itch.io

Also agree about the pages! I missed a few pages at first before I realized the button existed

I reallly liked this! The mystery felt very well-paced and designed, and there was rarely a moment where I didn’t feel engaged.

The lore was interesting to read, and I liked that there was almost no clue that was irrelevant or just for fluff.

The difficulty curve was good, room 1 was over quick but room 3 stumped me hard. I wanted to solve each clue through deduction and not just elimination, and the game rarely disappointed - which gave me the faith to tough it out through room 3, and get the sweet reward of solving it on my own.

There was only one field which I had to fill by trial-and-error, without understanding the reasoning behind it. At other times, I stopped myself from using trial-and-error even if it would have allowed an easy solve, due to my playstyle preference.

I grew to care about the story and characters over time - though at first I didn’t know what mystery I was supposed to be solving, just that I had to fill in the blanks. The lack of an overarching ‘purpose’ to my quest felt a little different from similar mystery games.

Overall, awesome work, and looking forward to the full version!

This was really fun! I was hooked until day 10, wanting to know how the story would go. I could feel the sense of relief on day 10 with the different tickets, and that mirrored the emotions of the character which was a great touch. I couldn’t exactly figure out the secret language, but I tried a few things and felt like I might have gotten close - or might just be dumb luck.

The game feels quite polished and I liked the randomly generated NPCs. Way to go!

Thanks a lot! I’m glad you liked the concept. I agree that there needs to be a lot more detail of how the systems work to create interesting situations, I might work on that in the near future.

I also assumed the AI works flawlessly :). Truth be told, I’m not sure it’s possible yet with today’s technology, but given the pace of AI development the tools might be available within a year or so. You never know!

Yeah, I should have described how the AI would work in more detail I think - right now it’s just assumed to work and not very convincingly playable.

5-7 hours isn’t a single session length, but the campaign length - essentially you could say you finished the game after doing one campaign, but you always have the option for replayability with new characters and objectives, and increased difficulty. I think with the variable LLM-powered dialogue, replayability would be a major draw for the game.

Yeah, sad lack of diagrams or good references - perhaps next time I’ll manage time better!

Love the part about the Duke of Doughnuts, and yeah - sometimes I think I’d expect players to go ‘wtf’ over these random events, as long as they can sometimes feel smart themselves too by outwitting others.

Loved the concept of this - a single-player co-op where the uncontrolled character is antagonistic against the other is pretty unique and clever! Though specific mechanics seem unique to this setting, the overarching concept could very well be adapted to other games and form a genre of its own.

The presentation of the GDD was pretty good, and I didn’t have trouble understanding the content. The structure seems a bit repetitive and not organized though - It might have helped to simply omit sections of the template that were not relevant to your game, and merge other overlapping sections for better clarity. I was also left a bit in the dark about the specifics of your actual core gameplay - what kinds of puzzles would exist, how would the players control and switch between characters, how exactly does combat work and what are the consequences, etc.

Also there are some sections where you seem vague or even undecided about what the game should be like - It’s usually better to pick a specific direction and stick with it (and include alternatives as footnotes if absolutely necessary) because otherwise I as the reader was pretty confused when trying to imagine the game.

The concept sounds fun to play and the puzzle-lover in me was already excited thinking of the kind of puzzles that the setting could offer. I liked the effort to make complementary strengths and weaknesses for both characters. The lack of specific gameplay details about puzzles/combat made it hard for me to say how fun it would be in practice, though. The overall story progression was interesting, as were the character backstories and details - but I’m not sure how the story elements are conveyed to the player in the game - is there dialogue, or written material, or something else?

Overall a great and very innovative concept - could use some more specifics about precise gameplay (and some diagrams!)

Hilarious concept that I’d wishlist instantly if I saw it!

The core gameplay reminds me mostly of the endless runner genre, of which there are many similar space-themed games - however, the strategic choices to maintain the scrap meter and more complex upgrade system might put this game in potentially new-genre territory.

The GDD was pretty well-structured and easy to read - especially loved the diagrams, and the custom art sold the overall tone and aesthetic of the game quite well. Most aspects of the game seemed well-covered and I could get a good picture of the progression and upgrade system. The core mechanics are still a little unclear to me though - do you get dialogue options when you hit another ship, or are they a separate mechanic?

