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Cool to hear a bit of the behind-the-scenes. And once again, great work on this game. I had a lot of fun playing it.

Gotcha. I'll try to come back to it tomorrow or later in the week.

I rated all of the games off camera after the recording. That includes yours.

Here's a video of my playthrough, which contains my feedback. I play your game at 3:49:17

Here's a video of my playthrough, which contains my feedback. I play your game at 3:30:00

Here's a video of my playthrough, which contains my feedback. I play your game at 3:13:42

Here's a video of my playthrough, which contains my feedback. I play your game at 3:09:33

Here's a video of my playthrough, which contains my feedback. I play your game at 3:03:10

Here's a video of my playthrough, which contains my feedback. I play your game at 2:55:58

Here's a video of my playthrough, which contains my feedback. I play your game at 2:18:37

Here's a video of my playthrough, which contains my feedback. I play your game at 1:38:20

Here's a video of my playthrough, which contains my feedback. I play your game at 1:05:52

Here's a video of my playthrough, which contains my feedback. I play your game at 55:16

Here's a video of my playthrough, which contains my feedback. I play your game at 33:21

Here's a video of my playthrough, which contains my feedback. I play your game at 25:13

Here's a video of my playthrough, which contains my feedback. I play your game at 18:20

Here's a video of my playthrough, which contains my feedback. I play your game at 7:07

Here's a video of my playthrough, which contains my feedback. I play your game first.

Recording the voices was a lot of fun, but pretty stressful as well. We got five of our friends to come over (nephguy did the sixth voice) and we had to have all of them there at the same time since all of the characters have dialogue with all the other characters recorded at the same time from separate mics. To speed up the process, I had a python script where I could hold space to start a take, then release it to end the take. Then it would save both audio files (one for each mic) into a folder with random filenames. Then it would print out both file names to console so once we got a good take I would copy those filenames into the conversations.json file. This rapid-fire approach let us zoom through the lines without having to click through audacity menus every time. Still took three hours though lol.

I had to coach the actors a bit to make sure they all put on voices different enough that they could be distinguished easily by sound alone. Sam had to sound stilted and monotone. Alfonso had to sound brash and rowdy. Zoe had to sound energetic and outgoing, etc. And they did a much better job than I was expecting from five non-VA friends paid only in free pizza.

Thanks so much for playing and for the kind words!

No need to apologize. A lot of people use game jams as practice in the art of game design and that couldn't be the case if there was some arbitrary minimum standard of quality you are expected to meet in order to participate. As long as you learned from this experience, it wasn't a waste of anyone's time. But at the same time, I've played probably over 200 game jam games so it's hard for me to sound super enthusiastic about every single game I play. I just try to give useful feedback.

The conversations are different in volume depending on distance from the currently selected microphone. But I assume you're not talking about that. It's pretty likely that the different characters (or even different lines) have different volumes just because of our voice actors being different distances from the mics (and not being professional VA's lol.) We didn't have time to normalize the levels on the 100+ audio files so it just is what it is. It is a little intentional that Alfonso talks louder than Laura, for example. That's just a personality trait of the characters.

Return of the Obra Dinn was definitely an influence, as was Her Story. The story in those games are a bit more compelling, but that's in part because we decided to go for 'functional' rather than 'interesting' in order to make sure the whole thing worked at at least a gameplay level. If we decide to expand on this concept, the first thing I would want to do is come up with some more interesting intrigue lurking under the surface and write better dialogue around that.

Thanks for playing!

For the tutorial, I really don't think you need all that text. The game isn't super complicated and actually could probably be intuited by 80% of players with no tutorial at all. Imagine if the original Super Mario Bros. started with a wall of text explaining all of the obscure mechanics of the game and a list of enemies and all their abilities. It would be completely unnecessary. That's kind of what you're doing when your tutorial spends most of the space explaining the scoring system.

Here's a video of my playthrough, which contains my feedback. I play your game at 2:55:00

Here's a video of my playthrough, which contains my feedback. I play your game at 2:24:34

Also, I realize that I spent so much time discussing the puzzle mechanics, I never got time to compliment the graphics, which are really nice! Great color palette and detailed backgrounds that don't overcrowd the main game elements.

Here's a video of my playthrough, which contains my feedback. I play your game at 2:15:40

Here's a video of my playthrough, which contains my feedback. I play your game at 2:08:44

Here's a video of my playthrough, which contains my feedback. I play your game at 1:59:28

Here's a video of my playthrough, which contains my feedback. I play your game at 1:48:32

Here's a video of my playthrough, which contains my feedback. I play your game at 1:44:42

Here's a video of my playthrough, which contains my feedback. I play your game at 1:25:37

Here's a video of my playthrough, which contains my feedback. I play your game at 1:17:49

Here's a video of my playthrough, which contains my feedback. I play your game at 1:06:04

Here's a video of my playthrough, which contains my feedback. I play your game at 1:06:04

Here's a video of my playthrough, which contains my feedback. I play your game at 58:06

Here's a video of my playthrough, which contains my feedback. I play your game at 48:10

Here's a video of my playthrough, which contains my feedback. I play your game at 34:37

Here's a video of my playthrough, which contains my feedback. I play your game at 24:51

Here's a video of my playthrough, which contains my feedback. I play your game at 20:17.

The reference information is nice to have, but it's a bit clunky. At the start of the game. I had no idea what any of the text boxes on that page meant. I figured it out by checking it constantly during the tutorial to match what I was seeing in the tutorial levels to information on that page, but it wasn't as obvious as it could have been. I think it would have been good to have that information as a text element in the level so the player can read it while they're doing the thing that the text explains. That as opposed to needing to click through two menus in order to find that information.

Having both the number and the durability as separate concepts threw me a little at first, especially since the number of conversions until breaking is not obvious from the sprite. (Unless you go back to the reference info and directly compare, which is clunky.) I don't think the durability mechanic is bad, (it's important for a lot of the puzzles) I just think it could be represented better to the player.

There is nothing in the tutorial that mentions that you can pull elements or requires that you do it to pass the level. I only figured level 1 because I remember seeing something about a pull mechanic when glancing over the game description. If it weren't for me remembering that, I probably would have been at that level for a while not knowing an important key to the puzzle.

Undo could use a hotkey, as well as a press-and-hold function to skip a lot of moves really fast.

All that clunkiness asside, the game has some really nice mechanics and you used them well in the five puzzles. I particularly liked levels 2, 4, and 5. Every time I thought I had it, there was just some little complication that got in the way I had to work around. 5 was really tough. I had to rethink the problem several times until I found a plan that worked. As a hard puzzle game lover, this really hit the spot! Great job!