itch.io

Note about the jam version: I made several mistakes in the last scenario (Power plant):

• The manager and Samuel speak about Mark, but call him Victor

• the body description should say the body lies on the shaft of generator 3

I checked rest of the texts and currently believe there are no more errors of this kind.

It’s still possible to complete the scenario successfully.

we ran into a problem with the ballista being unsuitable for close combat, so we instructed the zombies to jump onto the ballista slowly in an arcing trajectory

That's awesome :-D

A game about shooting zombies with a ballista. Why not.

The game is simple, but feels complete. There's upgrade system, simple story, several types of enemies, sound and music. The UI is clear, the pictures nice.

I really liked the the small touches, like the zombies jumping at you giving you a last-minute chance to hit them, or the fact that in the tutorial level, I managed to hit a bird (completely by chance) and it actually was hit and fell down. I think I even made a dent in the ground :)

I also found the scenery in the actual levels weirdly soothing.

I like a lot of things in this game. The graphics is nice, the UI clean, it's easy to know what to do and the sound is OK (which is non-trivial achievement, given the limitations) and the theme is very strong in it.

Sadly, the game just isn't fun for me. The  game play is just too simple (I mean, not that I can last too long at higher speeds, but that's not engaging me in an enjoyable way) and I kinda hate a mindless grind in video games. I am convinced you achieved what you wanted: it's just I hate it.

At least, it's a stark reminder why not to get a job at manual assembly line.

I gave the game only a 15 minutes or so, but I liked every one of them. 

The sound is good, it's clear what's happening and the music isn't grating (unlike many of the other games I tried, sadly).

The graphics looks really nice. I had some issues recognizing what's dangerous and what's just a scenery, but some issues like this are probably unavoidable in this low resolution. You most definitely go a lot of bang out of it: the game is really nice to look at, and the screen is busy but not cluttered.

Frankly, I am struggling to find anything negative here :)

Hi, that's some high praise, thanks!

I was afraid the difficulty would be out of whack: we finished writing the cases late in the night just before the deadline, so we had no time for human testing.

I would like to return to the game after the jam ends; I will definitely need some distance to see problems. I actually thought it might be too easy, because, you know, the cases I wrote were clear to me ;-). The first one (the mansion) was meant to be mostly an extended tutorial, so if you want to try again, I would recommend that one. I wrote the last one (power plant)  with a specific goal to be hard, even making sure there's a red herring solution that's gramatically correct.

We had some ideas how to make the game more playable. One of the more important was to split the word list to several categories (verbs, nouns, adverbs) and allow selection of the right one only: this should cut the confusion and make the UI more pleasant. I am also considering getting rid of the 84x48px resolution, just to allow using a more legible font. We aimed for maximum information density, but the trade-off is we just didn't have enough pixels to draw nice glyphs.

I am really happy to hear the descriptions are good. We both are playing pen-and-paper RPGs as game masters, it seems the years did pay off :-).

If you want spoilers, the GitHub repository linked at the game page contains complete source code, including the solutions. Open the 

the-grind-2025/scenario/<name>.py

directory and search for DeductionScreen - each one defines a list of words (in the correct order) that are the solution.

I hit a bug that prevented me from playing, and then I found another. I have to dock some points for that.

I really like the idea (I mean, I made a detective game for this jam too ;-) ) and I thinks it's original too. Simulating the phone's UI is brilliant. The game feels complete, even without music: given the limitations of N3310, I think it would get grating quickly and I would turn it off anyway. The ring tone was spot on :-) 

Probably my biggest complain is the font: it's just too small. I completely understand wanting to get high information density in your detective game, but it's your main user interface and it's just hard to use. If you are gonna work on the game in future, please, add at least one row of pixels.

Small game with clear focus. Visuals are clear, enemies have clear identity, background is nice to look at. The first level was very easy, I made mistakes only when the game started to be monotonous. I switched to the lvl 5 and it got hectic quickly :-).

My only real complain is the music. There's a reason it's off by default: it got grating fast.

How to rate a game that violates the rules, e. g. uses sub-pixel movements or runs in a wrong resolution? Should we lower the rating, rate it as hard zero or not rate it at all?

I really like this! It's simple, but it has a zen-like quality I think was the author's goal. Also, I really didn't expect (in the positive sense) this kind of game in Nokia jam.

I have two issues:

• The controls are too simple. I would like a better way to choose a plant. I think menu would be against the spirit, but give me at least a way to go forward and back in the plant list.

• The tunes are not that interesting and over time become a grating noise. I had the game running while writing this comment, and I had to mute it.

Even with this said, I see this as a success.

Hi, I wanted to rate your game but it hangs on the "hello pardner" screen. I tried both Firefox and a clean install of Chromium with the same result. Can you please advise?

Is it mandatory to use the sounds linked in Nokia Jam Resources? Can we edit them, e.g. speed up, slow down, cut or loop? Can we make our own 1-bit bleeps? (I would like to have more noise-like sounds)