itch.io

Well, you certainly succeeded in your goal of giving the player an unsettling experience! This is an experience.

So there are a couple of problems of which you are well aware so I won't pile onto those. I think I actually managed to enjoy the game much more when I realised the timer was broken: I took my time, enjoyed the art, and sounds and just tried to take it in. I couldn't do that for the first few minutes because I was too stressed! (Which I assume was the intention, in which case, great job. I was mightily uncomfortable).

I was worried about the onboarding, because the console is quite intimidating at first glance, however once I had read through the manual and figured out what I was needing to do; it's a fairly simple loop. My primary strategy was to check the oscilloscope first and foremost and compare to the manual. I suspect some players might read first and not engage with that; I think it's nice that there is both visual and written information that informs the players decision making.

For what it's worth, I'm usually somewhat apprehensive about having to read a manual to play a game, but it worked here; both thematically in the sense of being a console operator and logistically it felt appropriate to open the manual and check the encounter table to verify what I needed to to. I do think some initial, non-manual onboarding would help too.

I've already mentioned that the art and sound is great in its job of creating a really unsettling experience. It's a shame that perhaps you bit off more than you can chew, but paradoxically I think I enjoyed the game much more because of it. Thank you.

Thank you both so so much for taking the time to play. I'm so happy you got to see both endings as well!

I really appreciate your kind words, I'm glad you enjoyed my amateur voice acting! Thank you again.

Great, apparently I'm going into work every after the company has gone bust. I must really like clocks.

The BLUF of this game sounds like something I wouldn't touch with a 10 foot pole. But I was genuinely engaged in weeding out the duds. I made it to Sunday I think before eventually falling foul. My undoing was clocks that were running too fast. I think this was because I was also running too fast; I would speed through all of my various checks, usually spotting the slow clocks, but the faster stopwatches and countdown clocks often evaded me.

I thankfully avoided most if not all of the reported bugs, so I had a pleasant experience in that regard. The only potential issue I stumbled across was the alarm on the omni clock - it did not sound at all right and I couldn't fathom if it was intentional or not. But it was often a point of failure for me. It kind of sounding like the audio was playing twice or something.

I really enjoyed the variety of clocks, and variety of checks that needed to be conducted, but none felt like they were out of the way to do. Most can be done in a few seconds, so the game had a nice pace to it.

I enjoyed this all the way through. I do think there's so low hanging fruit with accessibility and perhaps tutorialising the manual a bit more, but this a really nice entry. Thank you.

Thank you for giving it another go, I'm happy to hear you had fun!

Just in case you want to go back to it. You're not actually supposed to get the timer at 00:00. You can click the plug :).

I hope you're willing to give it another crack!

This is a really special game. And I can still see a few question marks on the map for discoveries I haven't made yet.

I'm so so glad I went into this blind and didn't see the screenshots before I played, so I didn't really know what to expect and wasn't spoiled by the secrets, I just knew I should explore from the description. 

My first run I was just feeling out the controls and pretty much made a bee-line across the map as directly as possible, and after getting my bearings, I went in again. This time I found black holes, a parallel universe and some mean butterfly's that chased me when I got too close!

I've already spoken with you both briefly on Discord, but I think having these little discoveries are so rewarding. Granted, many players will speed run through and miss many of the things you've worked so hard on, but they were going to do that anyway. This way, the people that are really engaged with your work, get all these bonus discoveries.

I'm a big fan of KSP, so naturally I was hoping for MechJeb and my manoeuvre gizmos that I have become ever so reliant on over the years. But alas, I guess we're doing it the old-fashioned way. Out of curiosity, do you know if there are any Lagrange points where you can get into an infinite / stable position without  using any fuel? I feel like I was nearly able to find one in a zone with 2 binary systems, but I couldn't quite get it stable.

I did have some performance issues, even with the GPU fluid effect turned off, but as I understand it, the performance patch is coming post-jam which is great.

I realise I've only spoken about mechanics and design, so let's speed run the rest: 

• Visuals - STUNNING
• Sounds - MELLIFLUOUS
• Vibes - IMMACULATE

Thank you, thank you. Absolutely wonderful game.

Thank you for taking the time out of your day to destroy my game! Appreciate it :D. Glad you had fun.

Great success! 

I don't think there's a huge amount more that I can say that hasn't already been said. The art is marvellous of course. Systems are interesting and work well together in the context of a bomb building type mini-game. I wont pile onto the tutorialisation as horse has already been flogged.

I couldn't see in the description, manual or other comments; but was I supposed to be able to rotate the bomb pieces? It looks like I should have been able to turn them and puzzle things together more neatly, but I couldn't find a keybind for it.

 The interactable bell & parrot is a very nice touch, and the general characterisation of the customers coming into the shop was great.

