itch.io

Wow, that sure is an ugly prototype! :-)

No, seriously though, very cool to prototype the game to get a sense of its gameplay first. I think it's a neat concept: on the first round I was like "uhh...so I roll dice?", but by the second I was considering the dice and the cards and thinking "this isn't trivial, is it".

I ended up six coins short on the fifth round, which isn't a bad showing, all things considered.  I did feel a certain lack of control; the rule "larger divided by smaller" felt particularly hard to manage, since even with a d20 (do they go larger?) and a d6 (do they go smaller?), the expected payoff is pretty small.  (4.5ish, depending on how you round, with better than a 50% chance of getting three coins or less.)

But it's intriguing!  I'd love to see where it goes.
 

OK, bugs notwithstanding, I'm enjoying the heck out of this.  I love the presentation so much.

But speaking of bugs...

• After adding a second definition to a word, you can only click on its first letter to open it from the Dictionary.  (Which is better than I thought, i.e. that you couldn't click it at all.)
• I seem to have lost my Lielow board. [EDIT: never mind, there it is, totally forgot where I found it.]

> You are given a scissor that cuts space into Klein bottles.

Um--am I?  On the second level, there's a "✂️: 0" on the side, and sure enough, I can't seem to cut anything, which brings things to something of a halt.

This was cute! Not too long, interesting level design, plus I had fun chasing the mice around. (The reflection of the cat in the ice and water was a particularly nice touch.)

So: I haven't given up on this, but also I'll admit I'm more than a little stymied.  (Obviously, since it's mid-January and I'm still working on it.)  Can you confirm that the white arrow means (following in rot13 for spoilers)

ghea gur jbeq vagb nabgure jbeq va vgf pngrtbel, fb gung "gba" -> "cbhaq" (jrvtugf) naq "cbhaq" -> "rheb" (pheerapl

though if that's right, I don't know what's below "hear" (I'm assuming that "two parallel arrows" means "you can use this transformation in two different ways to get from A to B".  Like, "read -> lead" could be connected with two arrows that mean "rhyme", because they rhyme as present-tense/opposite-of-follow and also as past-tense/metal-element.)

The problem I'm hitting is that there's no independent evidence for orange and blue, only for them together.  I want, based on the above, for

gur fgrc orgjrra "gerr" naq "pbssrr" gb or "grn", jurer gur juvgr neebj vf gur pngrtbel fhofgvghgvba, naq gur benatr neebj vf...eulzvat?  Ohg V qba'g xabj ubj gb genafsbez "erq" vagb fbzrguvat gung eulzrf jvgu "gerr".  (Naq gura gur guvat orybj "gurr" jbhyqa'g or havdhryl qrgrezvarq; n ybg bs guvatf eulzr jvgu vg.)

Want to offer a nudge in the right direction?

I walked into a miner and...the screen went black and the cartridge reset?  Shame, I was kind of enjoying it up to that point.

Ooof.  Opened the game in a private browser, to experiment with what kinds of connections it would draw now that I knew what it was.  For "bacon" it told me Farm product, and for "skyscraper" it told me Hollow interior.  That's kind of rough, because while straw is a farm product, and a drinking straw has a hollow interior, those are two different senses, which--if I didn't know the answer and was now trying to think of a farm product with a hollow interior--would very much throw me off.

(Hey, did you know a camel provides insulation and a horse is highly flammable?  Thank heavens it's erring on the side of a property the target has and not a property the guess has.  Though for "television" it offered accumulates dust which is kind of a terrible clue, since that's true for roughly any physical object.  Also, do not trust this LLM with your horse.)

...yeahhh so it's true a nose ring is made of polished metal, but you don't polish it often.  It's a frustratingly subtle distinction (and trying to read subtlety into AI answers will not go well).

In terms of it being a "vague clue": I went with "bread" as a guess even once I knew it was jewelry-related because I was hoping to triangulate somehow.  That is, I wanted to get out of the local maximum where I'd guess another kind of jewelry and it would tell me "no, but here's what they have in common: jewelry!".  Alas, it did not work very well.

Today I started with "wood" and was told it was a (five-letter) organic building material, so, well, that ended quickly.  Still skeptical; still not unlikely to look again.

