itch.io

As a concept, it's good, but the execution feels like it could use some work.  Idle notes from a couple of rounds:

• It's really easy to overlook exploded bombs, because they're dark on a dark background, and therefore fail to count them.  Giving them a different background would help a lot.
• I won the first round, and it told me something about a bomb that was getting added, but I didn't really understand what it meant.
• In the second round, after I clicked on a bomb, it revealed over half the board (is that what the new bomb did?), which made it impossible to win (I ended up with 30 gold), which felt like a pretty serious consequence of one misclick.

There's already an E as part of its set; it should be pointing to that E, as far as I can tell.

Sorry!  Yes, it's rot13, translatable quickly with, say, https://rot13.com/.  (Serves me right for coming from a world where that's immediately recognizable and therefore forgetting to explain it.)

I am utterly stalled on the last one, and I think my not understanding something in the next-to-last is making it harder.

Va fdhner gjb, V gubhtug gur oenpxrgrq-fvk zrnag "sbyybj gur vafgehpgvbaf va fdhner gjb bs tevq fvk", ohg gubfr vafgehpgvbaf ner "hc hc yrsg yrsg", juvpu vf abg cneg bs gur cngu gung fdhner gjb vf ba.  Nz V zvfvagrecergvat jung gur oenpxrgrq-fvk zrnaf?

Aha.  I had AI-assisted suspicions but didn't actually know before now where to look for the tag.

Dear developer: setting aside any questions about the wisdom of using AI, I'd suggest running through your game a couple of times before releasing it.  However you code things, AI or otherwise, it's always a good idea to try to catch mistakes before they go out into the world.

Seriously, though, what are we looking at here?  You'd think that after thirty days the developer would have noticed this.  Or indeed after one day.  Or preferably before that, in testing.

Yeah, this needs like a few thousand more trigger warnings.

Is the illegibility of the file part of the puzzle?

It's very cute, and I like the journal aspect!

One thing to think about is that nonograms become a lot easier to complete if you can click and drag--especially true if you have to click several times to select the right stitch.  (To create a line of six box-shaped stitches, instead of click-click, drag, it's click-click, click-click, click-click...it's very repetitive.)

Glad you're on top of this already, because I had exactly the same thought as clansing: I did see the hint about the New Year's party being on Sunday, but a party on the night of the 31st is (in my dialect? I don't know) a "New Year's Eve party"; something called a "New Year's party" sounds like something you'd hold on the day of the 1st.

(So it should just be as simple as specifying that it's a New Year's Eve party.)

That aside, I enjoyed the deductions and the clues!

This was very good: a clever new take on pathfinding.  Some of the levels were much easier than others: #10 took a little care but not so much that it needed more than one attempt, whereas I took several attempts to get #7 and many, many attempts to get #9.  Overall very satisfying though!

ok but what is it. is it just a troll?

It's intriguing, but:

• The controls for turning are really slow.
• I couldn't tell what pink vs. white meant on the stars.
• I can't tell how you can tell where the connections go.  Is it just a matter of going from star to star and trying each connection?  (Again, this would have been easier if the controls were more responsive.)

On the one hand, "leave yourself behind as a platform" is, apologies, not the most original mechanic.  On the other, though, the level design of bridging spaces, moving straight up, and handling moving platforms do bring something fresh to the genre.

But there's one thing it needs, and that's a reset button that removes all your past selves.  If you're thinking "But no one could play this game so badly that they'd leave a practical wall of bodies that they can't progress past": hi there, it's me.

EDIT: OK, I made it to the end, but just to give you a sense of how bad it was, this is me and I swear I wasn't trying to see how badly I could block myself out.

Bit of a problem--when I finished the third level, it took me back to the hub on top of a lock (the middle of the five lower paths), which kept me from moving at all.

Neat!  (Also love the credits level!)

Aww--this was really sweet!

On the one hand, I wish the quotes mode would give you more information (e.g. either "when did Trump says this" or "who actually said this"; I recognized some, but not all, of the fake quotes I saw).

On the other, "giving more information" wouldn't be very Trumpy, would it?

I love the basic premise--it's a nice little logic puzzle and there's a real satisfaction in revealing the picture.  (I'd recommend not titling the levels; I didn't notice them at first and tried not to look once I knew they were there.)

