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The main reason I wanted the tutorial to be self-contained was that it’s based on the same random seed each time, so that could be exploited in gameplay. I’ll look into ways of making the boss levels stand out more.

Upgrades that modify the hand/deck have been thought about and were intended to be implemented in the jam version but never made it in due to time constraints. They are planned to be added to a future update, along with other card types I have thought about, and extra gameplay features like rerolling and maybe a hold system (like Tetris). UNO was the main inspiration for the card designs, but allowing counting up would make it not fit the original game jam theme anymore (Count Down), although I do know that the game’s design isn’t directly tied to counting down specifically.

Basic wouldn’t be a rarity anymore would it? “Normal” could be an option maybe.

I almost thought the income was too forgiving because people were ending up with hundreds after having nothing to buy after filling up all their slots. You do get extra for each boss round you pass, but it’s negligible on earlier rounds. Due to somewhat poor balancing, upgrade cost does not exactly correlate to worth, so you can get pretty far with only cheaper upgrades.

Trust me, the font was even harder to read in the original jam version. I can’t really improve upon it much more without increasing the resolution of the whole game. “Common” had to be squished down to make more space for longer upgrade names like Scraps to Savings. I suppose I could also opt for making the text box wider or using an abrieviation like Comm.

The jam version’s tutorial was a lot shorter, but it was also a wall of text that turned many players off. I will try to maybe shorten it a bit and make things clearer.

The side panel shows you exactly how many points you will get after playing a selection/queue. The queue row shows how much you get for playing the queue after playing your selection. Individual card scores aren’t too important yet, but I suppose it does help to see how adding or removing a card can affect the score. You can see how much each card scored in the little +x text effect when you play it.

I will be looking into ways to expand the main gameplay loop and add more juice to the game!

The tutorial is kinda hastily put together as it’s just a regular playthrough with a fixed seed that restricts what you can play/discard for the first steps, so adding an option to go back would be difficult (other than within the same set of text boxes).

Your selection in the second screenshot only contains 3 unique colors (blue, red, and yellow), so the upgrade does not apply there. You get less points from it because 9 8 7 gets the sequential bonus (+1 mult), while 9 8 7 5 is no longer sequential.

There are currently only three possible debuffs that boss rounds can have: “Wild cards cannot be played”, “Decrease queue mult by 1”, and “Not allowed to discard”. I suppose “Decrease queue mult by 1” is the most unclear as instead of a restriction in the player’s actions, it just decreases the queue mult by 1 (usually the queue mult starts at 2, but the debuff makes it start at 1 instead).

I assume by audio you mean the music. I was wondering why nobody complained about the music as I’ve always found it insanely repetitive. Maybe if I can up my music skills the next version will have a more listenable track.

People have gotten all the way up to Round 26! It’s certainly possible to pass further rounds using the overpowered combination of the upgrades Uno/Zwei/San and Blast Off. Balancing is planned for a future update.

The gap before the boss round is for the player to put what they learned into practice for a few rounds before having a debuff put in place in the boss round.

I’ll consider adding an option to speed up animations in a future update!

Sorry to hear that the animations made you uncomfortable; I’ll probably include an option to turn them off in a post-jam version. The font will be modified as well, and a proper tutorial will be added. The clicking noise is only supposed to be triggered when you can select a card, so not having it when you can’t is intended.

When you go through all the stages of life so quickly like that, you realize that your life choices and performance in life don’t really matter in the end, and that your words were no more meaningful than gibberish. 每年都有夏花和秋叶，人生的倒计时永无止境。非常有意思的小游戏，可惜玩的人很少。

You can definitely get past a few more rounds than that!

一开始我以为是要避开轨道上的猩猩，后来才明白目标……

Nice short game about learning a logographic conscript! There were definitely less characters that you need to understand to beat the game than I expected, though maybe some were planned to be used for the third level. Numbers were the easiest to decipher but didn’t really have much use other than seeing how much time left was in the countdown. Would love to see the game expanded on!

