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| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | Carraka's comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 5 20:55:45 | Wizard of Unstablely Place | ♥ 0 | Hey, Terry! Hope you're doing well! I think I got through three of the levels and then got stuck on the level where you zig zag up to get the key and then if you try to jump off it, there's a spike platform in the way, but if you take the lower path, there's a jump up at the end that I couldn't make. I wasn't sure how to proceed. If I could make one change, it would be changing the space bar to be jump and the dash to be left shift. (I actually wasn't able to get the run to work...or if it did work, I didn't notice any change in speed.) But I think that's because my mind is so used to dashing with shift in so many games. Had to rewire my brain a bit to get a handle on the jumping, and even still, I kept messing it up. A death SFX would have been nice too. Often I would step onto a platform and there was a pause between when I hit the platform and when the level reset. Keep it up! The music was very calming! Just what I need to relax after a jam. | |
| Oct 5 21:21:21 | 25m 36s | You Can Not Start This Game | ♥ 1 | What a creative approach to this game! I loved the rambling monologues too...very relatable. I appreciate a game that knows how to close itself. As I don't come from a developer background, I have no idea whether the following is an intended red herring, but when Player.log opened up, it had (among other things) the following text, and I spent way too much time trying to figure out how to modify sharedassets0.resource before eventually giving up and asking for hints, only to find the answer was online. First video frame not zero: 1 (0.032943s). Result may be out of sync. Please make sure tracks all start at 0 in C:/Users/Carraka/Downloads/You Can Not Start This Game x86/You Can Not Start This Game_Data/sharedassets0.resource |
| Oct 5 21:57:47 | 36m 26s | SANCTITY Compliant Yggdrasil Worldship | ♥ 4 | So first of all, I love the worldbuilding that went into this project. The imagery is extremely evocative. I wish there were a way to play this without printing out the forms. ALSO: the fact that all of the forms are buried in different folders, with different names for the folders and only a few items in each folder makes me think that the electronic experience was intended. After all, if it were just supposed to be a paper experience, the forms would all have boring names and they would all be at the same level in the folder structure. So I didn't print the forms. I just opened the folders and started browsing. The folders display in alphabetical order, which means the first folder that appears is DON'T OPEN UNLESS DEVIANT. Naturally, I opened that folder first and read the contents therein. I wish I hadn't read that folder first...I think this experience would have been improved if I had known what I was deviating against first. So, I would bury that sort of material inside of other folders so that anyone who gets the electronic-only experience would need to actually dig through to get to it. Anyway, eventually I realized I was supposed to start with the "START HERE" file rather than just opening each folder alphabetically and reading the PDFs inside, and my experience was much improved. I would have loved there to be more branching options for what forms to fill out next, rather than always just having to go to the next one and then the next one. For example, in the very first form, the only instruction I found was "If you have ever been convicted of crimes," etc. But what if I have never been convicted of crimes? I found myself with no option but to assume I have committed a crime and to open that form to continue the game. Searching for the YBK form was a little annoying, since it wasn't obvious that it was in the FOR YOUR EYES ONLY folder. It forces you to open every folder and search for it. Not sure if that was intended. I would have liked a folder structure system where all of the folders were the first three letters of a form name. So the outsider folder would be YBK, and then inside the folder there would be YBK-001, YBK-253, and other YBK forms. Et cetera. Eventually, I ended up at ODB-WR, which referred to a form PAS-S. I could not find PAS-S. I'm not sure if there's any way to reach the other forms, except to deviate. Anyway, I hope this wall of text tells you that I really loved the world-building, which is why I wanted to come up with all these improvements. Other than that, since this game was so text-based, I wish it had more of an edit. Things like inconsistent hyphenation of non-compliant or some items having periods at the end while other items didn't really brought me out of the world. But eh, such are the constraints of time. |
| Oct 5 23:14:57 | 1h 17m | It will Fall | ♥ 1 | A simple game with a prophetic title! I tried some different strategies like throwing the blocks at opposite sides of the screen without worrying about whether they would align. These strategies did not work. But the gameplay felt so smooth that it was still fun to try. |
| Oct 5 23:33:00 | 18m 03s | Instability Verse | ♥ 2 | Where can I find a tutorial...or something that tells me what Build or Rapire or these other buttons mean? Or the difference between a mine and a farm, other than the art? The game looks great and the music is fiiine, but I was confused. Eventually I noticed that the UI in the bottom left changed numbers depending on where I was standing, and that was when it clicked for me that maybe I should be trying to increase the stability of each square. But how to do that? Unclear...I'd recommend just writing up a quick guide to plop beneath the description so that people can at least have an idea of what they're supposed to do. Another way to make the game more understandable would be to add sound effects or visual cues that indicate when something is happening. I definitely knew when I was building buildings because I could see them pop up, but for a long time, I didn't think any of the other buttons actually did anything, so I figured those buttons were just leftover UI from a time when you had hoped to implement more features. Even just a little ding might have made me pay attention to the lower left and realize numbers were changing. I think the lower left numbers would also have been clearer if they appeared right on top of the platform you are standing on, so it's clearly linked to the platform and your eyes don't have to travel far to read it when you're pressed for time. Anyway, good job and I hope to see more! |