All in all, a very polished, fun game. Thank you.

Unfortunately I can't seem to replicate the issue at all. The detection area / variables that allow jumping are not mutated by anything in the game that is outside of that room. What OS / Browser are you using if I may ask? And just to absolutely confirm, you went inside the circle, pressed the spacebar and nothing happened? The counter remained at 10 too I presume?

I'll check your game out now, and I'll have to explore this in more detail I think!

Oki doki, thank you. I'm just going to have a look into that and then I'll try your game out!

Hi, it does sounds like you're the first person to actually break the game!

So were you jumping up and down over and over in the circle and the counter didn't go down at all? I'd really like to get to the bottom of what happened here. There was one additional room after that point, but you were nearly at the end.

No no that is part of the joke, you can get way over the 17 :D. The bomb was working as intended by the sounds of things. That is a 'bug'. But by bug here I mean an intention one that the 'developer' of the story accidentality left in.

I would really appreciate if you'd be able to clarify what happened with the jump circle. I.e. if you just jumped once, or you were jumping and nothing was happening. Thank you!

Oh no, another unfinished game? Sad😔

Brilliantly subversive and the whole meta elements are implemented so so well. 

I am a self-confessed smooth brain, and as you now know well, my solution to challenging puzzles is to throw it out of a window. As such I did find these quite hard. I got to the second to last level and my brain 404'd. I've been at this for close to an hour I think, so I should probably know when I'm beat. I play basically no puzzle games through, so this shouldn't be surprise and doesn't reflect on your game, only me.

The implementation is fantastic, both in the meta unfinished-ness and the puzzle mechanics themselves. When the penny dropped on the third to last level (can't remember which number it was), it was immensely satisfying chaining the several shots back to back through the slow fields and completing the level.

Thank you.

Haha jolly good! The window is working as intended then!

Yeah I think it's possible too, I've tried a bunch myself and I think the best chance of getting yeeted out of the level is in the first timer room, probably messing with either the button plinth, or more likely, the wire as it's a bunch of rigidbodies on pin joints. I think crouching / standing / jumping into them at the right angle will break the physics.

The crouching works by shrinking and then expanding the player collision shape dynamically, so there may well be something there to break lol!

You're only the second person to manage to do that!! I've still not managed to do it and I must have played through that room hundreds of times by now 😂.

I won! And I totally, absolutely did not skip a level...

I genuinely think the theme has not helped you here at all. This game is insanely good, but so punishing because of the timer. I think if it was completely removed; it would be one of the best games I've played this jam, and probably something bigger if you wanted to revisit it. The shooting while grappling and flying through the air is so satisfying, but is hard to enjoy when your heart is about to explode. 

For what it's worth I did enjoy it, but I think the time pressure takes energy away from all the other great things about the game to love, but alas that's the theme.

I think the biggest low hanging fruit would be a time slider, or another non-combat means to extend it and take some of the pressure off. I personally would love it if grappling gave you a little time back, and you chain grapples you can claim a good chunk of time back.

The boss fight is wicked, it was a really nice surprise as I wasn't really expecting it.  Visually it's nicely consistent and the assets fit together well. The music and sfx are equally good in that respect. The oil slick shader is lovely, and the floating damage text has some really crunchy juice to it.

This is a great game, being shackled a little by the theme I think! Shackles off and you could make this into something bigger. Thank you.

Thank you for playing and this is amazing feedback.

While I was developing and testing, I would unlock all the doors and teleport myself to the room I needed to test - but of course you're right that this need also applies to players who want to play and look for new dialogue / endings. This is such an excellent suggestion, and frankly it could be done in a meta way too with some accompanying dialogue. I'm going to look into implementing something like this for a post-jam update just in case anyone in the future wants to have a good explore around, without having to go through the start every-time. It works for the first time (and granted most people only seem to play once, but thereafter there needs to be something speeding it up.

I should say on that note, thank you for your kinds words, and I'm over the moon that you found enough enjoyment that you wanted to come back and find the other endings and secrets! I take it you managed to jump out of the level? In total there are two main endings, and there is some variation in dialogue when you reach the ending depending on the manner by which you reached it. There is a variable called defiance, which is basically how many times you've broken something, and the dialogue in the ending changes based upon this. Technically you can finish every mini-game as 'intended' and you'll get a unique dialogue, although it's almost impossible!

Thank you for taken the time to play, and play again, and for writing out your feedback. I'm going to have a look at putting a skip into the game for 2nd playthroughs and beyond, thank you!

Thank you! And thanks for taking the time to play, so glad you enjoyed yourself!

Oh that's hilarious! What I would have done to have witnessed that. 

While I was developing the game, I watched a GDC talk from the developers of Portal 2 and it was absolutely an inspiration, specifically the general interactions with Wheatley, and him not being very good at his job. I'm thrilled the general vibe came across.

