Flat Line To Happiness

machocodes 2017-12-04 04:03

Well Done Dillon

darylsteak 2017-12-04 04:32

Nice, especially how the music fits the story and how the story also fits very well into the theme.

jk5000 2017-12-09 21:20

The idea and story is pretty interesting, but the game is super slow. The music and graphics is really good. Overall a fine LD game.

webthingee 2017-12-15 04:01

nice work, I was surprised how sucked in I got. :)

araani 2017-12-15 05:14

Link to the web version doesn't work = (

chadrbanks 2017-12-15 06:22

Very enjoyable! I did reach a point where I got another popup from my prescription giving me more time, however I could not click okay to continue. I had to quit playing. The click animation was moving the button, just couldn't get rid of the overlay. 5/5 would play again!

tyranosaw 2017-12-15 06:52

This game is very fun simple game. The graphics are great and really effective. I especially like the transition between each day, it feels a lot more nicer than it would have if it didn't.

I understand that this was made in two days but there would be a couple things that i would've added. These things are just small details though, things such as sounds for the mouse (when hovering over buttons and selecting buttons, a clicking sound might've really worked). Another thing would be mouse hover information. Personally, i think that there should be a panel that pops up when you hover over the computer, shelf or door. Because honestly, i forgot that the shelf was an option until i started clicking all over the place. One last things was that i did feel that the game got a little repetitive after a little while, i got to a happiness of 250 then i felt like the same thing over and over again. Not sure what you could've add, as you said in your stream adding more things would have made the game much more complicated, which is true. Oooh, maybe when you click on the activity, you actually do the activity. but once again, only 2 days.

All in all, this is a great entry! Would love to see a built and evolved version of the game! Congrats!:smile:

miziziziz 2017-12-15 07:13

I like the concept here, but it has some mechanic issues: It took a bit to figure out I need to click the ground below the computer to open the screen, or the ground behind the door to do an activity, and that directly clicking the computer/door doesn't do anything. It's easy to spam cheaper options like going to a fancy restaurant and renting a racecar and you can get enough happiness daily to reach the goal before you die. Also, is it random how much happiness you get from an activity? I couldn't tell if there was a mechanic in place that makes you derive less happiness by day if you keep doing the same one over and over.

If you plan to expand this into a full game I would suggest putting transition screens showing the activity when you choose something. Also, adding intermediate goals would be great, e.g. 'make some friends' 'get abs' or something. Right now, just aiming for 1000 is very slow and I ended up quitting at around 300.

Overall, I think you have a good foundation for a fun game here, and you did a great job creating a proof-of-concept in the short time you had to make this.

roxter08 2017-12-15 07:16

Its a really innovative approach. Love the graphics and the choices I can make to spend money. Would like to see more visuals of the options I choose. Keep up with the development !

zax 2017-12-15 07:39

I really like the graphics and the idea keep it up! don't forget to check out my game too :)

bificommander 2017-12-15 11:26

A very clever idea, but perhaps 3 months to live would've worked better. That, or more activities that take multiple days. I didn't end up finish the game, so I never found out if pouring money into medical research actually gets you a cure :p

kobi-hawk 2017-12-15 11:33

The premise and mood are really good! Graphics are solid and the interesting music choice worked really well. The game feels empty to me though, like it's missing one core mechanic that ties everything together. Maybe like a day-to-day event system that brings together the theme of the game "money can't buy happiness"?

papaver 2017-12-16 01:36

So, that took really long. :P I was playing with a friend and when we had 100 days left we were 562 happy! But soon after, everything we did was not making us happy. In the end, I miss-clicked and spent too much money, with 8 days to go. Instant kill. Noooo, we wanted to see what would happen at 0 days. ;) The game is very slow-paced, I wanted to give up quite soon, but we persevered! (All the months seem to have the same number of days, starting on the same day of the week. :P ) The stocks only seemed to go down. When buying stocks, it was a bit annoying that I couldn't see how much money I had. We enjoyed making up reasons why we increased or decreased our happiness. It is funny how the mind tries to make sense of it. ^^ I think with some adaptations you could make a nice game out of this!

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dr-v 2017-12-17 06:13

Nice game with nice message. The UI could be a bit better (seeing how much money you have when investing), and the stock-market doing something other than crashing would be good :)

local-minimum 2017-12-17 13:04

I played a couple of days. Trying to figure out a bit about how the system worked, but found the interactions a bit cumbersome. It would have been nice if all tiles around each interaction point that were reasonable to view as that item would have triggered it. Not just a single per interaction. It took me a while to figure out there was scrolling because the color of the scroll-bar was so faint. It also felt like the number of days and the happiness rewards made progress too slow early on so that it felt like I would have to play really long to see anything happening. While at the same time, it wasn't really clear how the challenge worked. Some solve similar issues by making the game a clicker. Or at least building up a progression. Maybe you would not even consider most options until you've reached some level of happiness?