itch.io

Appreciate you guys 🙏 

Haha, fun idea! I'd love to see more content, where does it go? At the moment it's still in tech prototype land so it's hard to tell what genre the game is, but you could easily take it in the puzzle platformer direction, an eldritch-horror story-based direction, etc. Or maybe both 🤔 It feels like the obvious goal of the game would be to escape the prison, but maybe this is more about stockholm syndrome and you're being groomed to be their pet. Anyway, you've nailed the atmosphere which is the most important part. Tag me on here if you continue it, I'd love to play the next version 🙂

Hey GamedevGoblin, thanks for playing!

Glad you enjoyed the suspense and imagination components. I'm workshopping a 3D version and wondering whether some of that "left to the imagination" stuff would be lost by making the graphics more explicit 🤔 Still, I do love 3D space horror.

Appreciate your thoughts on the bugs and proposals, all have been incorporated 👍

FOV changing based on input is a cool idea! Hope you continue it! If you do, feel free to tag me for another playtest.

Haha, totally get you on the Warcraft killer comment. People don't get how much works goes into games.

We built our own survivors-like (just released our demo on Steam actually 😄), where you compose spells on a musical loop and fight to impress the audience. We started with a super novel mechanic (whammy mode from Guitar Hero and a Magicka like spell composition system), but then learning to do even just half of what the other games in the genre have accomplished has been most of the battle. 😅

Btw for your fullscreen question, I don't think there's a standard approach here. In Don't Read Chat, I did a cheeky thing and made a separate menu if the container is at exactly 960 x 540 (which is the size I made the itch.io container). So it detects if you haven't gone fullscreen yet, and tells you to go fullscreen to start the game. Otherwise, I've seen other people make their game window TINY so you have to click fullscreen to play. Or you could just make it 960 x 540, which is probably pretty big already on most screens, without being too big.

Haha, the intro with the VO was a nice touch. Pretty lighthearted and fun start to the game.

On the accessibility front, I'm running a Macbook Pro, so I don't play games at 1920 x 1080 (it's a 3024 x 1964 resolution screen that displays everything with double pixels at 1512 x 982). So putting the game window at 1920 x 1080 means it goes off the screen for me. You're not the only one to do that, and dw I get why you did – putting it in Fullscreen works. But, because escape is a button used for getting out of the tutorial or pausing the game, it also throws me out of fullscreen. So I found it difficult to engage with the tutorial early on.

Anyway, the gameplay itself was... interesting. Everything felt pretty "numbers go up", I wasn't really finding attacks that were orthogonal to what I could do previously. It would be cool to explore multi-attack, curving attacks, AOE, etc. I was mostly just picking the options with the biggest numbers and waiting to see if the game got fun. 

Sorry for the harsh critique! I hope you enjoyed making the game. The wheelchair guy was a nice touch. If you decide to continue the game, my advice would be to throw in one orthogonal upgrade then give the game to 3 friends and watch them play. See what they're enjoying, and double down on that. 

Yeah, getting the same performance issues as the others. I'm guessing it's checking for my position far too often, and for every actor. Because when there are more detectors on screen, it increases the lag. Generally this can be solved by:

1. Reducing the number of times it runs the detection check
2. Caching detection results if the player hasn't moved
3. Smooth out movement over the time between frames (Time.deltaTime)

Game felt pretty simple and straightforward. If you're going to build on it, would be cool to explore different enemy speeds and detection methods. E.g. not just rotating the cone but maybe swapping from back and forth, or flicking off, picking a totally random direction, then flicking on, with a second of foreshadowing beforehand.

Fun game! Simple controls, easy to pick up, typical gameplay. No notes!

Ah, yeah this is a great baseline for sure, like Maoaii said.

The main issue I see with this game is balancing. Run it through a couple more times with friends, and see where they fall short. For me, my contestant died because I kept being given the choice of Spikes or... Spikes. I didn't feel a lot of agency. There are also some notes on the value of certain actions. Like dragging the card onto the slot – there's nowhere else to drag the card to, so maybe it could just be a click? Or maybe you want to increase player agency and create more slots that can be dragged to? Like maybe the contestant hits a crossroads, and you're not sure which direction they'll go. So you try to setup a trap by predicting which path they'll take. Could also be interesting to lay traps in advance, down the pipe. So you're not just putting them in the very next slot, but maybe 4 slots down.

Oh man, this game would be fun with multiplayer. One friend is the contestant, the other(s) are laying traps. Or Twitch chat could lay the traps, too. That's a cool concept.