Spoilers for players:

I managed to figure out all the answers without skipping, except for the question ending in the green and blue flag. I still don’t understand some characters’ meanings, but I managed to piece together connections. I definitely had a lot of a-ha moments for example when discovering that the characters use radicals like Chinese characters.

I also previously made a game where you had to decipher a logographic language, and when you have a game like this you can definitely expect most players to have no idea what to do. Something that might make it easier would be to have more occurences of rarer characters whose meanings are harder to decipher.

Some issues I found:

• pressing S or space skips the question when typing in a note
• the date in the top left has the wrong month
• clicking anything resets the countdown timer
• some of the inputs are blank when pressed

All in all, it was a very enjoyable game and I had fun with the challenge of trying to piece together all the character meanings.

WHAT I didn’t know you were streaming since you didn’t post a link in the GMTK server today! You actually did pretty well for someone who didn’t fully read the How to Play (I’m guessing most people barely read it actually…), but you did miss stuff like the score predictors on the left and the sequential and color bonuses. It seemed like you kept trying to play long sequential queues at the end, which does give more points, but you shouldn’t waste your plays and discards trying to make it perfect. You were just one round away from a boss round by the way!

Both come from the system of equations w = a + b + c, x = a + b + d, y = a + c + d, z = b + c + d, all mod 10. These come from each click affecting all cells except the one opposite from it. If you add these equations up you get w + x + y + z = 3(a + b + c + d) (mod 10). The modular inverse of 3 mod 10 is 7, as 3 * 7 = 21 = 1 (mod 10). So, the equation can be rewritten S = 7(w + x + y + z) = a + b + c + d (mod 10). To solve for a, subtract b + c + d from both sides, and since b + c + d is z, a = S - z (mod 10). Similar steps can be applied to b, c, and d. The second method is solving the system using linear algebra method and you multiply by 21 to make the resulting vector all integers since 21 = 1 (mod 10).

Wow, looks like Round 26 is the new highest round anyone in the comments has gotten! I feel like the Blast Off + Uno/Zwei/San combo may be a bit too overpowered…

Yep, the game is endless. I originally intended it to “end” on Round 15 before going into endless mode but that didn’t happen. And I definitely will work on a better tutorial as that’s a common issue people have with the game.

For 2x2, let w, x, y, z be the numbers in the cells at the top left, top right, bottom left, and bottom right respectively. Then, let S be 7(w + x + y + z). The number of clicks you need in each cell are a = S - z, b = S - y, c = S - x, d = S - w, all mod 10. Alternatively, you can multiply the inverse of the matrix [1 1 1 0, 1 1 0 1, 1 0 1 1, 0 1 1 1] by the vector [w, x, y, z] and then multiply by 21 and modulo each number by 10.

A very simple yet challenging puzzle. I managed to get the 3x3 after a long while. I was trying to solve it with linear algebra but the matrices were too big. I’m wondering if there’s a logical strategy that is feasible for humans to execute. I did notice that once you get all the cells to either 0 or 5 then it simplifies to binary as the number of clicks you need for each cell is either 0 or 5.

Nice little cozy game with great art. The music reminded me a bit of Everywhere at the End of Time (which is probably not intentional). Maybe a sort of calendar system would make it easier to see which flowers can be planted on which days.

Very satisfying gameplay loop, and I love the color palette and clean UI. Great work! One thing I noticed though is that the button hover info takes a bit to appear, not sure if that’s intended or not.

Simple but well executed idea! I liked how you have to quickly switch between so many different tasks under time pressure and other modifiers like the dark room.

You can always sell upgrades to buy new upgrades in the shop. There’s also a legendary upgrade that allows you to turn cash into points, but I think I made the legendary rate too low.

I already had a setup for the upgrade description tooltips, so it was easiest and quickest for me to just reuse that for the How to play popup. But I’ll definitely integrate a more full-fledged tutorial in a post-jam version.

