short period of two weeks so i am super impressed.
but yeah, knowing your comment comes from such a carefully considered place makes it even cooler lol! thanks so much!!
thanks, that means a lot! one thing i've definitely felt when brainstorming ideas for this jam, and when browsing other horny games for inspiration, is that it is surprisingly difficult to come up with a meaningful way to create gameplay out of sex or vice versa. i was quite happy with this idea once i came up with it as it is one of only a handful of ideas i've had that has this very tight relationship between sex and gameplay.
but basically, the way you described it in your comment is exactly what i was going for, and I am very happy to hear your description of it.
(also, just in case: i believe my page said 20 ratings both before and after your comment... if you happened to forget to rate i wanted to let you know. i know i personally always write comments first and then half the time forget to rate lol)
thanks for playing! you're absolutely right, the undo system is not communicated at all in game and is quite lacking. i really wish i had figured out a good way to implement a complete puzzle reset system, to save long undo sequences, but i just couldn't figure out a nice way in any reasonable amount of time.
i did fix a couple of puzzle designs that i was sure would practically guarantee long boring backtracking sequences, but of course, that's not quite enough to save the game from all the boring backtracking.
i'm honestly super touched to hear that you thought the music and sounds were good! those are areas i'm not as sure of myself in, but knowing that at least one person thinks they're better than my art is, weirdly enough, actually extremely reassuring lol.
this was fantastic. i have to say, i am not great at sokoban, or at designing tricky sokoban puzzles (as you may have guessed), but i had a blast solving these. it took me a while but i was able to figure out every single puzzle, and every single one had some really satisfying twist in there.
the last puzzle especially had this. i had to figure out how to get the blue batteries past the gate. then i had to figure out what to do with the green ones. then finally i had to figure out how to get the climax meter to be exactly 7 before finishing the puzzle. all of these steps seemed impossible at first until i just though of little new clever twists, and that's the exact kind of puzzle that i find most satisfying.
there were a handful of say, boring issues with the puzzles. i thought the 5th one was flat out impossible until i looked really close at my screen and saw that each of the red things had a number on it. it would help a lot to scale up the game to fit your whole monitor. another helpful option would be a way to toggle on/off the hidden lines.
but i do need to talk about the horny. man, is this game horny. and it's fantastic. these moments when you're a single move away from failing the puzzle due to climax, and you just push a block out of the way in time... like, that's arousing in a way i didn't know that game mechanics could be.
the sound design and character design really contribute a lot there. hearing the robot whirr up and then either cum if i fuck up, or immediately fall back into a soothing silence if i do it right... (although with the added twist of like, knowing i'm doing orgasm denial at that moment in time...) it's just great. i love the way that the cumming is itself tied to advancing time in the puzzle. to me, this feels like a very sokoban way to do cumming, which is of course wonderful.
i will say the prime horny level was probably level 6. it had the most of those clutch (not) cumming moments. level 7 was too hard and without enough edging to be as horny. ;)
but yeah. just fantastic stuff.
i absolutely adore the art here. it is cute, with great character designs, but also manages to look great in all the sexual and nude drawings.
i also have to say, the interactivity of the art here is really something special. it makes it feel so much more immersive even though each character "only" gets one more frame per drawing. but what's more, the interactivity of having to click on the characters is good and is put to really good use.
i want to draw specific attention to the various drawings of things moving around in the drone's butt... because you've cleverly chosen to depict something cyclic (a string of cherries being pulled out), the two frames feel "true to life" despite being only two (because there's a natural cycle of motion).
the only problem is i completely forgot about this interactivity at first despite reading the instructions about it. i'm not sure how to draw the player's attention to it better, as it really is something you don't want them to miss out on, as it is a great mechanic.
thanks for the comment! do note that the orbs turning white is actually not itself enough--they have to turn even brighter than white.
that said, to me it now does seem that there is likely a bug of some sort. the only thing i can think of is maybe some systems are capping the color value at pure white, so it can't reach the needed threshold. if it's a deeper bug than that, though, i honestly have no idea how to figure it out.