Anyway, great contender, awesome start, and if you build on this again in the future, tag me and I'll give it another play!

Defs a cool concept. I could see this being used for a superhero style newspaper editorial game. Like playing it, I was imagining a twist where different scoops show up about the appearance of Spiderman, and you decide whether to expose him or keep him hidden. It wouldn't even need to be Marvel IP for it to work, just some character we might care about protecting.

I thought the game mechanics were really interesting and it brings to mind a lot of ideas for more exploration on the theme. Nice work!

Huh, man some of the games on here are so creative, and this one is no exception. I would never have thought of building a game around making a livestream in hospital. 

I did notice that it seems your game's second camera, the one for UI / livestream stuff, appears to be scaled to 50% of the viewport. This made it pretty tricky to engage with the game.

Also, the spotlight does this thing where if you're facing left, then go up, it rotates back around anti-clockwise instead of clockwise naturally. That's a really common logic problem when it comes to smooth rotation! The trick is to keep counting the number up rather than clamping at 360. That way if the system sees 365, it will treat it as if it was 5 degrees, but it won't swing it back all the way around down to 5. This issue made it hard to stay alive because I could never see what was to the top left of me haha.

Otherwise, I enjoyed the overall vibes. I couldn't get very far because I couldn't figure out how to keep the monsters at bay. It felt intuitively like if I shine the flashlight on them, they'll stay away, but it didn't quite work like that. Was there something I needed to do?

What! No comments yet? Oh man, this one's underrated for sure. The main menu is slick, the vibes are well crafted. I wish your tutorial actually matched to the gameplay, it seems to be leftover from a previous version perhaps? I didn't experience anything like a singing minigame or dancing minigame – I was pressing keys as they came up. TBH for that gameplay, I didn't need a tutorial, but I did go into the game prepared to press WASD and collect green circles haha.

Definitely feels like a puzzle game. Is that what you were going for? From your GDD, you described how the minigame in Dispatch would make a great full game (I agree btw – awesome premise), but the game itself felt to me to have a much stronger puzzle-y feel than in the minigame from Dispatch. I guess the thing with Dispatch is that game actually teaches you how to play the minigame, you're not sitting there figuring out which characters to click, what clicking even does, etc. I found myself clicking every possible screen item for the first 5 minutes and reading everything, grinding forward at a pretty slow pace, until I pieced together what to do. It felt like a puzzle game. If that was your intent, great – it seems like some of your other players enjoyed figuring it out in the dark. For my tastes personally, I would have preferred being quickly shown what to do, even if it was outside the core gameplay experience, and then being thrust quickly into the game so I could practice what I just learned. Since it is a minigame in essence, I wonder if you could borrow from Mario Party's minigames to give the player a quick pre-game tutorial on what to expect and how to play? With the simulation and all that? Anyway, just an idea.

The game itself was of course really fun – but you already know that!

Haha, fun concept! And can I just say, the main menu design is really neat. It does exactly what it needs to do: start, exit, volume. But as someone who's studied a LOT of main menus to learn how to do the design really well, I feel this one sits really high at the top of the list for me. Really cool vibes.

The polish on this game is really high for a game jam. I'm really impressed with how robust the game mechanics are. If you decide to continue it (and you should!), it would pay off immensely to pour some time into playtesting and tutorialisation. Not necessary a "tutorial screen", but a way to implicitly tell the player how to play your game. Check DRC, for example. I seeded throughout hints on what buttons to press, only at the times it mattered.

Accessibility is one of those things that is really hard to remember to do, unless you're constantly playtesting with strangers. And then it's immediately obvious if it's lacking.

Yeah, totally get it! Accessibility unfortunately does take a backseat in jams. Still, it can be also fun to build a game specifically with accessibility as the core constraint. Asking yourself "does this improve how easily people can play this game?" can be a great way to keep the scope small. I usually really struggle with scope creep but decided to take that approach for DRC, and the result was pretty liberating. I didn't feel like I had to do so much more, I just had to do one thing really well.

Very cool prototype, I could see this being a full game with a bit more thought around what kinds of input from the player could trigger different effects

Hey, I'm not seeing a game here, just the GDD! What happened?

Thanks JustSomePikachu! Yeah I pretty aggressively subtracted everything from the game that wasn't directly benefitting the delivery of the story. So I only focused on what felt core to the experience I wanted to deliver. I was concerned that I may have removed too much, but I'm glad you enjoyed what was left! 😅 There are a bunch of endings you can explore, with more that will become accessible post-jam, once I fix a few issues related to the logic gating.