The presentation could be a little difficult though.  It was sometimes hard to see the removed lines, which made it harder to use information like "(non)consecutive)".  It could also be hard to tell which lines were borders of regions--specifically, when mousing over a number in a region, the color change made it clear which possible lines were borders, but not always which already-set lines were.  More than once I moused over a 3, saw three possible lines, and started clicking them without having noticed that there was also an already-clicked line that also bordered it.

But as prototypes go, it's quite nice!

A little short, and a little anticlimactic (why would you even make that trade!?), but pretty good up to that point and I love having to buy the start button.

Actually, same problem (Firefox, Windows).  Bought a second card, first card keeps flipping, second is just an empty space.

Also: what is the deck codex?  It keeps alternating between being blank and having the eight through ace of diamonds.

Disclaimer: I have a doctorate in linguistics.  My experiences reading an unfamiliar language in a game may not match anyone else's. :-)  (But yes, I totally played Senaar in hard mode.  And was extremely entertained by the game's translations of words that we had very, very differently.  "Hippie" comes to mind.)

For this, rather than replacing, I could imagine a mouseover/tooltip thing, though since it's already the case that mousing over a Trevosan word has an effect on it, I don't know if that would work (I am not a front-end programmer, not since the Rounded Button Incident).  Though that would be tricky in its own right, since you either [rot13 spoiler for morphology] lbh'q unir gb ragre lbhe tybffrf sbe gur -b-/-nv-/-r- sbezf bs rnpu jbeq, be ryfr gur vagresnpr jbhyq evfx tvivat njnl gung gubfr ner sbezf bs n tvira jbeq.

(Speaking of which...there was one point where i ended up finding a document by gnxvat n jbeq V unq--fbeel, ybfg zl abgrf, V guvax vg jnf gur bar V naabgngrq nf "thneqvna (a.)"--naq punatvat vgf ibjry gb nabgure ibjry gb, V guvax, gel gb svaq qbphzragf jvgu "thneqvna (s.)" va gurz, juvpu vg qvq.  Ohg V'z cerggl fher gung vg nyfb ghearq hc n qbphzrag jvgu gung jbeq V nyernql unq, juvpu zrnag V pbhyq unir whfg pyvpxrq vg.  Juvpu znqr zr guvax, "Jbhyqa'g vg or pbby vs gurer jrer n obahf qbp gung lbh pbhyqa'g trg ol pyvpxvat, bayl ol frnepuvat ba n zbecubybtvpny inevnag bs n jbeq lbh nyernql unq gung qvqa'g nccrne va nalguvat ryfr?"  (Ohg gur nafjre gb gung vf cebonoyl obgu "ab vg jbhyqa'g" naq "tb jevgr lbhe bja tnzr".  V fubhyq tb jevgr zl bja tnzr.  Naljnl, guebjvat gung bhg gurer.))

Long story short: cannot wait for more Jamwitch games. :-)

I would like an option to replace a word with our personal translation of it

I actually really liked it as it was.  That's certainly an immensely helpful tool in many games (Senaar, Heaven's Vault, Epigraph), but those differ from this one in a few ways.  First, those have entire grammatical structures to parse, and this one is only the vocabulary, embedded in English; second, in all of those you're annotating rather than outright replacing.  (I think that was true in Senaar?)

In this case, though, the first third of the game was spent switching back and forth to my notes going "talo, talo, oh, right, that means that, so ok, back to the text...", and by the last third of the game I was reading the text without notes and talking back to it: "mmhmm, right, right, of course you don't respect the beelon, I--hey!  That's your leevaith you're writing to!  Show some respect for her oleth!"  I thought it really helped the immersion that you're absorbing the language.

Anyway, just an alternate take on the mechanic. :-)

You had me at "inspired by The Roottrees".  Or maybe at "language deduction".  Or probably at "new game from jamwitch".

Really excellent and engaging.  I was so genuinely sad to learn how "the Clipped Wings" got their name, and only really frustrated that "the Ultra-Snarky" wasn't available as a sobriquet for either of the sisters.  But seriously, so good, so rich in detail.

Oddly, I can jump...once.  After that the space bar doesn't do anything.

