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Thank you for playing, and the very kind compliment!

Thank you for playing!

Enemies do need some sort of telegraph for when they'll appear, or more helpfully they shouldn't be coming from as many sources as they currently are. I have an update in the works which will hopefully help with that.

I wish I could make a somewhat detailed background for the underwater sections of each scene, so that it's clearer where physically blocking objects are. As it is, the green collectables help at first, but that visual information is lost once they're gobbled up. Ideally I should have created two types of wires, ones which are attached to blocked paths and ones which aren't.

For which connection opens which path; they're linked by the wires snaking over the stages and are color coded, which hopefully helps.

I really appreciate all the feedback you gave me, and I'm glad you found it fun!

Thank you for the detailed explanation! It's very interesting to learn the thoughts which went on behind the code. :)

I did miss that there was a fast-forward button, alas. Good to know if I go back and try different choices later.

Is it possible to reach a failure state? Aside from the first day, I always seemed to be doing well according to the boss.

The game didn't want to run in Firefox, but had no problems in Chrome.

The puzzles appeared to be more complicated than they actually were in most cases. Many times a lot of the moveable furniture could be ignored, possibly because the cat is able to pass by small gaps without trouble.

The indications for which objects could be moved, and how, were well designated.

It looks very good, the idea is definitely interesting.

I did try playing this one several days earlier, and as soon as it got to the Pick between four twitter responses to that scene in IT I felt strongly that this game was not for me.

However I returned today and decided to power through.

The music starts out nice, and it's subversive like the UI to give happy feelings despite the dark content. However, it's quite repetitive and I ended up muting it around halfway through.

It feels a lot like NationStates in that you have a prompt, then four choices, of which none of them are correct. Except more politically charged than NationStates, somehow. I felt like the choices I made were not at all relevant, and the vast majority of the game is waiting for the analytics on the right to cycle through whatever it was doing, or pretending to be doing.

When interacting with a customer/patient/victim there's no option to do anything other than push the ? button to generate a response, as far as I could tell. In theory this is to see the results of your choices, and in the very first conversation that's true. After that I'm not so sure.

First conversation: Divorced woman, gets a bunch of irrelevant twitter posts and rightfully terminates the call.

Second conversation: Fan complaining that their ship in a fictional story was sunk. Gets generic responses which they don't seem to care about (more on this later)

Third conversation: A cat is lying on a keyboard. Responses irrelevant, it's a cat.

Fourth conversation: It's the second conversation again, but this time... no, it's exactly the same. The generated responses might be different, but they don't affect anything at all, the person said exactly the same things in the same order as before. Is this on purpose, indicating that people just want to hear themselves talk and the other end of the dialogue is irrelevant? Who knows! It proves my choices up to that point had no effect on things, which makes me question why I needed to wait a minute between each decision I made before being allowed to continue.

Then the game is over. I'm left wondering many things.

Fantastic!

It felt so nice to be able to use the moving boxes without unexpectedly getting crushed to death. There was still a bit of that in the final level, which is where the vast majority of my deaths were. But I was able to complete it this time!

Very neat! There's a lot going on all the time, but it never felt overwhelming or unmanageable.

I'm generally bad at multitasking, yet I was able to move the robot and fire on enemies while still guiding the drone to pick up crystals pretty effectively. The controls are well thought out to make everything feel very intuitive.

The enemies have the right amount of health, taking enough hits that you need to focus on them, while not so many that it feels like a chore. Even when there were a lot of them on screen, I was able to fend them off thanks to the very quick fire rate (and the ability to hold down the button to fire!)

The music is suitable tense. The sound effects fit perfectly. The one thing I would say about sound is that the robot's gun does get repetitive with the amount of firing needed. If you altered the pitch up and down slightly per shot it might help with that.

It would also help if the total number of crystals on the level was displayed somewhere at the start; if it is I missed it. Otherwise the player needs to walk over to the alter with at least one crystal and push E twice to get the total they still need to collect.

Really fantastic and fun game overall!

