mossgames 2019-04-29 01:19
Pretty neat twist on interactive fiction!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD44 → ｉｎｖｅｒｔｅｂｒａｅ
By jjjjason
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 41 | 3.91 | 122 | |
| Fun | 141 | 3.47 | 123 | |
| Innovation | 13 | 4.12 | 121 | |
| Theme | 363 | 3.00 | 115 | |
| Graphics | 364 | 2.93 | 116 | |
| Audio | 71 | 3.61 | 120 | |
| Humor | 190 | 2.90 | 102 | |
| Mood | 19 | 4.16 | 124 |
Pretty neat twist on interactive fiction!
Great interactive fiction, and really creative! I like the concept of being able to go back into the past and changing / seeing different events based on the words you collect throughout. This would be a really great project to continue on, by adding even more branches to the narrative!
Spooky vibes got me deeply immersed in some text! Great job
Just trying to play but I can't seem to do anything on the initial screen; the options are 'close' and 'set' either of which can be dragged to the prompt at bottom left but I can't click 'ok', press enter or type anything. What am I doing wrong?
@paul59 There are some highlighted words in the story as well that you can interact with. The contrast could probably do with some increasing.
I'm read a lot so interactive fiction really appeals to me. I liked all of this; the narrative, the visual presentation. Great work.
I really like the idea a ton but I'm a bit stuck personally after having just gotten to the end. I thought there were a few obvious branches but I feel like I'm missing stuff and it's hard to discover what that is.
you can pet the cat
Brilliant concept, I haven't played so much storytelling and text games, but it was a great experience. Really spooky after a while and a telling a story in this game is fantastic! Keep it up!
Excellent and elegant mechanics, on the one hand focuses on parts of the text, on the other hand, creates a feeling of research when you need to put words into possible actions. The first time I see this.
narrative and presentation was really clean and well created.
Theme fits and it's very polished, I don't usually like interactive fictions but this one enjoyed me.
High level for a compo entry, really creative and innovative.
Really cool game ! The concept is very neat, the ambiance is really nice, and the execution is top notch !
It was a bit hard (but I'm not a native english speaker, which could make it harder for the expressions and combining words), but I went to get the story.json file, and with it it became easier and allowed me to check path that I did not even think of ^^ If you have time for a post-jam session, maybe you could add an help button, that can help the player by telling them if there is a path that they did not explore yet from this screen, and if they can get to it with their words ;)
Really cool game, very original for a game jam ! Good job !
This is so cool!! The story is compelling to read and it fits very well with how you interact with the game. I did end up having to read the source code at one point to figure out what to do, but I'm glad I did since I got to read all the paths and your internal names for them. Also the music definitely added something. This makes me wanna try to make a writing-centric game sometime.
Very good story, and the collecting of words was a very clever element. Got stuck after the bluff in bosses office and returning home however, could not open my door because I had spent the word already.
Well done! I liked it!
Thanks for the feedback and nice words everyone!
@dodormeur An indicator for when not all valid answers have been given sounds like a fantastic idea. Stops you from just throwing down answers hoping that you'll be able to do something else. Perhaps a little star next to the help button that lights up?
@zondarg Great to hear you liked it! There are two routes to the ending, and you chose the trickier of the two (congrats :smile:). You were very close, here's a hint that's been [ROT13'd](https://rot13.com/): qb lbh jung lbh qvq gb trg "bcra" "pbzchgre" bire gur cnfg ebhgr, ohg va erirefr gb trg gurz onpx gb gur cerfrag ebhgr.
This was awesome! Favorite entry that I've played so far. I did have to look up the script once, I had missed that you could take the word 'before' from the email attachment.
All in all, really innovative mechanic, really interesting take on the theme, great mood and atmosphere! Not to mention it's a fellow "just a website" game like mine. :) Really good job!
Help button needed, I got stuck on the email :joy: Spooky vibes, feels like I'm peeking into something that I'm not supposed to. Gonna go through the source code and play all the routes!
As i first saw this game, i was extremely mindblown by it's twist. I never really played interactive fictions before, but this is really good! Also the minimalist graphics really fit in my opinion
I enjoyed it! I don't know why but it reminded me bandersnatch :)
You said short? this was very long for a compo game, and every minute was great
i was not sure how to play it exactly. somehow i managed to bring words from the right panel to the bottom input area but what to do next??