Thank you for taking the time to play and share your thoughts, I'm so happy you had fun.

Thank you so much!! So happy to hear you enjoyed it and for such high praise.

Thank you for taking the time to check it out :)

That you so much for playing and your comment. 18 coins? It does sound like you were indeed breaking things! But yes, there's not any additional dialogue for the coins as they were a last day addition to the game.

Many thanks for your time and for playing.I hope you had fun!

This would make a great mobile game with a bit more development I think. It's really got that Subway Surfers / Temple Run feel to it.

My best score was 272, I reckon I might be able to crack 300, but It's probably a case on rolling the RNG a bit in my favour. I don't think i'll be hitting 500 though!

Well done for a great first jam submission, it's a real achievement to make something in 4 days.

Thanks so much, it was my first time attempting any VA so I'm really grateful that it seems to have come off alright and has been enjoyed!

Great question, for that section I recorded voice-lines for the following scores / brackets:

• Exactly 1, 50 or 100
• Brackets of 2-20, 21-40, 41-60, 61-80 and 81-99 if it was not one of the above numbers
• And then 3 additional voice-lines if the player presses another score button after the voiceline based upon their original score:
  • <40 - "Noo, you've already told me how much I suck."
  • 41-59 - "No no no! You only get one chance, you weren't decisive enough
                    the first time. That's on you."
  • >60 - "No no, no backsies! You already told me how great I am."

I tried my best to litter the game with dialogue that somewhat matched what was or has happened. So there's a few ways to play through and you can get some different dialogue throughout and 2 distinct endings (with a couple of variations within those)

Thank you for taking the time to play, really appreciate it!

That's so generous of you, and I'm absolutely chuffed that you enjoyed it so much. I can't wait to play your game

Thank you very much for taking the time to QA test my unfinished game!

Really appreciate you taking the time to play and your kind words, hope you had fun!

A really nice, smooth and tight game loop. Really enjoyable platforming.

I got quite concerned after the first floor as I was down to like 30 life and start to panic, so I am eternally grateful you included the life on kill upgrade. 

I love that you made everything yourselves and everything is really charming. I think it's the perfect length of a jam too, doesn't outstay its welcome in the slightest, and there's more content for people to go back and get the other ending. The credits are nice too!

Many thanks!

Absolutely hilarious. Off-screen **** was brilliant.

I'm quite glad that I just clicked play and didn't check the screenshots, as everything was a complete surprise for me, and that fed into my enjoyment greatly.

Great writing, the kazoo-esque sound effect for the voice worked really well too. And I liked the quiz at the end! I felt like it was a gimme and just more or less to round off the story, but apparently people aren't familiar with zero division huh?

Really really enjoyed this. Thank you.

This was absolutely delightful. I rarely play puzzle games, and I love them even less frequently. But I really loved this; and gladly saw it through to completion.

The entire concept is excellent and well implemented, it's simple enough that you need next to no tutorialisation, but there's plenty of depth to the level design, even though you were limited to certain shapes.

I loved how you subverted expectations with the levels around half way through, the format wasn't getting stale for me or anything, but that change really did keep everything extra fresh.

I encountered one small bug on 45 where I got stuck in an infinite loop, I have recorded this if you'd like me to share what it looks like. However reloading fixed it (thank you for adding save games!!)

Artistically it's spot on, really looks exactly like an old backlit monochrome LCD. 

Thank you. I enjoyed this greatly.

Really enjoyable entry, I was full invested from start to finish. 

Voice acting and writing is excellent and it's a fantastic take on the theme. Thank you.

Such an interesting game, really quite engaging.

The skill tree is excellent, and it is tangible in making the game easier, so it's nicer to get closer and closer to the cafe each playthrough. 

I most enjoyed the physical minigames, as I almost always missed the memory clues with other things being on the screen.

It's a really fascinating mish-mash of different genres and mechanics, but it all worked together great for me and was enjoyable to the end, thank you.

Thank you for playing and such a detailed comment! It's really appreciated.

Haha glad you enjoyed it, however you signed an NDA, so I'm going to sue you now for disclosing it's existence publicly!

So the shift crouch binding is a real pain point for me. So the story is, I originally had it bound to CTRL and the toggle turned off. However as it happens, the bind to close a browser tab is often also CTRL+W. So at the last second had to change it. I don't like it and I don't really know what the solution is!

I'm really glad you enjoyed the humour and my amateur voice acting, I really appreciate your time and feedback, thank you.

This is absolutely dripping with style and polish. Seriously nice work.

I only managed ~6k score and that felt like a decent go of it. I wasn't quite able to suss out the multiplier, I'm assuming from the description that I need to chip down multiple enemies to 1 hp and try to chain / multi-kill them to boost the score? 