Thank you for playing and for the kind words! It was fun animating the different characters, I'm glad you liked them. :)

Thank you so much for playing, and for the indepth review!

That's a good point about the art, I was learning as I went and realized I had a much easier time creating character sprites if I started with a much larger canvas size. Since environments are less detailed and intended to be tiled I could make them smaller, I didn't consider how it would affect the overall visual consistency.

Thank you for playing! The reason there isn't more snappiness to the grid is that I didn't use grid-based movement. Based on people's comments and experiences I should have, and it was something I considered early on and decided not to implement. Next time I'll definitely do grid-based movement in this kind of game!

Once the review period is finished I plan upload a new, improved version with fewer bitey fish.

I think Meemaw would be a little less cavalier about dodging traffic if she wasn't secretly indestructible.

You packed a lot of extra games into the main game, very impressive! I thought every day would be a variation on the same thing (like a another level in the maze game for Terance, rather than an entirely new thing.) I was only half right! I'm pretty sure I'm worse at math than Sophia... but at least I know how to use Unity. And I have a sneaking suspicion Annabelle is using me to do her chores.

There is a glitch caused by the watering flower game, where from that point onward the sound of the water being poured is playing nonstop.

The visuals are nice, the music is nice, the characters are nice. Everything is exceedingly nice. (I thought Melvin would give me a cake, though...)

Thank you for playing! I always appreciate hearing nice things said about the dialogue. (And the rest of the game, too!)

The Game Over at the end of level 8 was so abrupt I didn't think to record my score. Actually I was wondering if I'd somehow done something wrong, despite having just linked the last two pictures. Judging from the youtube video that's just how it goes!

I like the sound effects, including that you can sweep the mouse back and forth over a dot to get a bunch of different tones.

The visuals are clean, not so sure about the choice of images in a couple instances (the face with green... slime...?)

Also not sure if the dots appear in the same order each time (except with increasing numbers of pictures) and I'm meant to track them at the start and recall that. If so, I didn't! I guessed pretty well. I know the first dot is always the heart, so it stands to reason they do go in a specified order, but that's beyond my ability to watch and retain.

I'll be honest, I couldn't figure out how to use the cues successfully. It appeared as if they were always available from the text prompt, but sometimes the bar went up and sometimes it went down.

I appreciate the support for controllers. Also for input rebinding, something I have yet to include successfully in any game, jam or otherwise. (Though rebinding the bond button on controller seemed to cause the game to lag out a ton afterward and I needed to refresh the browser.)

Here's my best result:

I had a fun time with it! I'd have done more if there was more to do. Great job making a game jam entry while having 10 (awesome) horses in your lives!

Thank you for playing! I'm glad you were able to figure things out, and enjoyed doing so!

Alright, this was quite interesting. It was also very long. I appreciate your artistic vision, and I certainly understand allowing something to go on for a longer time than is necessary because it feels right. However, it's asking a lot for people to play through so much content in a game jam. BUT I DID!

It's actually quite fun to throw out the primitives and jump onto them. It's a unique kind of experience. I especially appreciate that there is no sliding, no slipping, jumping onto something is solid and safe. I did still manage to fall down a number of times throughout the game, mostly in the war scene and the penultimate scene.

By the way I don't think there's a natural way to exit the game once the credits have finished. I eventually alt+F4'd without finding an alternative.

The music carries the narrative a ton, which is what it's for of course. Well done on selecting the tracks you used, they're monumentally important.

Now here's my amazing idea:

Rather than starting out with the full scene in view, the player is only presented with the glowing balls they need to connect. Every time the connection is made from the blue ball to a purple/orange/red ball, it reveals the relevant model(s). This way, not only is the player motivated to do the game mechanics, they're uncovering the story as they go; they're a participant in telling the story, rather than being given a story and told to appreciate it.

For bonus points, once everything is connected up, disable the renderers on the primitives, so that only the gold connecting line remains, for the final beauty shot of each scene.

I promise if you do that you have an award winning masterpiece on your hands. I think it would add to things, personally.

This is really neat!

I'm glad it's not too punishing because I played terribly and still managed to defeat Him!