@nexusviper It’s sort of like those old text adventures where you have to type in the right commands to get the the game to do anything. Once you drag in the right phrase, the OK button will light up and you can click it.
Wow! Very neat. It all works really well together.
I may be dense but I wasn't able to figure out any branching paths besides petting the cat >_>
This was awesome, really well done! The music was so good - really added to the vibe. You really nailed the graphics/ambiance from the game. I also thought the way you made the story interactive was really cool, and being able to go back and try different combinations was a great idea. Like others have said, I think this would really benefit from some kind of an indicator about whether you've tried all combinations. Overall, this was amazing though!
Very cool concept! Nicely executed too! Took a while to find the right combinations after hoarding all of the words lol
I got stuck after the email part but it was still pretty awesome! Quite an interesting take on the genre and the theme! Super original, I loved it!
Loved the twist of this game. And it's definitely creepy. I got stuck when I came back to the house a second time and played through to the first ending to find nothing had changed. I'm not sure if I was supposed to go back to the house or do something else earlier ... there didn't seem to be any hints about how to progress from there either.
Thanks for giving it a try everybody, I really appreciate! 100% agree, I think some sort of indicator for "hey there's stuff you can do here!" would be super helpful.
For anyone who's really stuck, I added a link to the internal story file above. Feel free to take a peek behind and get back on the right path.
@carraka You were super duper close to the ending! Through the route you took, you gained two things: an additional word, and some additional knowledge. I think you have everything you need to get to the end, but if not, feel free to take a peek at the file above.
Wonderful experience! A bit of a longer game, but the story was quite nice! The graphic design of the site/app was really well done! Clean and easy to read the text. I wish the selectable words were more visible, and some of the solutions were a bit unsatisfying to figure out. Lovely music, great story, fun game! Thank you!
5 star game. This is amazing. +10
Whew! What a ride. Extremely innovative way of doing a text adventure. Loved the music even though it was only like a 8 second loop. Fun gameplay, although some solutions were rather ambiguous (I did need the walkthrough to get the ending). Very well done.
Thank you for including the link to the story file! Helped me see some things I missed out on (lol @ stairs end) and definitely helped keep my rating schedule on track. The short music loop you made is simple but really sells the whole package, great great decision adding it.
Some quality of life improvements would have been nice, like not having to collect all the words again when backtracking, better feedback to avoid the "zillion combinations of trial and error", etc etc.
Fun regardless!
Great game.But have less mood and I am kinda bore
This is great. Reminds me of https://www.letters-game.com/ but creepy rather than cute.
Great experience! I really like the concept. Congrats!!!
It was weird and interesting. I really enjoyed it!
"PET EMAIL" :smile: didn't work though! Nice game, good job!
oohhh this is really good. Totally failed to finish it as I got stuck at the end but could definitely spend more time playing!
Awesome entry, well done!
The music does an amazing job at setting the mood, and I wish there was more of it! It would have been great for the stairwell to be trippy or for the boss scene to be anxious/urgent. Great story and great concept!
@zarkonnen Yoooo thanks for pointing this out to me! Super wondering if anyone else had explored this mechanic before. Definitely will put it on my wishlist!
Great game! Very creative idea, well written, and perfect atmosphere. Played through the whole thing and only reached for the hint for the second-last clue. I might not have used a hint if it was a bit easier to "get around". A couple suggestions: - collect words automatically as you go to "before" - have a "quick select" for already discovered word combos (provided you have the words) - trim down the number of words (e.g., "disembark" and "deboard" maybe could have been the same
For a Ludum Dare game this was amazing! Had lots of fun puzzling through it, and I'd definitely play a longer story.
@boxedmeatrevolution Hey friend, thanks for the nice words and the itemized feedback! I’m working on a stand-alone blog post to generally address feedback, but I wanted to jump in on the last one since I thought it was kind of funny.
So the engine I wrote that’s driving the game has had a core issue from the start: it barfs at duplicate words, especially if the user managed to put two of the same word in their wordbank. I told myself “ah it’s ok I’ll fix this later” and then two days and four words for “get off the train” later it’s still there :laughing:
A post jam version of the game would definitely get that right cleared up.
I actually noticed that I never played your game and wew, I had a blast.