Hey ShenTzu! Wow, coming from the creator of Death and Progress that's quite the compliment. Thanks for being so thorough with the bug reporting, it really does help a lot that I know where to look and what to test. I've already eliminated most of the issues reported so far – and tbh, most of the issues came from not having enough time to run through a proper QA test in each of the routes. Plus, unfortunately I was unable to resolve a bug with the logic gating so in the end, with 5 minutes to spare, I was forced to turn it all off (which felt better than to permanently lock end-game content). Hence why you could skip all the puzzles. 😅

Great point on using the keyboard to select options, which also makes it fully controller supported. A game like this would probably work well on the Steam Deck / with a controller.

I'll post an update shortly after results are in. When you come back, make sure to try a different approach to what you did last time!

Any time :) If you do improve it post-jam, ping me here and I'll give it another playtest if you'd like!

Thanks Pauper Tim!

Ahh, right clicking. That's unexpected. Ok thanks! That helps narrow it down.

I'm glad you enjoyed it! Check back in post-results and I'll have patched a tonne of bugs! Also, your save should work backwards compatible just fine. But if it doesn't, I've designed a bunch of different pathways through the game so you may like to try alternative routes the second time.

Cheers,
Nat

Well very nicely done for only two weekends of work! I spent essentially 4 hours a day throughout the week and 10 hours / day on weekends for Don't Read Chat!

Yeah you could definitely benefit from a dedicated playtest with a video / microphone recording from an external playtester, at least once a week for a bit while you work on improvements. I've never found that to be a bad thing. I'm really bad at racing games so didn't get super far (not your ideal playtester) 😅

1. Yeah, makes sense. Maybe having a bigger sign pointing to clicking the player then could be worthwhile. I dunno, I just got stuck several times because I kept forgetting to click on the player – and the hitbox for clicking him was kinda invisible so I clicked next to him several times.
2. Just big wide arcs left to right quite rapidly. Steady wide rhythm. It's my go-to for these sorts of games.
3. It wasn't taking itself too seriously, and in it's a submission for a game jam. On Steam I'd usually prefer to see more a polished art style. Or, if mixels are the art style, then usually it involves a heavy amount of fancy VFX to make up for it. But hey, I'm not saying the inverse would be wrong! It's just not my preference.

How does this have no comments? I feel like I've discovered a hidden gem here. This felt fantastic to play! The forecasting of attacks, smoothness of platforming, game juice in the camera and character movement, etc. – all felt really great. The soundtrack is a vibe, too. Is that an original composition? It's giving C418 in a really nostalgic way.

Thanks cryaning! So glad to hear the V.O. paid off, it was definitely a gamble. But we've been watching a lot of Blown Away lately, and all the contestants on there are constantly talking about how they're taking risks, pushing themselves, and trying techniques they've never done before. I felt inspired to do the same here, and I'm just glad it came out as slightly coherent enough to pay off.

You're right that your save will stay intact (in the same browser), so once I fix the logic gating, you can jump back in and try again! Also, there are loads of different endings, so even if you did start again, you might find that with your familiarity of the content, you're able to take a different path the second time. I packed the layers pretty dense with this one. 😅

Orangudan 🙌 you're too kind. Thank you mate, really appreciate your time playing and providing feedback.

I've got some ideas for improving the readability of the Explore Mode dots so will have a play over the coming days to see what lands best. I'm interested in your comment "I think my progress through the ship overtook my actual progress through what I was meant to be doing" - it sounds like you felt you got past where you felt you were supposed to be? That may be that I had to disable the logic gating in the end as there was a bug I couldn't solve with it in time, but it may also be a pacing issue with you feeling out of step with the content. Once I fix the logic gating bug and address the readability of Explore Mode, I'd really love to know if you engage with it better! 

Ah ok, thanks! I did some testing today and haven't been able to reproduce a black screen in the electrical room, but will keep at it. An issue I've been coming across is how enormously difficult it is to test every room's connection, since there are so many branching pathways, and each run takes 30+ minutes. I think next on the roadmap is to build a cheat system so I can get around the rooms faster to test specific things.

Thanks for the kind words 😄 it's my first solo game (publicly), so it means a lot!

Cool concept! For some reason, the game flicked black a lot while I was trying to play. I'm not sure if this was intended? I could start to get an idea of what to do in the beginning, but the black screen flickering became so heavy by 1 minute in that I literally can't play it anymore. Which is a shame because it seems like a really cool concept. I like your GDD, I can tell you put a good amount of thought into the brief. Hopefully it was just a tech issue on my end (I'm on a Macbook M2 on Chrome, if it helps).