I love the chaotic, frantic gameplay and the overall zany sci-fi aesthetic of the game, and that combined with slapstick crashes and explosions would probably get me to play it. The idea of pop-up menus and hats obstructing your view was pretty funny as well. I wasn’t exactly sure how the difficulty would ramp up over time though - or what the main source of challenge in the game would be - because the more ships you hit, the more scrap you get right? You get more and more upgrades, but the only balancing source of increased challenge seems to be the chaos meter and the police, and I’m not sure I want to be chased by them every single moment.

Overall a very attractive concept presented well, would love to see this made into something more :)

Fun read! I liked the concept and definitely think a game like this could find its unique niche.

The concept of a combat-less MMORPG isn’t new - but the focus on breeding and training real-world pets makes this game stand out, and might perhaps even birth a Pokemon-like genre of social pet-world games.

The order of the sections in the document confused me a bit - I didn’t even know what the core gameplay was going to be like, but was plunged headfirst into a detailed economy section. Once I read through the rest of the doc I had a better idea of what the game was - but would still like a lot more detail on the core mechanics and the moment-to-moment gameplay. There’s good coverage of the loops, progression, and economy, but less on what you actually do in the game and why that is engaging or challenging without considering metagame factors like economy and trading.

The concept seems like it would be fun to play, but without more description of the art, world, aesthetic, and core gameplay - I’m not sure if I would pick it up. The focus on economy and breeding for profit also seemed a little at odds with the cosy, personalized feel of the game - but perhaps that’s just me.

Overall an interesting concept with a good niche, and pretty well-written GDD (with diagrams!) although missing some key content.

Fun read! I liked the concept and definitely think a game like this could find its unique niche.

The concept of a combat-less MMORPG isn’t new - but the focus on breeding and training real-world pets makes this game stand out, and might perhaps even birth a Pokemon-like genre of social pet-world games.

The order of the sections in the document confused me a bit - I didn’t even know what the core gameplay was going to be like, but was plunged headfirst into a detailed economy section. Once I read through the rest of the doc I had a better idea of what the game was - but would still like a lot more detail on the core mechanics and the moment-to-moment gameplay. There’s good coverage of the loops, progression, and economy, but less on what you actually do in the game and why that is engaging or challenging without considering metagame factors like economy and trading.

The concept seems like it would be fun to play, but without more description of the art, world, aesthetic, and core gameplay - I’m not sure if I would pick it up. The focus on economy and breeding for profit also seemed a little at odds with the cosy, personalized feel of the game - but perhaps that’s just me.

Overall an interesting concept with a good niche, and pretty well-written GDD (with diagrams!) although missing some key content.

Had a lovely time reading this, and the idea and presentation is superb!

I loved the idea of ‘epistolary deduction’ as a genre, and I don’t see many other games attempting this particular niche. The document presents what could have easily sounded like a dry subject in a clear and appealing way. I could get a good sense of the potential gameplay as well as the overall progression.

The length and detail of the document is pretty perfect, it reads easily while also being comprehensive and concise. I especially like the attention given to art and narrative, since these are two areas which really sell the idea of the game. Perhaps the only detail I can criticize would be the lack of a diagram to describe the overall interface and how a potential letter or puzzle might look - I found myself drawing a blank at times when imagining exactly how it would be laid out on a screen.

The way the art aesthetic is described is mouth-watering and I’d be prepared to check out the game based on that alone. The narrative was also really well-presented and would definitely hook me - especially the contrasting backgrounds and personalities of the characters. The deductive-style gameplay could have used a little more detail about how difficulty would be scaled, and how the epistolary puzzles would be kept interesting until the end with variations/twists (using the Strix Grimoire for example?) - but free-deduction games are some of my favorites and I’d definitely want to give this one a try.

Overall it’s a top-class GDD and I’d be one of your first wishlisters if this ever gets made :)

Thanks for the high praise and for taking the time to go through it!

I agree that it’s a pretty outlandish design, and the technology for it technically doesn’t even exist yet - but I was excited by the challenge.