for now, i've pushed a patch that will hopefully make these sections doable by reducing the needed color threshold over time. it does take a little while so, if this fix does work for your system, it still might take ~20 seconds to get through these sections.
i'm also considering implementing another success condition for these sections that will help them work correctly, but this simpler change is all i have time for at the moment.
thanks for playing! your point about keyboard and mouse controls is something i had not considered. the main issue imo is that the mouse controls more or less mandate capturing the mouse (which is a little annoying), and so i added the keyboard option as an explicit toggle so the mouse could be uncaptured.
but, this is less important now that the web version isn't even available, as mouse capture is much less annoying on desktop.
and thanks for your final comment! i consider this game to be perhaps the most artistically honest thing i have ever created. i love the freedom that this jam gives to just... be sincere. and i'm extremely glad it comes through in the game!
i have unfortunately had a lot of trouble with godot's IK constraints (which are what the character animation is based on). to summarize my pain: exporting the game, it had issues; i restarted godot and exported the game again, and it was fixed. this kind of jank... where something in the editor effects the export process, soemhow, is very frustrating to me, as i seem to have no control over it.
I do not have a linux computer, but i may try to re-export the linux version and test it in VM. when i run the current version in VM i do not see this exact issue (as the game is too laggy in VM for it to even flicker like that) but i do see some kind of IK related issue. so perhaps i will be able to at least half-verify whether a re-export works before uploading it. i'm also considering adding an option to just hide the sex animation as it's really not super important to the gameplay.
anyways, thanks for the bug report and for playing my game!
for your second point: i think this is likely not a bug, from looking at the gif. i am also not able to get through this puzzle when i move back and forth across three tiles. it should work if you only use two though!
i'm glad you liked the in game dialog! i was very worried it would interrupt the puzzle solving too much. but i will let you in on a little secret: the dialog messages have little correlation to your gameplay. most of them are based on how many times you've pushed a box around. i did figure, though, that they may be interpreted in a lot of ways as what conditions trigger them are not apparent to the player, and it's cool to see that that's true.
designing the stages was for me mostly a two-ish step process. one: draw them out on paper. this is nice as it's easy to draw, say, the intended path and think about how that will work, or to add and remove walls, etc, all very quickly. all of my puzzles were based on a core idea, e.g. "i want you to push this box over there, or through this part of the puzzle," etc. almost all of my puzzles did not actually work correctly once i built them in editor, as it's easy to overlook stuff on paper. so once i had them built in editor, i would de-cheese them, trying to at least stick somewhat close to my "core idea." sometimes i just kinda had to scrap the idea as it didn't seem doable. the other trick is to try to place walls that force a solution, but that don't make that solution completely readily obvious. this is mostly trial-and-error for me: place some walls, boot up the puzzle, and if i can easily cheese the solution, try a different set of walls.
thanks!! i'm glad to hear that at least some people like the dialog (and the characters!) as honestly i have no idea what i'm doing lol. never really written dialog or designed much in the way of characters before. also glad to hear the puzzles were occasionally difficult. i found so much cheese during development that i was convinced everyone would one-shot the puzzles... guess i was wrong!
thanks for the bug report. if you have a screenshot i'd love to see it, as i honestly have no idea what that might look like or what could possibly cause it. i'll try to look into it when i can.
edit: after running this game in a linux VM to investigate another bug i saw something that looked like misalignment and it appeared to perhaps be lag related. i will try to investigate further when i get the chance.
hey, thanks for the comment.
it should only take 9 iterations to get through the gate, unless there's a glitch. the optimal strategy is to go back and forth between exactly two tiles, i'm not sure if it's possible if you use any more than that.
i didn't realize this until playtesting just now, but it is a little difficult depending on the way you're doing the inputs. however, with the keyboard controls it is, in my opinion, not too difficult, as you can mostly rock your finger back and forth between W and S. note that you do not have to time it correctly--as long as you're holding the key down it will work. it is admittedly harder with mouse controls which is my bad. i got very used to the necessary action on the mouse while working on the game. you can still do a somewhat similar technique of "buffering" the input but it is probably not as easy as with the keyboard.
i'm not sure what you're referring to by your comment "already would be a terrible idea." if you want to clarify feel free.