As all the others, the art style is banger 🔥 I love a good metroidvania and this did not disappoint. If you decide to build it further post-jam, my key recommendation, as with many other submissions I've played in this jam, would be to get external playtesting feedback and iterate rapidly on their specific player journey. I felt a little friction in places I'm sure you didn't intend, and I think you'd really benefit from seeing people play your game and honing the controls / tutorials / mechanics based on that experience. Overall, great contender!

Haha, really fun and cool concept! I haven't seen this idea yet and tbh now that I've played it, I'm surprised I haven't. The interviewing mechanics felt easy to use. I did feel like it was a little hard to understand what to do next at certain points in the game, which could probably be eased with more external playtesting and player validation. Overall, solid entry!

I love a satirical rant. It felt surprisingly coherent to me to be honest. The early gameplay didn't feel like I had much control or power in the matter, which felt very on point for what you're trying to convey. I really enjoyed the idea of being an OP late-game God that didn't give a F# about the world by the end, but I found it difficult to get to that fantasy. I see the other commenters feel similarly, and I agree that balance is a key issue. If you continue with it post-jam, or for when you build your next jam game, I'd highly recommend getting as much external player feedback into your brain as possible, and building ways to get it into your design cycle. For me it meant releasing early and building in public. For you it could be different, even just hassling a few friends to play it every few days.

Neat little game! The input scheme felt tight and I really felt in control of my little guy. I wasn't sure that I felt super connected to the theme for this one, but I did enjoy the gameplay a lot regardless.

A few observations:

• It would be great to click anywhere to start, not just on the player
• Moving the mouse was a very intuitive control scheme. I was able to cheese it by moving left and right consistently; even in the wind, the constant movement seemed to override whatever environmental forces were applying
• The art style, while simple, felt really well done. I enjoyed seeing the little guy fall to his doom, hehe. I'm personally not a huge fan of mixels, but it worked in this context really well.

I love the art work! That's a huge strength of yours that I hope you lean more into with future work. I'd love to see a full game illustrated in this style.

I too couldn't fly the organ btw

Woah!! This is intriguing, what a cool idea! I love how you've made my attention the engine for progress. It would have been cool to make the little boxes selectable with the key 1,2,3, but actually I wonder if that's a response to having my attention used against my will haha. I immediately wanted the experience to require less of it.

Very thought-provoking little game, nicely done.

Haha, cool. I love the vibe! You're crushing it at game polish & juice. This felt really good to play, and I never got stuck wondering what to do next. That's tough to pull off!

P.S. you should turn the fullscreen option on in itch.io's Edit Game settings, it's not too late to do it and it helps a tonne with playability. I just used the debug console to make it fullscreen and enjoyed it much more.

Wow, this is a cool interpretation of the theme. I love your art style! Really clean lines in a way that shows a lot about the characters' internal state without being overt. For your second game this is really stellar, you should feel proud!

For your next games, my advice would be to focus on the player's journey very very closely. As a player with zero idea how to play, what menu buttons do I need to click at the start? Are they necessary? What keyboard or mouse buttons do I need to click? Do I know how to do that? Are you leveraging gamer knowledge (like WASD)? Is your game accessible to non-gamers? What device does your player use? Are they wearing headphones?

All of these expand your craft in different directions that I find provide constraints to let creativity flourish in really interesting ways. Anyway, kudos on your second game!

Interesting little game! Overall it was surprisingly crunchy and felt great to play. I noticed a few things:

• It was not immediately apparent that you can press space to shift perspective. I ended up nearly filling the right side of the board with tiles before switching over and doing anything with them.
• Once I started placing them around, I didn't really understand the nuance of what each tile means, or how to generate specific ones. I'm guessing that's kind of the point, that it's an exploration and memory game, but the explanation of what I'm there to do felt a little undercooked to me.
• I wasn't able to actually fail at the falling blocks side of the game, so it didn't feel like it had stakes. I didn't necessarily feel that fantasy of being a god taking over earth, which feels like what you might have been going for, and I wonder if you amped up the stakes a bit, if it would help with that power fantasy.

If you decide to continue the game, I could this working really well on mobile! You've got a really solid game idea here, it just needs to go through the car wash a few more times and get loads of external playtesting!

Hey, I felt you really hit the brief with being watched, it felt super on theme. The tutorial was spot on, I understood how to play with very little friction. You've "selected" the art assets really well, usually that kind of thing is quite difficult to get right, but everything feels cohesive and not like it's from a bunch of different asset packs. Kudos!