I think you’d definitely expect AI to do some unexpected and non-human things, and humans to find ways to exploit the system for their own benefit. The game doesn’t pretend to be fair, and players should enjoy themselves trying to find ways to manipulate the AI, even if it ends up being a little metagamey at times.

Nevertheless, as technology improves it might become feasible sooner rather than later. And you also need good human technical writers to define interesting characters with compelling voices, because an AI would otherwise make everyone sound generic and make the same kinds of choices.

I feel like the strategy section and systems need a lot of work, right now they are still a little flimsy and it’s noticeable. But glad you found it interesting. Might take some time to work on it some more when I have the time.

Thanks for giving it a read! And yes, I did have a lot more content to add, but had to cut it down due to bad time management. Primarily stuff about how the basic mechanics could actually be used strategically, but when I wrote it out it wasn’t making design sense yet, and needed some more rigourous thought.

About the genre, the reader is free to come to their own conclusions about whether it’s a new genre or not. I found that there were very few single-player negotiation games, and the best candidate I found (GNOSIA) didn’t make use of new tech like language AI. I just gave the genre a fancy name so that I can try to file a ridiculous patent for it later like how Shadows of Mordor did with the Nemesis system XD.

About the technical aspects of the AI - right now the technology is heading in that direction, but a proper plugin that you can use to make an AI-powered commercial game like this one doesn’t exist yet. ChatGPT’s API has a bunch of limitations and restrictions - for example there’s a character limit on context, and content filters that will prevent your NPCs from talking about anything related to death or violence or politically incorrect things. Plus it’s hella expensive for each prompt.

But in theory with a game AI plugin, you would give each character a standard description, motives, etc as context - then feed in the player reply and formulate an appropriate response. Then give the AI a limited list of actions that its character can do in the game, and ask it to pick the most appropriate one.

Really liked this idea, and as a tower defense fan I would be so down to play this!

The initial genre definition of ‘PvP tower defense’ seemed to not be as genre-defining, but the inclusion of drawing your own paths around immovable obstacles seemed very interesting - would have loved to see that explored in more detail.

I really liked the Twitch integration idea, which (if I understood it right) would allow teams of players to fight against each other, each with a streamer or captain as its head. This sounds pretty innovative and would definitely make this genre-defining in my eyes, and potentially make the multiplayer aspect a lot more popular.

The overall design sounded interesting and fun to play, and I appreciated the detail given to describing the phases and potential strategies and edge cases (like the AI completing your path if you don’t finish in time.)

However, the document definitely felt too long to me, and very often repetitive, which made it hard to extract the relevant details without skimming too much. It might have helped to modify the original template a bit to match your game - eliminate the sections which aren’t relevant to your game, and merge the sections that tend to repeat essentially the same information. I also felt that the ‘Genre’ section was mostly empty and could have had a lot of good arguments for why this game defines an all-new genre - information that I would otherwise have had to gather from pockets elsewhere in the doc.

Some more diagrams or references in the doc would have been helpful to visualize the map and the gameplay better - but the art references and moodboards at the end of the document were a nice touch, definitely helped me understand the intended look and feel better.

This was a fun read!

I loved the overall structure of the document - it felt concise and readable, and the diagrams and image references added a lot of clarity and brought the game idea to life. Was some of the art made specifically for this GDD?

I especially appreciated the diagrams for the core loop and controls, they helped me understand them in a jiffy. The appendix of comparison games was also useful.

I liked the details about the basic mechanics, world structure, and core loop - but would have liked to know more about specific parts of the gameplay - what do you use other robots’ parts for? Puzzles? If so, what kind? How exactly does combat work against the spiders, and how do you stealth past them?

The narrative seemed interesting, especially the part where you get the memory chips from old robots to try and piece together the world’s backstory.

About the genre - You’ve defined a genre called ‘Perspective Game’ and given a few examples in the appendix, but I don’t see how this game in particular helps to define that genre. It seems to instead fit closely with the existing Metroidvania genre (as Kirk mentioned) and there isn’t enough fleshing out of the knowledge-gathering part of the game and how it affects the core gameplay, for me to recognize it as a genre of its own.

Love the concept, and a game which focuses on customization of mechs and rearranging parts into creative new configurations sounded really cool to me!