Not because of the game itself but because of the mood. I mean, there's no much gameplay but the writing and the music were exceptional. I think there's a fine line that divides pretentious with artistic and this is right on the artistic side, and I really love works like this.
thanks for taking time ;)
P.S: There's a bug. Opening your cat doesn't work :thinking:
xSHoRfT.png
I really love the narrative coupled with the ominous music! I especially loved when the other instruments would kick in as you reached parts of the story. Everything creates a really amazing atmosphere.
A small note - I love dragging the text in place, but sometimes it got a bit cumbersome as I was going backwards and collecting words to drag them back in place. I feel like it could be helpful to let them return to the right panel with a click rather than having to drag them back.
Awesome work!
Really a fantastic entry, I played all the way through, took me way too long, especially as someone who grew up with Zork. I really enjoyed the story you were telling, and the way you told it.
Some mild criticisms: I think the music got really repetitive. I eventually ended up muting it. I would have loved if it were easier to remove things from the selection bar, dragging things in and out got pretty tedious.
All things aside: I got an hour and a half of playtime out of it, and thoroughly enjoyed myself, so well done!
@occultone Hey friend, thanks so much for playing. The idea of anyone playing a game I made for such a period of time is bewilderingly joyous. 100% agree that the selection mechanism can be improved -- drag and drop is sexy, but it's not the most efficient :smirk:
I think the music in its simplicity is ripe for expanding upon, such that you aren't listening to the same little ditty over and over again. At the very least, I would have loved to make another track for the past-heist.
You did a great job. Anything that gets me to play for >30 minutes gets high marks in my book. I have a NOTORIOUSLY short attention span.
Very spooky! A changing background, or a gradient would add just a bit more colour to make it more eye-catching.
Very cool method of interaction! It all clicked the moment I understood what the last sentence of the bad ending meant.
Really cool. The music really sets up the mood and the way the story is told is very intriguing.
If I have any complaints it's for QOL changes. Multi select and ability to quickly remove all answers would be nice. Other than that, maybe you could make a graph based approach? Like each node would be a block of text. And once you would be able to swap between alternate answers that would lead to a particular scene.Sorry if that didn't make much sense.
I also found that the okay button disappearing too be annoying later on. It fit with the 'this is not what happened' section but not with the others, Is it a bug?
I really liked this idea with dragging and dropping the words, the story was intriguing, a bit difficult at times, so I had to look up the guide. Some more hints would be nice. Also considering the story took over 1 hour for me to complete, the ending was a little unsatisfying sadly... I wish there was a bit more explained about what you were doing, what "invertebrae" was or some sort of plot twist. The ending still left me wondering and I wish there was more to it.
Thanks for the additional feedback everyone!
@arcus That’s a pretty neat suggestion. When originally designing this one of the ideas I (very) briefly had was letting people choose their own terminal palette. I think having dynamic, smoothly transitioning palettes would be pretty cool, and potentially a good way to signal that the “path” you’re on has changed.
@akirassasin I still feel that line needs some workshopping, but that feeling of “...OHHHHH” is 100% what I was going for, so I’m happy it worked.
@fahim-faysal The button disappearing is intentional, as the game was designed to require at least a little bit of inventory management (e.g. your words are stuck in the past! how do you get them out?). However, looking through the feedback so far it doesn’t seem like this was handled in a terribly fun way, so I’ll need to work on it a bit more (I don’t want to scrap it altogether, as I do like the core puzzle-ishness it adds).
@fat-cat I’m preparing up a formal post about it now, but one thing I honestly was completely blindsided by was the actual length of the game. Seeing comments above plus talking to my friends have indicated that the game is waaaay longer than I had expected (I mean, when I’m testing it already knowing everything it takes me like five minutes to blow through lol). I’ll have to find better ways of figuring out playtime in the future, as there are many things I would have prioritized if I had known (such as writing an impactful ending rather than just a teaser :joy:).
Oh my god, this was SO GOOD! I loved the storytelling and the story itself, I loved the mechanics, I loved the idea, the sound design, everything! You did such a good job!!!
Very unique entry!
Loved the game!
One of the best ones I've played for this LD so far. Don't really have anything to add that others haven't said, I'd play a full game like this for sure.
Very smart and innovative game. I loved the unsettling atmosphere created by the minimal music, interface and story- perfect example of "less is more". I agree with other people about the drag and drop- I was playing on trackpad and I suspect it was worse on here.