Definitely noticed the same thing GoodGuyGames did--part of the problem inherent in a guessing game that involves zeroing in on an answer is that your guesses start to get pretty similar ("necklace", "bracelet"...) and so the commonalities it finds are also pretty similar, which means you're not getting more information.

And while everything it gave me was associated with the answer, it wasn't always particularly associated with things I typed in.  ("nosering": "Often polished"?  Is it?  "bread": "Frequently gifted"?  I can't remember the last time someone offered me a gift-wrapped baguette.)

And GGG isn't wrong that it being an AI game makes it less appealing: not because I hate AI (which I do), but because it means that no thought has gone into any given day's game, because an AI cannot think.  You clearly put thought into making the game, and kudos for that, but at the point at which an AI takes over, there's no guarantee any more that there will be a good path from the starting point to the solution, which is the kind of thoughtfulness that a game or puzzle designer will put into a round or level.

I might give it another go tomorrow, to see whether it exceeds my expectations.  But I have to admit I'm not optimistic.

I...feel like maybe it could have used some words after all.  I admit I'm intrigued and I'm enjoying clicking on the funny little circles, but I can't really tell what I'm accomplishing.  (Are my numbers going up?  I don't even have numbers.)

Not giving up on it yet though.

There's a lot here that makes no sense:

• Conveyor belts carry you one space, but there's nothing to indicate which direction.
• On almost all of the levels (well, through #9, which is when I lost interest), you can succeed by unfolding and just walking across.  Like level 4 is called "carry lesson" and you can do it a move faster if you fold/carry, or you can just walk over to the blue square.  Same thing on level 5, where it says that "the obvious route fails" but, no, you can obviously just go LLULUU.
• Level 6 tells you to "plan the landing", but (a) as noted in the first point you can't really plan anything and (b) there's nothing to plan, you just step onto the conveyor, which is your only move, and then walk to the blue square.
• Level 7 tells you there is no path.  There is.
• Level 8 tells you to "time the fold".  You just do it at the start and walk.

I feel like you're missing something fundamental here.

Clunky, yes, but kind of interesting!  I can see things I'd improve (I made it to the second level before dying, which kind of undercut my original "it's kind of easy, isn't it?" comment), like possibly different-colored floors for adjacent rooms, specifically to help visually set apart multi-space rooms.

The "it seems easy" comment came from "oh just get the skeleton one space behind you and then it'll follow you but never reach you", which is great if it works, but it didn't particularly work by the time I got to the second level.  I did get into a kind of stalemate, where I was in the fourth column and the skeleton was in the third, so I'd move up or down a row and it would move up or down a row to match me, so I was a move ahead of it but it blocked me every time.  (Maybe I should look again with a little more attention to door-locking.)

But I think there's absolutely the core of an interesting game here.

see, for me, it was more like "Mister Mayor!  Please stop building factories and apartments on the east side of town!" "Oh, OK, I'll put in some more parks and cafes on the west side."  It felt very real.

This is intriguing!  But there seems to be a restarting bug where, if I die (or, really, "when", because I'm dying a lot), my luggage starts with fewer empty slots--as if it remembers "I had two things in here, so I'm now at 3".  (And then eventually at 0.  It's very hard to succeed with zero luggage space.)

Well, so far I've figured out:

1. If I push the left block, everything freezes and I can't do anything.

2. If I don't push the left block, there's nowhere to go and, um, I can't do anything.

I don't usually post "I don't even know how to get started" comments, but--

I think maybe it needs more thinking?  I was given

Target touches Node 2. Target is 1 nodes from Node 3. Node 3 is EAST of Node 2.

and the target was Node 1, which is on the other side of Node 2 from Node 3, and thus very much not "1 nodes from" Node 3.  Unless I'm very deeply misunderstanding how distance is being measured.

something is wrong. i can get "st" for #1 but then no matter how many times I type "ay" after it, I can't get him to stay.

please get him to stay. i am so sad now.

(Seriously this was so well done.)

Clever as always.  Really love the jumps from "right but that makes this impossible" to "wait hold on what if" to "yeah no great thought but it won't work" to "hey I got a big gold trophy!".