That might be the only thing that is missing, as everything else felt extremely intuitive and well designed. I like that the core game loop was about 2-3 mins per run for me, which feels like the perfect length of time for a jam, and I can then choose how far to take it.

The art is excellent, you've taken really simple assets and they just pop so well through the shader use and general art direction. The UI stuff is stunning, and really hard to get looking that good in my experience!

I enjoyed this thoroughly, thank you.

Such a simple concept, executed perfectly. I don't play a huge number of puzzle games, but I didn't really enjoy this; I think it's probably because it's physics based!

The last couple of levels were definitely quite challenging and took a decent amount of trial and error, but got there in the end!

N.b. on the resizing issue, Firefox worked perfectly and it scaled up to my monitor. I don't know if monitor resolution has an impact, but I'm just on 1080p.

The music and audio is nice and works well, perhaps there could be a little juice on the marbles, but it's a pretty minor thing. I do agree with another commenter that I would have loved a restart button that maintained my current line setup, but maybe that would have trivialised the game too much by allowing fine tuning on a line-per-line basis.

I enjoyed this, and probably spent close to an hour playing! Thank you.

Thank you for playing and taking the time out to share your feedback. And thanks very much for the kind words on the VA.

On the audio clipping. I've done a little more investigation after the first report of issues and while the web export being single-threaded is the bottleneck; I have discovered there are definitely a few things I could and should have done better with the power of hindsight. It is a more general performance issue that is manifesting within the audio for the player on slightly lower end systems.

I was very conscious with the quantity of dialogue recorded with the branching and random bits of extra narration you can unlock, that the zip size would become too large, so all the dialogue, music and sfx are all stored as .ogg and this is really expensive to decode on the cpu. I should have used mp3 / wav for the sfx that's being played constantly.

I've also got a pretty terrible level layout considering I didn't get time to put any occlusion culling in, it gets better as you move through the game, but I really should have at least hidden some rooms until you come to them or got to basic culling setup. As in that first room there's probably a good 800 or so extra draw calls that don't need to be happening. OOPS.

Hope that puts a little meat on the bones - every day is a school day!

Thank you for playing and your comment.

As a card-carrying smooth brain; I became quite nervous when I saw your comment pop up on my game. Math and memory are words that keep me up at night.

All in all it wasn't bad though, I do appreciate that you exposed a wide variety of setting options to suit those of us who are computationally challenged. And while I don't think I'll be setting the leaderboards alight (I didn't submit any :D), I did enjoy it much more than I expected.

I imagine there is a community of people into puzzle games that would absolutely cream their knickers over this game, especially the competitive element. it's really well put together. 

Oh and I should also say, welcome to the Godot family! Nice to have you on board.

Thank you for the game!

Haha thank you for playing and rating. I was certainly thinking about what I would do to try and break a game while planning it out, it helped me squash quite a few bugs that usually might have slipped through!

You found 21/17? Sounds like someone has been breaking my game... tsk tsk! 

Really happy to hear you enjoyed it, thank you for your time and thoughtful comment.

Honestly this feels closer to real life than it does satire. I'm 99% sure I've had to do similar things, on similar archaic pieces of software in the public sector.

This is hilarious though. I think comedy is so hard to pull off in general in games, and you've smashed it out of the park. It's weird, wonderful and just the right level of unhinged. Loved it, thank you.

Oh my, I had to go back and check my project to see what I recorded - that's how you know it's rare when the dev can't even remember what's supposed to happen! 

You didn't!??!? 

I believe you are the first person to actually do it, all through development and testing I never actually managed to stop it on 00:00. Absolute god gamer right here. I don't remember if I even recorded any voice lines for it because I didn't think it was realistic anyone would actually win 😂.

Thank you for playing!

Oh my thank you so much for such a lovely comment! I'm really over the moon that you both enjoyed it. Thank you so much for taking the time to play and share your thoughts, I really appreciate it.

Thanks for taking the time to play and for your feedback.

The humour was the biggest concern for me during development; because there's such a fine line between funny and cringe. I was constantly sending jokes, videos and all that to people to get some sort of litmus test for what worked. I also watched a few GDC talks from both the Stanley Parable and Portal devs and they spoke at length about during their play-testing just having random stuff that wouldn't land at all. So it was a big concern. For the most part it seems to have worked for most people at least.

Appreciate your time mate!

Thank for you for taking the time to play and your really kind feedback.

It's a HyperX Cloud III headset! I paid about £65 for it, so it's about as cheap as they come. I did put some reverb on the audio bus in Godot but this is the first time I've recorded audio for a game before, so it was all very experimental. So happy to hear it paid off

Thank you again for playing and your feedback.