The puzzles were good which is probably why I and others got stuck playing for 1+ hour. If you wanted to expand the game further or make a sequel, you could have puzzles that combine words across more temporally distant frames, or have more play on words/riddle types. But honestly everything about the game fits together so nicely as is.
Overall, excellent work!
clever game and i really like the element of looking for the words to use next -- great game -- thanks for making it
enjoyed the game, struggled to find the highlighted words at first. Thanks for the game!
really cool variation on an adventure text game! I ended up using the guide as it wasn't immediately obvious sometimes to me what I should be doing (usually if I thought I was in the office but I was still actually in the stairwell, or I thought I was still on subway, not outside of office). I ended up collecting all the words I used as I went backwards so I think I needed to do, but then I had a lot of choices that I could potentially make. Perhaps having more alternate pathways? Anyway, nice job!
Very nice ambience overall... The intro track reminded me of the Resident evil safe room :)
Very cool and unique game! This is very innovative and the writing was immersive. I really liked combining words in different ways during the first half of the game. I got frustrated when I started to accumulate so many words that it was taking up two pages. Pretty quickly I found that combinations that made sense to me weren't valid choices which was too bad. Reasonable for a game jam game though. I wound up opening up the JSon to cheat a little and see more of the story. Very original! Would love to see more like this.
@jamesolivermusic Oh yeah, I can sort of hear that. Thanks, it’s a flattering comparison!
Very nice and original idea. :twisted_rightwards_arrows:
@candlesan @aeveis Thanks for the feedback! I think ultimately in a future version I’d like to just decrease the number of words altogether and increase the per-word utility.
For example, there’s a couple of small paths in the game that are just there for optional flavor, such as the smoke break (“head out” during lunch talk). Do you think these small “flavor-paths” add anything do the experience? Or should all paths preferably be consequential? At the very least there’d be an indication that these flavor paths are dead-ends, so you don’t spend your day trying to figure out how to further extend your smoke break :joy:
@jjjjason Ohh yeah, if I knew which paths were dead ends that would help a lot. I liked the flavor text, but not doing what to do next was a big problem, since each possible step could have a potential path(s). Maybe for the sake of exploration either letting players know it's a dead end, or if there's more potential at that moment?
@aeveis Makes sense! Was discussing this with a friend (based on @dodormeur’s idea), what we had come up with as a potential solution was a circular icon next to the question mark that would
- Be solid if there’s solutions you haven’t tried that you have the words for - Be hollow if there’s solutions you haven’t tried that you don’t have the words for - Be faded out/invisible if there aren’t any solutions you haven’t already exhausted/this page is a dead end
This wouldn’t fix the “too many words!!” issue but it at least would prevent people from wasting time. And maybe for the hardcore folks out there could be a “moon logic” mode that permanently turns the icon off, lol.
Hoooly that was an awesome game! Played it entirely (Did this just to a few games in this jam)
The narrative is very good, and somewhat funny (The boss part is the best)
But I had an "Issue" with this game - Lack of the ability of double clicking the word for fast placement/removal
This wasn't reeaally an issua, but it would have made my experience far better (Nothing that removed points from my rate)
I loved how you had to go back and foward through time for grabing words that you had to use somewhere else
About the storytelling one Issue - How did I received the e-mail and I said "Oh, so it work" when I didn't do it yet, I could have received it but I wouldn't answer that it worked if I didn't really do something, got it?
Just that. The game is Awesome, Congratulations!!!
An interesting game indeed. A new - for me at least - kind of text adventure, quite far from the classic "You Choose Your Adventure" mechanic. Music fits the mood perfectly even though I would have liked a few more variety.
Well done!!!
The best storytelling game I've played in this jam so far. Excellent job!
What an amazing game! I loved the narrative. I think that the initial difficulty in understanding how to use the interface is ok. I couldn't see the different colour at first. The when I realized I could go back and collect words I was really excited! I think that the absolutely genius thing you managed to do was to solve an old dilemma: long text in narrative games , but I should say long text in general, is easily skipped by the bored user. They go through it quickly, just to grasp the idea of it. It's really hard to catch the average player's attention, to make him want to read more. But you brilliantly did so and made the user hungry for new branches to read carefully, looking for precious words that can change everything. I asked myself many times how to make narrative "rewarding" in this sense. Great job!
