Had a great time facilitating and playing a three player game of this today. Very enjoyable game that came together to tell an interesting story.
StephenM
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Facilitated and played this two player this evening on a Discord dedicated to one shots of various RPGs (And by coincidence wound up playing exclusively with my Kids on Bikes GM). It was a blast. Even as someone who's played journalling games in the past, I was surprised by how easily these simple prompts became scenes.
It wasn't always easy to figure out what a character taking a more supportive position in the narrative could do to contribute a die to the roll, but we always got there in the end (My favourite was using engineering to turn some random components into 'art' to fob off to bandits while the other character was negotiating with bandits) - Though figuring out if a character possessed by a dark entity asking somone to knock her unconscious should be Engineering (She related it to rebooting a computer to flush the RAM) or Moxie (Because of exactly what she was suggesting be done to her) was an interesting call to make.
Played a couple of one shots this past month, everyone seemed hopeful to get more opportunities to play it, and two of the people I regularly play with who joined those one shots pretty much demanded I add it to the list of game pitches for future campaigns for that group, which I had zero issues doing, so there's a decent chance I'll have the opportunity to play this in a campaign format later this year.
Good luck on the physical version Kickstarter next month.
An absolutely fantastic production, which I found thanks to Curious Archive's coverage of it. I wasn't sure what I was expecting when I heard 'VN stylized as a nature documentary about an alien whale' but that description piqued my curiosity and the VN absolutely delivered more than I could have possibly hoped.
Multiple solutions to the problem of how do you do pinball without flippers (Breakout being the most fun), and it's a fairly solid implementation of the concept. Unfortunately, I've weirdly seen this concept before? Even ignoring the first decade and a half or so of Pinball existed before the innovation of flippers came along, the PS2's Flipnic's fourth world was pinball with breakout paddles rather than flippers, which dilutes it's effectiveness for the jam for me. Saying that, it's a great game, and I hope you polish this up while adding more tables after the jam.
Third level is brutally hard - could use a few more levels for a better difficulty curve, and maybe more zoomed out camera, but this is on point for the jam for me. Removes a fundamental mechanic from the genre it's in (Direct movement) and builds around that in a way that creates a really enjoyable game premise while not feeling like anything I've seen before. Love it.
Winds up being an interesting (if probably solvable - In most draws I think Player 2 can force a win if Player 1 doesn't play for stalemate and I'm not certain about the one draw me and my husband had where Player 1 won) take on the four in a row genre of abstract strategies. I've seen similar tabletop games to this, but never with a shared hand in a game with a deck.
Really enjoyable concept, and it's easy to see how it could be expanded into a full game beyond the jam with more applications. Weirdly reminiscent of Lemmings in places, and gets somewhat difficult towards the end with a smooth difficulty curve. Love how you used the theme to inform the secondary mechanic you added on some levels with the limited RAM, too. Just wish there was a fast forward button for when waiting for the file to cycle back to where I wanted it for starting the process.