Perfect vague hint; also got me there.  Thanks!

Kittens!

Loved it!

This is really quite good.  (A few nitpicks: it's very atmospheric to have everything in typewritten or handwritten images, but it's a little frustrating when you have to retype an entire Caesar-shifted message instead of being able to copy it as text.  And at least one of the typewritten notes was spaced to be left-and-right justified rather than having a ragged right margin; not really typewriter-esque, and also made it harder to count the number of letters in the redacted name.)

If this is your first game, I look forward to seeing what else you come up with!

Something's going on with the controls, I think.  I had to reload the game (that's happened a few times now--the first was when I had the keypad open when I ran out of time, and [enter] didn't see to do anything) and now my movement is much slower.  Slower as in, I can't even get to the "Code is..." room that I've gotten to before.

...never mind, figured it out.  (And finished, though with only one secret, alas!)  It's very good.  And I'm glad to see it was inspired by Leap Year, because I was getting strong leap-year vibes from it (in a good way! in a "this reminds me of that game I loved" way!).

I'm loving this.  I'm also often getting stuck--I had a hard time figuring out where to go after getting block 3, and am once again after getting block 6.  (It's hard to tell from the limited minimap navigation where there might be a new location.)

Really lovely.  As I was finishing, I thought, "Is the solution unique? Could I have done it in fewer rows?" but the bonus question answered at least part of that. :-)

On the second level, how do you move the bubble to the right?

"E" picks things up (and puts them down again).  That may get you started on crossing the water--or you could just walk and hope for the best, since it only drains your power slowly...

That's too many controls I will never remember them all.

(I was...intrigued, and maybe enjoying it, until there was a tetris piece coming down and I hit "ctrl" and "R" at the same time...)

Well, this is...cryptic.

I think the main thing I want (other than "any idea what's going on") is a "click to continue" after scoring, so that I can look at the three cards, look at how they scored, and try to learn something, anything, about the system.  As it is, I'm going, "Oh, cool, +12 for circle-circle-diamond, by playing a--god, was it two green cards? I think a 3?"

For me (Windows, Firefox), the bonus round works for the first game or two, and then it hits a game where it just doesn't accept input at all (from the real keyboard or by clicking the onscreen one).

So I love the idea of "make the rules fit the seating" instead of "make the seating fit the rules"!

I did get a little stumped on the second one, where I put together the rule "At least one goblin next to elf".  The "VERIFY" result seems to show the second row not working when it's "goblin - elf - goblin", but that row does indeed have at least one goblin (in fact, two) next to every elf in it.  What is it that's wrong with that solution?

EDIT: I'm not entirely clear on the grammar of the rules.  Does "at least one goblin next to elf" mean there's at least one goblin next to every elf, or that there's at least one goblin next to some elf?

The other thing that's not clear is that I think I'm gathering that the rules have to uniquely determine the row, and not just allow the row to be satisfied?  That would explain why "At least one elf seated" isn't valid in the second puzzle (even though it's perfectly satisfiable, with either "goblin - elf - elf" and "goblin - elf - goblin").  I think that probably wants to be more explicit.  Even with that, though, I don't know why "At least one goblin next to elf" fails on the second row, since "goblin - elf - elf" doesn't have at least one goblin next to each elf.

OK, now that I've gotten into the computer, I can see how this has plenty of potential.  Don't let game jam time limits keep you from seeing where you can take this!

Ah--somehow I parsed "November 15" as today's date (which is a thing a lot of computers-within-computer-games do), and didn't particularly parse the birthday hat as "today is my birthday".  (It's an old decoration?  They came from the break room where there was cake for a coworker's birthday?  Anyway.)

Am I being particularly dense?  I can't figure out what the PIN is supposed to be; the screen is the only thing I've found that I can interact with.

The word "Chaucer" was definitely missing.  (Though it had had no trouble with "Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevky".  Length of answer in lines, maybe, not words/letters?)

"The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey"?  Might want to check your list.

Solved--now there's a game there instead of a single level! :-)

Finished it.  It's quite good.  The right length, not trivial but not so hard as to be unapproachable.  Very satisfying.

Same thing happened to me (Windows, Firefox).