The document did a good job of explaining the overview of the game and the main progression/upgrade pathways. I would have liked to see more detail on the specifics of combat mechanics and how rearranging parts can help with that. There were some intriguing descriptions of mobility-based parts like legs or hover-jets, but not combat-focused parts like gun types - which felt odd because high-octane gun combat seemed to be the main focus of the gameplay more than mobility or exploration. More specifics of how exactly you would combine parts to create different mechs - how the interface would work, what are the restrictions, etc - might have been more useful than the menus and save system description which is less unique to this particular game.

Likewise it would be nice to read more about how the different types of enemies function and look in-game - the story background for each race was super interesting to read, but I couldn’t imagine how they’d look or fight without more info.

The format and content was pretty clear and easy to read, although some diagrams might have helped when it comes to describing things like the HUD.

As for the genre, the Mecha-like genre described already seems to have a fair number of titles, and the document doesn’t specify which part of the design is genre-defining. The comparison of ‘more real-time and fast-paced building process than Crossout’ is intriguing, but the rest of the doc doesn’t mention real-time building and only seems to let you re-build your mech at certain key points. Likewise ‘an engineering take on Spore’ sounds instantly attractive to me, but is hard to substantiate without more description of the customization system itself, and what makes it deeper or more creative than other Mecha-like games.

That’s my feedback - definitely looking forward to see more of this if you plan to take it further!

Totally agree with your feedback! I had some more ideas for detailing the systems and systemic interaction, but the idea was probably too high in scope for a 2-day jam so I submitted whatever I could. As I was writing I definitely realized that some of the systems seem impossible to actually implement with existing technology though :’)

Thanks a lot for taking the time to go through it and for the rating!

Thanks for the praise! The theme we chose was ‘It’s not supposed to do that’, in the context that normally enemies are supposed to die when you shoot them below 0 HP - and not go into the negative and revive as glitches.

Incredibly fun gameplay - struggled a bit at first, but was very satisfying once I got the hang of it. Loved the idea of bouncing off sound platforms and killing the robots with them as well. The level design and execution made it a fun challenge, and it felt so good to beat the last section - though like others have mentioned a more gradual difficulty curve initially would have helped.

The animations, atmosphere, and sound/music all came together really well, as well as the quirky narrative intro. Would love more levels, but for the scope this is a neat package :)

Apart from the ‘sound’ reference, not sure how this fits the theme exactly, though?

Had a lot of fun playing this! Loved the crazy knife, and wondering which ability I’ll get to use this time. My best score was 1750. Liked the entry dialogue with the wizard too :)

Wish there were some more variety in abilities for the knife, after a few rooms the existing ones got a bit repetitive - but that’s fine for the scope. Some more ‘juice’, like having slight sound effects or visual effects for enemies getting hit and dying, would have enhanced the fun. Also had some issues with the screenshake and noise everytime you get hit, it’s a bit excessive and causes fatigue. There was one situation where I got softlocked - enemies stay stuck in the corner when you have the item-throwing knife. If you keep throwing things and stack spikes all around the enemy, you can’t progress any further because the enemy stays alive forever.

Also, returning to the main menu starts the music again, overlapping the previously playing version. Sounds cool as heck!

Fun entry though, liked the graphics and music, would love to try again if any new content is added :)

{Outtie}

Really nice minimal puzzle game. At first I needed to look up the rules on the itch page, but after that I could understand the puzzles and played through the levels. Gorgeously polished, smooth visuals, and the glitch effect was a nice touch. Would have enjoyed slightly more complex levels, hope there’s more to come!

Gonna finish this later, because it’s 1 in the night and that second level is nightmare-quality stuff lol. Very well executed, I must say.

Pretty trippy aesthetics for the first level. I took a photo of the maze guide and used it to solve the level, otherwise it was too hard to navigate. The visuals did start to give me a headache after a short time.

Some issues with the controls made it hard to play - the sensitivity is really low and I can’t seem to change it from the pause menu. Likewise, my pause menu audio slider starts at 0, but I can’t change that either. During the maze and house levels, I can’t hear any sound at all, but sound somehow works during the cutscene areas??

Let me know if these are bugs with my system in particular, or if everyone is experiencing the same.

Loved the atmosphere! Very creepy environments, the pixelation was a nice touch, and the level of detail was cool.