| Oct 5 23:44:06 | 11m 06s | The Witch Exam | ♥ 1 | The graphics really went above and beyond. You know when there's an animated menu that someone has put their time into the game...and the way the camera shifted from level to level is something that I wish we had implemented for our game (but didn't think about from until way too late). The game itself was fun, until the later levels, when I got annoyed at the puzzle design. There were missing letters and you had to fill in the right letter, but there were multiple solutions. For example, IEF and the correct option was L for LIFE, but R was an option as well, which can spell RIFE or FIRE. Or DESE came up, and the answer was SPEED, but T was also available, and STEED is a word as well. Or LITH and I'm not sure what the intended answer was here. Maybe LITHE? But I put in F for FILTH. So either design levels where there really is only word possible (definitely use one of those anagram websites to verify that there is only one possible solution), or add some sort of hint text as to what kind of potion we're looking for. Anyway, that's how I ended up with a score of 9 out of 16, failing the exam. Haha, I feel like one of those students who's trying to insist the problem is not with the student, but with the test. In other news, I loved the irony of flinging an empty flask into a potion. And I still don't know what the O object actually was, other than that it started with O. Orb? |
| Oct 6 00:16:12 | 32m 06s | It's All In Your Head | ♥ 1 | There were some great jokes in here! I especially appreciated Sir Circle. I only wish the font were more readable. Also, it would be nice if after speaking to someone, you can immediately speak to them again to get their next dialogue line. I was standing in place spamming enter waiting for the option to come back, but there was no indication of when I could talk to them, so I got impatient pretty easily and didn't do all the dialogue for all the characters, which is something I usually do. I nearly quit after finding only 4 of the 5 tokens. Turns out the fifth one was in the main map all along. I really need to commend you on the color coding in the main map. It was a great way to make it clear that there were four different areas to explore (other than the main map), setting up the expectation that you could find one flesh token in each part. So finding the token eventually was satisfying and you always knew where to go next. (The red one was hard to see on a red background.) But speaking of satisfaction...I suppose the title of the game should have told me the twist that was coming. I'm not a fan of "it was all a dream endings." It just makes me feel duped. Like...why did I spend all that time thinking about a mystery that the writer themselves said was unimportant. Which was a shame, because until the ending, I really liked the writing and the humor and the weird square ideas. But the ending was a let down. I'll just go back to groovin' with the worm. |
| Oct 6 00:34:40 | 18m 28s | Unstable Wizardry | ♥ 1 | A good length for a game jam! I enjoyed bouncing around and wondering what the next change would, and there was a great variety of different things that could happen. After killing all the monsters in the final enormous room, the game just stopped. I'm not sure if this was a bug or if that's just the end of the content. I couldn't move anywhere, or do anything, so I just alt-tabbed out to exit the game. - Definitely if you were to add any graphics whatsoever, the first place I would do it is making the monsters react when damaged. If the main mechanic of the game is killing stuff, just make it feel satisfying, y'know? - What was the difference between the two kinds of spells? I didn't notice any strategic advantage to one over the other, so I just spammed them randomly and got through the game just fine. - The wizard never took any damage. Not sure if that was intended, but once I realized I had nothing to be afraid of, that meant the only challenge there was was platforming (and I was actually pretty bad at the platforming on the bottom right part of the map, where I kept hitting my head on the ceiling and then falling between the platforms. Got there in the end, but it wasn't fun to deal with the physics, and I doubt that was intended to be as much of a challenge as it was for me. |
| Oct 6 00:44:57 | 10m 17s | Unstable | ♥ 2 | Definitely a fun idea! I think the game would improve if it were a little slower, or if at least it started slow and then ramped up. I basically never had any time to react to the color of a cube, much less attempt to place it somewhere, and if I did manage to do it for one paddle, I certainly didn't manage it for the other. I think slowing the game down would do a lot to mitigate that. I'm not sure still how much control one really has over where something goes. The paddles really only seem good at changing whether something is moving vertically, when this game's mechanics are more concerned with where something is horizontally. Maybe if there were only one paddle and you could move the paddle around in addition to just flopping it back and forth? Anyway, after I gave up on controlling the cubes, I just let the game alone and watched the cubes fall where they may. It makes for a nice screensaver. |
| Oct 6 00:58:22 | 13m 25s | U.N.stable | ♥ 1 | Oooh, this is a unique take on the theme! And super ambitious, too! I only wish I knew how to play this game. I read the tutorial twice, but it only told me what the buttons do, not what they mean. Is it good to have thoughts? Is it good for something to pass and bad for it to fail? If you increase the value of a patent law, does that mean the law generates more money or that the law is stricter? Why would it matter whether the law is stricter? (Maybe it's good for the inventors in that country, but is that something the game is really tracking?) How much money do we have to buy votes anyway? And what good is it to buy votes when you don't know whether you want something to pass? These were all questions that went through my head and without the answers, I had no idea whether whether all the different statistics on the screen meant things were getting more stable, less stable, or about the same. So I think the number one priority would be to design a tutorial that explains what everything means. Ideally, the complexity would start simple (maybe only looking at one or two types of projects for one or two countries (just the Security Council?) and then introduce mechanics gradually until you have the behemoth that a U.N. simulator should be. Or, until you run out of time to implement new mechanics... Good luck! |
| Oct 6 15:43:42 | 14h 45m | Asylum | ♥ 1 | I only wish the game were longer. There was the beginnings of a mystery and the beginnings of a daring escape, but it was over too quickly. Still, what was there was executed well. The audio was a nice touch. For the escape, I do wish there were a button that would let you restart the game. I escaped before complying (because I'm always more interested in that route first apparently), but then since I had nothing to compare it to, I wasn't sure whether I had reached the ending. The story just stopped. |
| Oct 8 13:14:38 | 45h 30m | Cake Stacker | ♥ 0 | After two levels, the cake-dropping machine never came back D: It's like it knew how bad I was. I also didn't quite understand why I was getting congratulations for 4-stacks when there were only two cakes that were falling off the platform. But hey, if that's the quality that the customers want, then it's good enough for me! |