They’re not exactly supposed to be balanced. You play the selection and then maybe a few more selections, and finally you play the queue to get all their points. Unless you meant the tradeoffs in playing a higher scoring selection for a lower scoring queue or vice versa.

The problem I had with trying to implement partial discards was that the selection system only allows you to select cards that could form a proper sequence to add to the end of the queue, so I’d have to work some things out to allow you to select arbitrary cards but not play them if they’re not playable, which may get confusing for the player.

Yeah the swaying is actually a bug that became a feature since some playtesters and I liked it. But I can see why that could be a problem combined with the hard-to-read text.

Wow, the highest any of my playtesters got was up to round 19, and that was before I implemented boss rounds, great job! And I definitely plan on expanding this with more unique features.

6 * 5 wouldn’t work because there isn’t a number that can replace * to make it a strictly decreasing sequence. You can instead play 6 5 * or * 6 5. These would be different from something concrete like 6 5 4 and 7 6 5, as 6 5 * and * 6 5 wouldn’t get the sequential +1 mult bonus unless there’s enough context to assure that there’s only one possibility for the wild card. So wild cards have pros and cons and it’s important to know when and how to use them.

It took me a while too fully understand at first, but after I did it was quite fun, and I got a high score of 280. Nice work!

The game was unable to be made as completely as we initially planned to due to time constraints, so the south exit doesn’t lead anywhere, and the last 2 spells did not see any use (the last spell does do something by the way).

You can shoot fire to see through the darkness and read the bottom texts. The shape of the east room resembles the shape of a previous room and the texts hint to what to do in that previous room. You may not know what all the symbols mean, but you should recognize the ones that represent spells, and you can look for where the other symbols have appeared before to maybe get a sense of what the symbol means. I can’t really give more information without spoiling the solution, but it’s fine if you want to give up at this point since the last room is just empty and there’s no content after that.

Hopefully in a future version of the game we will be able to add more clues to help the player figure out what the symbols mean.

The room with lots of inscriptions provides clues on how to access the last room (which is completely empty…). You’re supposed to figure out what the inscriptions mean based on how the symbols are used but it’s probably difficult to do so with so few rooms.

Yes, I’m aware of that bug already (it’s listed under Known issues). Did you earn enough money on the previous days to buy good upgrades for Day 3? You shouldn’t really need much for it.

I liked how you were able to tell a story without using any text (besides some words on the bottom) and just through the differences between each loop. I was expecting a more satisfying ending but I suppose life can be like that sometimes.

The speed cap is on purpose; the hand moves slower the lower your energy is which makes you work less efficiently.

The new mechanics introduced in Levels 2, 4, and 5 introduce that variation, but the 4-minute days seems to quite hinder players from that unfortunately.

I liked the concept, but I felt the difficulty curve was a bit too high (took way too long on even Level 2). In-game hints and feedback on which equations are correct would be nice. It would also be interesting to see there be hints for every equation like a regular crossword. Randomly generated puzzles would also be fun.

I loved the horror aesthetic and how the theme was used in the narrative, but unfortunately I found the monster to be too hard to dodge as it moves faster than the player and the dash has a cooldown.

The work does get more challenging with the new mechanics introduced in Days 2 and 4 (though obviously most players don’t get that far…) as well as the increased speed/quota in later days. And I did want to include more piece types but I did not have enough time. Appreciate the feedback!

Loved the idea of having a metroidvania but you already have all the skills you need (and with resetting instead of backtracking). The take on the Sisyphus story was also interesting and fitting for the theme. Overall you all did a very good job!

You can still combine parts even when theyre on the left because the outline shows through; you just have to move your hand around to find them (this mechanic is used during the outages in Day 4 and up). And yes, I will fix that missing period.

It was indeed mentioned in the dialogue. And I probably should have made the days shorter so that they can get to the later levels and since so many people were complaining about that…