It can be a bit tricky to align the point you're building from with the cursor. Not usually a problem, except when an enemy is slipping through and you (I) panic.

I love the searchlight range of the defenses. And the simple, effective resource gathering.

It does seem that way, yes. I think, though, that labelling it as a puzzle game should encourage a natural playerbase which is interested in figuring some things out on their own. I absolutely appreciate everyone who took the time to try my game (including you, thank you!!), but I completely understand that many of those people are here to rate submissions rather than limit themselves to genres they normally prefer. I don't think I can give more information without the average player feeling like their hand is being held and guided unnecessarily, if that makes sense. :)

A fun and unique game!

The UI was a bit cut off on the sides for me, whether I was in full screen or not.

I tried a custom round after doing the two presets, and found that either some dots had repeating colors or they had colors so similar I couldn't distinguish between the two.

Other than that it's pretty much perfect! I was worried when the game said it required patience and precision, since I don't have much of either of those. Yet I still found it very enjoyable to play. :)

I got through to the end, I think? Once I got to the doors in the room with the ramp it went back to the title screen.

It's a good idea which uses the theme well. Picking up and moving the crates was very glitchy for me. Sometimes they would move very far away, but still act as if they were being held. I also found I could cheat by getting to the next checkpoint with the smaller bot and then loading from there.

I also managed to get stuck at the beginning of the game, by going into the charging station before beginning the story sequence.

Love the intro sequence!

Very Katamari Damacy, much fun.

The web version was very laggy so I opted to download the Windows build. Things were going great, until I held down the domain expansion at around level 10. The sheer number of things I pulled in crashed the game.

Without the hungry eyes (or gluttonous eyes or something-or-other) upgrade I had a lot of trouble judging what I could and couldn't pickup. It felt like plenty of things I was allowed to grab in the beginning, like candles, were definitely larger than I was, visually.

At a certain point, it felt detrimental to have a large magnetic aura because I was picking up a lot of tiny objects which didn't do much to increase mass, but did constantly slow me down and prevented me from getting to juicier targets.

I liked the music and how it escalated as size increased (or time diminished? Maybe both.)

No worries, you aren't the only one who's had trouble. :)

It's really hard to see on my monitor, but I did catch it thanks to knowing what to look for! (I then blew up on the impulse section part...)

Thank you for giving it a shot!

I did my best for the writing to explain what to do, I'm sorry it wasn't clear enough for you.

Thank you for playing! I'm happy to hear you found the tutorialization fun. :)

Thank you for giving it a try!

Thank you for trying it out! I completely understand, I have trouble doing that sort of thing myself. (I'm only any good at my own game because I'm the one who built it...)

Superb writing. But I know that werewolf's going to eat me the moment a commercial break starts.

I opted to ignore the flashlight the first time I ventured into the extra basement. This turned out to be a bad idea.

Thank you for playing! It's nice to hear it got a laugh out of you. :)

Very well done atmosphere!

I had no clue what to do with the Mobility section.

The first time I got distracted toward the end of the monologue leading to it, because by that time the Pressure system was on the verge of collapse again. I panicked and got it under control, then wasn't sure which station I was supposed to head to. Went to Mobility, which gave the ability to interact, so that seemed right. I had no clue how to "follow the instructions", or what the instructions might be, beyond three beeps, and exploded after pulling levers at random.

The second time I was prepared, listened attentively, and tried again. Go to the mobility section, instructions would be sent. I hear three beeps, I try the right handle, that's wrong. Three beeps again, I try the middle handle, that's wrong. I try pushing 3 on my keyboard, nothing happens. Maybe at this point I should have tried the first handle? That didn't make any sense to me, it was three beeps so it must be the right handle. But it wasn't. Maybe I didn't use the middle handle correctly, then I exploderized.