For me, I could not make the story progress at all. No buttons worked.
@jadedresearcher Oh no, I’m sorry! First off, make sure you’re zoomed out enough—you should see full boxes with no sides cut off.
After that, look for the words that are brighter than the rest. You can click and drag those words onto the word box on the right, as well as the prompt on the bottom. If you put in a correct answer, it’ll light up the OK button.
The game really should have a better indicator of this. Perhaps a ghost cursor that finds and drags the first word for you.
Sadly this is not working properly on my laptop (Linux Debian build - All software up to date). In Chrome there are bits cut off and buttons not working and in firefox nothing displays at all. I will give this a go on a different PC tomorrow as I do really want to give this a go. Will comment again after trying this.
@sahoskins1 I’ll try and debug FF. For chrome, you should just be able to ctrl minus and zoom out. Apologies for not handling various monitor sizes correctly.
Edit: on a whim, is there a chance you have JS disabled in your Firefox? I tested FF Nightly latest on both Windows and Mac OS and it works as expected, trying to get my Linux friend to check it out.
Double edit: my Linux friend can run the game in Firefox, but it’s also too zoomed in due to the small laptop he’s using it on
Triple edit: Realized I am using a JS method that was not added to Firefox until version 62. That might be a reason for a full crash...
Overall, this is an excellent game, with a really clear and crisp presentation that works excellently for the type of story you're telling. I'm really impressed with the story you were able to create in such a short time.
I will, however, sheepishly admit also to reading _story.json_, simply because I wanted to see what happened, but the mechanics of trying out answers became a little tedious when repeated constantly (especially when I was trying to find out-of-the-box combinations). Dragging the words was a great tactile feel the first couple of times, but then I just wanted to get into puzzle solving mode. Nonetheless, excellent job, can't wait to see more!
Thanks to everyone that had suggested clicking for moving the words around. Double-click to move is now in the first post-jam update and god*damn* does it make things quicker.
This is a very cool idea and the music works really well and creates great atmosphere!
Really cool game ! It has a nice feeling to it and I believe the music has got something to do with that. Unlike a lot of other entries, despite the game being pretty long and letting your mind wander on the music it doesn't get tediously repetitive, on the contrary. Maybe a tad bit of sound effects could have been a nice (nothing too flashy but like a soft click when you get a combination, a little feedback when you drag a word, and perhaps a faint typing sound of the text ?).
Narrative games seem pretty rare for jams but they're one of the type I usually enjoy most, and indeed the story kept me invested. I got to the end but there's still a lot of mystery going on (although I didn't read the whole json to see if I could glean a few more information). I'm not sure I understand how the theme ties into it though, was hoping the whole invertebrae thing to be linked to it (selling information on some type of lifeform ?) but maybe I just didn't explore the story enough.
I found the main mechanic (picking up words and keeping them to make actions) interesting and I think you did a really good job fitting the different word in context (at least most of the time :P ). The ability to go back is also really cool !
Technology wise I think it's cool you made this game in React (instead of a specific game engine) and open sourced it. It was also interesting to see how you formatted the story as a json (actually it's surprisingly similar to how we did it for our game, which we originally open sourced but went back on because of shame about some of the things we did to make the game work ^^").
You managed to fit in a lot of content for a Compo and I think the result is really cool :) . Great job !
@ashtrail Hey, thanks for writing so much feedback!
Haha, the theme tie is definitely a bit :thinking:. Mechanically I was going for sort of a pun, interpreting currency -> currentness -> progression of time. From a story standpoint, I guess it's less that the MC is currency as much as they are pawns used both by their workplace, as well as "them". I don't want to go too far into it lol, this is something that needs to be telegraphed in-game rather than in-comment.
The tech implementation of this was very fun! Making the game a webpage rather than a raster canvas made some things super easy (text rendering of course, taking advantage of browser APIs), but also made some things a lot more tricky/unconventional (no traditional game-loop, how do i perfect-pixel-scale things, etc).
And I think the most important thing I want to say is you (and anyone else who reads this) should really open-source your game code! I am a huge proponent of learning through open-source projects, and if anything, the tricky parts of your code base that you're not quite proud are the *most* educational. Some tasks are just hard, and require hard code! Plus, it can teach newcomers that your code doesn't have to be awesome to make an awesome game.