Wished there was some more gameplay to go along with it. The key puzzle felt a bit unintuitive because I wasn’t sure where to look for it, and the rest of the game felt empty of meaningful interaction/content.

Great entry! The Twist at the end was something I began to suspect, but was still a really cool surprise :). Won’t spoil any more of that.

I did find the pipe puzzles a bit repetitive, since all the pieces were already in place, and you just had to rotate them. Some more puzzling gameplay would have been fun to see there. The light puzzle at the end is also something I solved by accident. Couple of buggy interactions, but nothing game-breaking.

The art and world are really gorgeous stuff!

Nice concept, implemented well, fits the theme, and was pretty fun! The unfinished art still fits the game really well. It’s a feature, not a bug - right?

I died a couple of times in level 2, apart from that was smooth sailing. the difficulty level was good. If I had to suggest any improvement, it would be to make the debug console text a bit more readable on-screen, and maybe more levels where the controls switch back and forth a bit - once I got the hang of the reversed controls and auto-jump, there wasn’t much challenge left after level 2.

Well-scoped entry, great work team!

Thanks! glad you had fun :)

Glad you enjoyed it! And yeah, without time to add more hazards and enemy types it did get a bit repetitive. We hope to improve things and polish a bit after the rating period

thanks Venkat!

Thanks for playing! And yeah, we definitely wanted to add more varied enemies, but scope turned out to be an issue. Maybe after thee rating period. :)

Thanks for playing! Sure, I will try yours out as well.

Thanks!

Glad you enjoyed it!

Thanks! We wish there were more levels too, hopefully can add more after the results are out.

Thanks for the detailed feedback! Glad you enjoyed the game.

We ran into a few scope issues, so the gameplay might not be as polished as it could be - we’ll definitely take your suggestions into account when making improvements post-igdc :)

Fun idea, I liked the variety of things you could potentially buy and manage to increase revenue. I felt pretty good when I could earn enough to pay my bills on time - isn’t that everybody’s real power fantasy :P

The scaling of the servers and cooling equipment made buying the more costly ones pretty pointless - I can just max out on Raspberry Pis and get more users without bothering about cooling. So it didn’t feel like there was any point to get the more advanced equipment, which was a shame.

I liked the detailed tutorials and tooltips, made the game a lot more understandable at first glance (although the initial computer scrolling text was too slow for my liking)

Not quite sure how this fits the theme of ‘it’s not supposed to do that’ though?

Really touching game! The relationships between the player character and the others were developed really nicely. Especially loved the barter mechanic turning into an altruistic one where you don’t have to give anything in exchange.

The pacing did feel a little drawn out, and the day to day work could have used a bit more juice and variation to keep things interesting. Overall, a really nice narrative experience.

this is hilarious and really top quality fun. Wish there were more levels! I’m surprised I’m the first comment here, hugely underrated game concept :)

This was a really fun play! The Giant Orange Cockroaches were really freaky, but fun to dodge. I was especially scared when two connected rooms both had cockroaches, and I was stuck in between, lol. I managed to save three kittens so far, though. I hope the Great Master Loaf Cat is proud of me.

Great work! Looking forward to your next game, whenever it comes out.

Hey, thanks so much for the video. It was super entertaining :). Glad you enjoyed the game!

PS: Added a comment on YouTube as well.

Wow, this is sooo cool. Thanks a lot for streaming this! And especially for playing on despite the horrible glitches haha. The PC build doesn’t have the lag and black screen issue afaik, but I wanted to keep WebGL up for those who can’t download or install Windows stuff. Will try and fix the WebGL bugs once the rating period is over.

There are a lot of things to improve - enemy AI is a bit inconsistent, and combat could be a little smoother I think. Likewise with the slow zombie speed and repetitive wandering around the map. Still, I’m glad you sounded like you were having fun all the same :).

PS: The text scrolling is a little script that I wrote, I might add it to my github at some point if anyone else would find it useful. The lighting is done by adding a lit shader to all the sprites, and putting Light objects on the torches and the player. The platform is Unity, btw.

Congratulations on getting it submitted though! There will always be unfinished parts, but it takes skill to put it together and make a fun playable game despite the limitations. Looking forward to seeing any improvements you make in future :)