Restart for a third time... knowing I have to do the entire intro and second puzzle again, to get back to the one I still don't understand. A checkpoint system would be appreciated, I think! Or the ability to skip ahead past already seen dialogue at least. Or for the game to run in the background while I type my progress so far in this paragraph. :)

So, third attempt with Mobility. Three beeps. I pull first lever. Nothing bad happens, an arrow on the display turns green. I pull third lever, still nothing bad, so then I try the middle lever. 1 turns green on the display, that's progress! Now I hear  four beeps... no indication of anything else. I try first lever, failure. Four beeps, I try third lever, failure. Four beeps, I try middle lever, explosion. No idea what I'm missing, sorry!

Thank you for playing, and sticking with it!

Thank you for playing! I'm glad you found it to be good fun. :)

Great sound, music and visuals!

Fun gameplay loop.

I hate to say it, but I think this might be the one game in the jam which is too easy. I felt like I could have kept playing forever, and it was tempting to do so! I had to intentionally stay still and stop shooting in order to see what the game over screen might look like.

It's fun simply to fly around grabbing the yellow dots power orbs to level up even further, especially at the speeds allowed. And the fact that ramming into an enemy doesn't knock off a huge amount of health (which would swing the difficulty too far in the other direction.)

Allowing for continuous fire is great, and somewhat balanced by the fact that you can also push away (and even destroy?) the power orbs you want to be collecting. Having the magenta enemies appear at a point before the player can damage them is a good call, though once homing missiles are unlocked it essentially signals the end of progression.

I am not known for my exquisite typing.

I like the concept a lot, especially that the words are in Latin which both feels appropriate narratively and challenges the player to pay close attention to spelling.

Highlighting the already typed characters works great, though it was strange when a new enemy's word was already previously typed due to linking to a previous defeat.

The fast moving ones are very rude, even if they have short sequences. And ones which appear from the bottom and right are far easier to deal with than those from the top and left, since you can see the starts of their words to begin with.

With some sound, music and animations this could be quite addictive.

Thank you for playing (for a long time)!

I had no idea you could do this with youtube videos.

It's impressive on a technical level.

I don't know really know what the win/failure condition is, if any. I moved the dot (it felt more like I was moving a camera with a large square reticle) inside the boxes and circles, but there was no indication of doing well or not. The instructions to pause were a bit unclear, was I supposed to pause the moment the bar showed, or when the bar was filled, or when the wormholes appeared? I tried different ways without finding an answer.

Really intricate, complex mechanics!

There's a lot of nuance to the controls, I really liked the three displays to help align with the cargo. The camera works great to give whatever view the player needs.

The music is a bit quiet and extremely epic for the type of game this is. I enjoyed it!

The sounds fit perfectly, the beeping can get a bit annoying but that's entirely normal and expected for something which is so realistic.

I did need to keep the keybinds opened whenever I had to pick up cargo, something I'm sure I'd get the hang of if I played more.

This isn't really my type of game personally, yet I feel there are many games like this on the market right now, and that a lot of them aren't as good as this jam submission is!

I'm guessing the money and XP rewards weren't implemented in time, I remained at level 0 throughout with 500 money. I also seemed to get a small deduction of my earnings after completing a job, according to the display, without an indication of what might have caused this.

Nicely done! I played through at least seven levels and took a look at the random generator version as well. Great job fitting that all in during a game jam.

The puzzles are satisfying to solve mechanically, though all quite simple to do since you can move and adjust the ribbons easily and have extra pegs all along the outside of the board.

As you've noted, the speed of the ball is slow which is the main 'punishment' for setting things up incorrectly.

It's possible for a ribbon to be just close enough to a peg so that the color flickers on and off, I had one situation where the white I required wasn't set when I finished placing the last ball, but by touching the ball again when the ribbon was connecting, it immediately completed that level.

I also enjoyed how the levels 'built' at the start, and then reverted at the end.

Oh no! Maybe I assumed it wouldn't work, since the main section didn't have a checkpoint. That's entirely my fault if so. I did recognize there's a checkpoint between planting the tree and moving on to the four route section. I should have had more faith.

Thank you for playing! Sorry for the difficulty, there were definitely too many enemies wandering around making things harder than they should have been. I'm glad you thought it great in spite of that. :)