For the record: have returned, have finished, have loved. :-)  I don't know why it feels so atypical--you'd think a lot more IF games would involve research rather than exploration--but it does feel like a fresh take on things.  With a whole lot of backstory.  Nicely done.

Man, Inform 7 is like magic, in that who even knows how it works.  (Obviously not true.  I even know people who know how it works.  Still: magic.)  Glad to hear it was eventually debuggable, and I look forward to getting back to this!

Hey, so, very intrigued, but the game froze for me at one point.  So I downloaded the zip version and ran it locally and it froze at the same point, which makes it look more like a bug than a browser problem.

Sadly, since it's frozen, I can't paste a transcript or a command history, but roughly speaking what I had done was:

• Attach an antler to a black blade, and label it T5.
• Repair three shards to make a bowl.
• read list -- this is the command where things freeze.  (read list at any point before the latter repair is fine.  I didn't dive deep enough into debugging to find out whether it freezes even if you don't do the knife first.)

I have no idea if this is helpful.  (I did check the browser console to see if it reported anything useful; it did not.)  Looking forward to getting back to this, though!

It's a cool concept, though it's also tedious to click on letters when decoding rather than typing them.

But...I have to admit I gave up when I hit "My name is Ash. I'm inheriting his work", not because it's too hard a puzzle, but because that's a lot of letters to have to type one by one while looking at the code and retyping if you get anything wrong.  Especially without a backspace.  It took me three tries just to get through "This isn't Caleb" in part because when I accidentally put in a space in the wrong place, I had to hit enter to start over.

Honestly, for all the paper puzzles I've done (which is a lot), I don't think I've ever seen mirrors in nonograms before.  This was fun!

The text is very small.  And...does the description of the mirror say it's one-sided, and the other side absorbs?  Because that's clearly not true.  

Alas I did not--I didn't look to see if there was a way out of the loop, and was already feeling, to be honest, a little frustrated by the lack of clarity on what the chests were even doing.

On my browser (Firefox, Windows), in fullscreen mode, things cut off at the right side.  Which I didn't realize until I had 2/3 active idols but only two idols visible in the lower right.

It's intriguing, but I feel like it could use a little more guidance.  The red symbols were clear enough from experimentation, but I didn't really understand at all what the treasure chests did.  (One of them moved me two spaces.  Sometimes?  Very confusing.)

Unfortunately, after the second set of--fireflies?--I stepped on a chest, and it moved me two spaces north onto a red symbol, which moved me two spaces south onto the chest, which moved me two places north...and I was stuck in a loop.  Presumably unintended!

May well come back to this.  Curious to see what's going on here.

> I had a ton of fun making this, even though it's unfinished

Hey, games are hard.  Xenolinguistics is hard.  Getting anywhere at all on either one is impressive!

I hope you decide to return to this.  I've felt for a while that game jams are great if they give creators a sense of urgency to make something, but they run the risk of encouraging people to dump what they have and forget about it.  If you had fun making this, I hope you find the time to make it more complete!

Short, but incredibly cute.

I hear you.  I'm a month behind on writing Enigmarch puzzles because I can't seem to make whatever, and I keep turning ideas over in my head and not getting them quite right and then never getting to them.  Kudos on getting this out there.

Anyway, solved it; it's a doodle, but it's a fun doodle.

I like the concept but...the words I went out on were ABYRENE, AURILLIAN, and IMPASIVE, which as far as I can tell are, you know, not words.  I guess they could be words in a way that CKOFUTAU can't be, but still, it's a little weird to be playing "identify the fake word" and lose because you identified fake words.

EDIT: when I restarted, I was given WORRY, USURP, ESTOP.  Which is unfortunate because all three of them are words...

OK, works now. :-)  Was honestly surprised that almost everything was additive, i.e. I could just throw in another word or punctuation mark.  (On a second run I got "can't contain an N" and I had to change "king" to "rook" and then I had to change the initial "G" to "K", but pretty small.)  I was prepared to need to use "saturn" so that it could also satisfy the day-of-week rule, because a length limit would pop up.

Still, brief but entertaining. :-)

I have to say, having the rule cut off below the bottom of the screen does add an interesting challenge...  (Windows; Firefox.)