I'm thinking back to when the Celeste devs [released the 5400-line behemoth that was the Player controller](https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/03/05/celeste-movement-code/). Of course you got a lot of armchair programmers criticizing it on Twitter. But at the end of day, Matt and Noel made Celeste and those armchair programmers didn't. I think I know who'd I rather learn from :smile:
Tried it again after you updated it and it now works fine on my machine. Was interesting to play this one. Is not like anything else I've played in this jam. Well done for trying something new! It could get pretty frustrating at times but puzzle games in general have the ability to do that. Nice job on this :)
That was very cool. The concept of collecting words to use as actions was great, and not something I'd seen before. I would love to see a full version of this concept with more branching and possible options. I played the post LD version where you could double click words which helped a lot with navigation, but I feel it was still a bit tedious to remove letters.
@shunaky Ah whoops, I forgot to respond to this. Whatever route you pick in the past, it still ends up with you doing at least part of the important action. Therefore whether or not you’re able to get the real ending, the present version of you feels like they did something, and email “confirms” it, hence the reaction. Even before you go to the past, it being the past already happened.
@jjjjason Oh, makes sense.. Pretty clever, actually! ^^
Really enjoyed this one! The music was simple but enhanced the experience a lot. Moving back and forth, gathering words to get more options - I loved the puzzle elements. I agree that it would be nice if clicking "before" automatically put words used on that page back into the bank. I would have liked a more conclusive ending, but overall the writing was really solid!
All i can say is wow. What a unique experience
What a truly amazing game this is. I am glad you posted the guide, otherwise this would have taken me a lot longer to beat. (Not that I wouldn't have tried!)
If I had one minor point of critique to offer is that I often felt like I went too deep the rabbit hole, like there were multiple things I wanted to try in a scenario, but by the time I reached the end of a path I would have forgotten what they were. Something that might be helpful would be a visual representation (like a tree) of where you have been, and which scenarios still hold alternative solutions. I think this would be a nice help in not missing anything.
Super interesting and unique experience. I'm not smart enough to figure it out though
Interesting project. I like to find words and use them so as to progress in the story. The quiet music was perfect. For a compo entry I am very impressed by what you did in a few days. Well done ++
This was well executed, and the addition of putting the words you can collect in bold was an excellent update. I loved the music. I definitely referred to the guide after a while, but I made it! Cool concept and great execution!
Surprisingly immersive! I'm sure my company's security team would love this too :)
I really really love this game, I love the minimalist UI, the font you choose, the music set the mood perfectly, and I love how the theme is used. So much in such a short time! I didn't finish it yet, (but I will) and your guide helped me for one situation (for now) so it's pretty usefull. It become more an more difficult as you progress in the game with all the world combinations you can get, but it also makes me want to try them all! Great job! :)
Good job! I needed help to finish the game but still liked it a lot. :slight_smile:
Ok. Reality check. This is one of the best games. But also, extremely hard to finish without the guide. Some kind of keyboard typing (such as first letter of the word, or first few in case of ambiguity) would help tremendously. This way, it's kind of slow.
But honestly, very well done.
@mags @linheha @kaisean-games Thanks for checking it out, and for leaving feedback. Really appreciate it!
Yeah, I’m still formulating ideas on how to make some of the solutions less obtuse. Besides better writing (ofc) and decreasing the number of words altogether (and increasing the number of spaces you can use any single word), from a UI perspective I’ve been knocking around
- An indicator for whether or not a screen has more solutions you haven’t tried yet - A hint button that would highlight words in your word bank that can be used on the current screen (but not what combinations, in the case where there are multiple solutions, or where you don’t have all the words needed)
Both of these also would ideally be options, so for the three people out there that want the most obtuse moon logic experience they can get they could turn off all help :laughing:
At the end of the day, the guide is useful for the LD context (the game can go for quite long without it, and there are many other games to rate lol) but ideally I wouldn’t be distributing a walkthrough with a completed game.
This was fantastic. Definitely a bit confusing at parts so I ended up looking at the story structure. Really cool method for handling branching paths and giving the player more options as they play. The story was interesting and the music fit the mood. Really nice entry.
Fantastic game! The level of depth is amazing! The story is engaging and really well written. It keept me going for half an hour and I'm still not sure if I've found all the endings. You only had text, but you still managed to pull of a very atmospheric and consistent design with that. The music lend it itself quite nicely to the atmosphere of the game. The mechanics made the whole experience much more interactive than a standard text adventure. Amazing job! Also, pet bonus :D !
There is only one tiny little issue I have with your game: Why is THIS not a valid input? Anmerkung 2019-05-06 221901.png
@awesomealliterationalliance Thanks for the kind words! I've been wanting to make a text-based narrative game for a long while now but wanted to avoid making it straight interactive fiction (no knock on IF by the way I love 'em, but it's not the kind of game I wanted to make). Even with some of the obtuseness, I'm glad people generally enjoy the core puzzle mechanic.
Also very happy you enjoy the aesthetic--in a text game ambiance is going to be *everything*, because the last thing you want (and what @tommyflower explained really well above) is for people to get bored of reading, lol.
Also yeah, that line's preeetty gooood. My sister had managed to come up with `figures out suspect`, and I'm hitting myself for not finding a way to integrate that.
I can only repeat: This was fantastic.
I found this to be a very well-polished game! It was a little difficult at times, and I frustratingly I found myself having to refer to your story guide once or twice, but the main mechanic of taking words from the text and then using them to perform actions is just ingenious! I would have loved for my own text-based narrative game to be as well-finished as this is. Great job!
Wow this is a really interesting game, super original, super moody, perfectly writen, amazing. The game kept me super interested in what was going on (and I'm really not into this type of games). Beautiful execution, top notch.
This was such a fun puzzle/adventure with so many different paths for a game made in just 24 hours. The graphics are nice and create a really ambient mood combined with the audio. As far as gameplay goes, this was awesome. I definitely had to "cheat" a bit, but I still had a lot of fun playing it. Amazing work!
Also, the "Big Woof" ending where you pet the stairwell was great lol. :D
Woo, thanks for the comments everyone!
@joshyoshkenoshi While I thank you for your kind words, don’t put your own game down dude! Not only should folks not do that in general, but your game in particular is a really comfy story with great characterization (and a fun mystery mechanic on top!).
Impressive. "Big Woof" saved your "Humor"-grade greatly. Probably the most polished I've played this LD. Owing in part to its simple mechanics and style, but still. Gives off a professional vibe and contains some solid writing.
Very nice and engaging story. One of my top picks for LD. Good idea on making the important words bold. /me watch confused cat find the suspect
Really interesting storyline, cool audio - nice job!
Amazing narrative, and the sentence completion mechanic is also good to add some sort of owership feeling over the protagonist's story.
You could add more hidden texts and actions, at least to allow the user to see more about the world thorugh the protagonist's eyes and also hunt some keywords, like allowing the user to see accross the subway window, see through the apartment window, look up and down the street ... describe the character's suroundings, toughts and feelings...
@ivan-garcia-filho Ooh, the idea of jumping between narratives using words sounds pretty neat, and would jive pretty well with the way the game works currently. It would be quite a lot of writing though to support a non-linear, open world text adventure :joy:
Ahhh it's been a while since I've played a text adventure! Really enjoyed this! Very refreshing and loved the story! Have you considered making this like an Alexa or Google home voice app? I think it'd be really cool! You should do it!
Really cool. I wish that there was a mode that let me know when I wouldn't need a verb again... I ended up carrying them all around, but then it became time consuming to figure out how to respond. I wasn't able to win, but I did play it for 20 minutes, so thanks!
@comicsans Thanks for checking it out, and no worries--having watched some people play it in person the word burden is real haha. I'm workshopping some ideas to make it a bit more manageable for the future.
Cool mechanics mixing words! Maybe the words don't have all the possiblities that the player wants, but it's nice. And the story is great! Great job! :clap:
great story, the music creates a special mood. Find it great that you don't just have to click on the words but can arrange them like a puzzle.
Congrats for your entry.
I didn't latch on to the UI interactions at first - I tried to type, click on the words, drag the words to the prompt, but I had to look in the comments to realize I should "collect" highlighted words in the text. Once that became apparent, it was quite an innovative way to design the UI to drag and drop the words. I was playing games in the early Sierra era and liked the old graphic "type command" games even though the game design back then was flawed in many ways - but I still like seeing a prompt text commands. I also found the XML implementation interesting, I haven't done any conversational or stoyline based games before so this taught me a bit about how to approach that. As for the game, I played it for a while to progress through the chain of events but it didn't keep me too captivated, probably because I am not so great/patient at reading =) The music was somewhat repetitive but at the same time it had a nice mood to it. Thanks for your entry!
What a cool game. At first I thought it was just a linear story with good writing, but once it started looping I was thouroughly impressed. The music is super nice as well and both tracks fit really well, though the main loop is pretty short.
Some of the puzzles seem a bit too cryptic and I'm not gonna lie - I peeked into the source a few times. In the end I *lost* some words and wasn't sure where I left them, so I just browsed the rest of the story from the shared repo.
A few minor gripes: - it would be nice if the player could reorder the words after picking them - I'm not really a fan of the 'everything is lowercase' approach - that makes it ever-so-slightly less readable IMO - the player can view the next page of words even when there no words to view yet (the previous page is full)
BTW. You have been busy with rating games, haven't you? That amount of ratings is super impressive.
Oh dude, really a great narrative job and puzzles design. It would be nice to replay for me again, havent finished and I wont read the guide! : _D Well done!
Thanks for the comments everyone.
@imphenzia Happy to see you were able to progress with the UI. In the post-jam version the "?" button contains some instructions on how the UI is expected to work, but it would definitely be better if I could describe this somehow visually--maybe the first word is auto-dragged by a robo mouse cursor. I'm definitely going for the old prompt aesthetic, but maybe it's to the point of being deceptive, lol.
Re: implementation, yeah I would totally recommend storing things like dialogue in a separate markup file rather than in code. Means that you don't have to recompile every time you want to fix a grammar mistake, and also potentially makes it easier for less technically inclined people to contribute (heck, if you wanted to you could probably make a GUI that understood the schema of my story file, kind of like Twine).
And to your latter point about holding interest, I feel the goal of a writer is to entice people that might not even be interested in the first place. This is the first story I think I've ever written (save for maybe middle school assignments :smile:) so I still room to grow when it comes to enticing the reader (and making the puzzles clear, as other people have remarked).
@secretpocketcat Yeah, while I'm happy to provide the source/story guide for the context of Ludum Dare, I definitely need to better balance difficulty and obtuseness in the future. While I think a bit of cryptic is a part of the charm of these kinds of games, obviously having people give and stop playing is not a great outcome (no one wants to be added to the [TV Tropes Moon Logic](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MoonLogicPuzzle) page).
Concerning lowercase, I personally like it aesthetically (it feels very modern and "internet") but I hadn't considered at all how it would affect readability, so duly noted.
And yeah, I've put my Switch on the shelf for the last two-three weeks and my only electronic entertainment has been Ludum Dare games lol. I'm definitely privileged to have gotten the amount of feedback I've gotten, so it's only fair I try and pay it forward. Plus to be perfectly honest, lots of Ludum Dare games can be fully experienced in less than five minutes, so it's not too hard :joy:.
@pequenodev Haha, I'm very happy to see people sticking with it. You can definitely beat it; heck, you're probably farther along than you think :wink:.
Nice atmosphere and the verb actions were quite logical. But If you mess up the order of the words you are screwed. I couldn't find a way to remove or reorder words.
@sergi-montaner Hmm, you should be able to drag words from the Prompt back to the WordBank if you want to remove them. If this isn’t working for you, can you tell me your OS and browser
Play style was inventive. Not really my kind of game but overall I thought it was well done.
Like this concept, reminds me the Don't feed the Monkey! The word interactable helps me focus on the text.
Yeah, it figures! I am laughing really hard right now! :-)
I had to look at the JSON story because I did not find the "before" key word in the text. The words could stand out even more to make the puzzle even remotely solvable. I think that even without that I would have at most a 50/50 chance to have solved this first puzzle.
I have to say, these solutions are really not intuitive for me. I basically had to read the story JSON for all of them until I stopped playing. This reminds me of old adventure games like the Indiana Jones and Sierra games (and for me Thimbleweed Park as well, even though they did not want that) where you cannot conclude the answer from what you are given and eventually try every possible solution by combining any words with each other. That is not the goal of the game and not fun which is why I did not play your game through to the end.
I still love the idea and the story is well-written and accompanied by a great background music. Really good job. Except for a few technical things that would have made game play a little clearer, this is a really good idea.
Great job, keep up the good work!
Ok, I tried and it works, thank you. I didn't think on doing that. