yojammerjammer 2017-12-05 06:17
Another visual novel game! Yay!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD40 → The wreck of the Pulstar-VIII
By oceanosaurus
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 246 | 3.77 | 39 | |
| Fun | 577 | 3.31 | 39 | |
| Innovation | 775 | 2.94 | 39 | |
| Theme | 684 | 3.29 | 39 | |
| Graphics | 306 | 3.94 | 39 | |
| Audio | 521 | 3.00 | 39 | |
| Mood | 148 | 3.86 | 38 |
Another visual novel game! Yay!
Nicely done. Kept me busy until it was solved. Great little game.
Thanks for the comments!
Art and storytelling are really great, but the pacing might be a little off due to very long expositions. Shaving off a few lines of text here and there could have made this a little better.
Really nice story, done very nicely. I'll have to find all the endings! ^^
OMG, I've wiped humanity from the universe... who cares?? ahahhahahahah! Very nice game! Art is VERY good: simple and beautiful. Congratulations.
Very good and tense atmosphere, even though the atmosphere is incredibly gloomy (the suicide scene was tough). That's the kind of game, that makes you feel uneasy after playing...
The premise is good, and the theme integration is clever, but the writing and story was pretty disjointed. The gameplay is also kinda hostile to the player. Visual novels with "game overs" are annoying.
Very cool take on the theme. It's a little wordy for an LD game (we're all trying to play as many as possible) but I'm defintely bookmarking this one to play later!
Thanks everyone for the comments! @iamtalin Yeah, it's hard to find the balance between too much and too few information. You can always use the skip function though! ;) @jungle Thanks a lot, really glad you liked the art, took my almost one of the 3 days to make all the assers.
So many ways to not to manage killing off just about the right amount of crew. And then humanity vanishing. Very nice game. I like the take on the theme. While the interpretation you used kind of hints that the game would be hardest in the beginning. Which might not be optimal as there are so many ways to try and set the ball in motion. It would probably have been more fun an experience if it got harder the fewer there were left. So most first murders would be fine, few second, only one third. Then I don't know, because I never managed to make it. But I would have been inclined to have solution (or at least on of them) be excluding the captain yet managing the goal of only having two left.
Well written and a good atmosphere.
I very like visual style and well written story line. Good game!
@local-minimum thanks a lot for playing and for the feedback! Actually the original idea included suspicious progressing (as in the characters would become more aware of your actions after the 1st murder) and also suicide-possibility (being able to successfully complete the mission by dying). Unfortunately had to cut both off due to time restrictions. Would love to update the game in the future!
Reminded me a lot of "Gods Will Be Watching"...down to being a dialogue-heavy game written in terrible English. The radio guy puzzle was interesting, but getting the doctor to commit suicide felt like a bit of a stretch.
Also, please. It's bad form to FORCE the player to do horrible things and then call them out on doing EXACTLY WHAT YOU GAVE THEM NO CHOICE BUT TO DO. I didn't ENJOY having to kill my crew, okay? Don't pretend like I was SUPPOSED to. :P
This is really impressive! Great art style and very in-depth branching story, especially with the time limit. Awesome work on this - really well written and great feel to it!
My god, I did multiple runs and I managed to complete the game, and now I feel really bad :( The game is pretty cool, it's nice how you have to know your crew in order to kill them without leaving evidence of it. Very nice art and the audio gives a nice feeling. Great job!!
Very well done entry, certainly a diamond in the rough.
That typing sound!!! That Damn typing sound. I was like Garr! click. And I missed a piece of the dialogue! more Garrarrarr... Pressed the "back button" and was like "Wow, that worked, I wen't 'back' from the game, back into the dialogue!" If that was not a 'feature' you built in, then it's a damn good bug! :)
Got pretty close to the goal, I was left with the Engineer and the cook, kinda felt like they both deserved to live more than me as Capitain.
Surprised you could get that much of a story done in that short of a time. The game was similar to the text adventures with graphics before the age of point and click. Dark decisions!
Nice to see another visual novel! While the story and characters aren't that fleshed out, the premise itself is really cool and a great use of the theme. I really like the art too!
Really cool art style. Love it.
Didn't find more than one final. But due to what I read in comments, I know there is not only one, so, I say good job and go back killing my innocent krew, finding who I can save or not.
Super solid entry, congrats on finishing it while taking care of your students! Thought the game was quite fun, I enjoyed getting to the end. That said, here are some thoughts:
- The artstyle was simple but it worked really well. - My first instinct was getting to know these people I was going to kill, but the characters felt quite shallow and asking everybody about everybody was tedious. Making deeper characters would have been hard, specially during a jam. Perhaps reading reports about each member of the crew would have been a more pleasant way of showing more information. Then again, it was a short jam game, super tough to achieve this. - I don't know if you can do this on renpy, but adding some input delay would be nice, I missclicked dialogue options a few times. - I really liked your take on the theme.
Once again, well done! :-)
Cool, good work on setting the mood and good use of the theme. Figuring out the puzzle elements of how to kill off the crew was interesting, but I also wasn't a fan of being chastised by the game for doing the only things the game allows you do to progress. Like... seriously? Also it could've used some proofreading and a more readable font, though those weren't huge issues. Still a pretty interesting experience, good work.
(contains spoilers, heh)
Nice use of the theme :) I found many ways to keep 1 crew member alive and also a way to keep none ^^' I didn't find a way to keep 2 of them alive then "suicide" the captain. I'd understand the absence of that option if the game made clear that without the captain the ship couldn't reach it's destination, but with a smart AI computer it felt automated enough so that , without a crew to manage, the ship wouldn't really need a captain.
In the end the captain depicted here really is a "murderous bastard" that would do anything to survive, and didn't even consider at any point giving his own life to save 1 more crew member (heck, nothing even prevents you from killing all your crew members...) This game tells more about the captain than the other characters :)
_**Edit** : okok the "tell the truth" endings seem to make it clear that the captain is necessary to reaching the planet and there's no other way around it. But there's still the fact that you can kill ALL crew members !_
I did enjoy trying to find the different endings! I found a bug though: - The cook can be both in space and in the freezer at the same time (make the doc kill herself, send the mechanic in space, send the cook with her then put sleeping pills in the food, then the cook will suddenly be here telling you about the lack of food)
Oppressive mood, 5/5, well done. Reminds me of several old space games by Yahtzee Croshaw. The gameplay is very trial-and-error and reliant of knowledge from the future, but you are upfront about that. The high production values in the art and feature-rich options and main menu make the spelling errors all the more jarring.
I like how the theme is incorporated into the story: The more witnesses you have, the worse it gets.
Well done! I included it in my Ludum Dare 40 compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look. :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvj17CkuZ1U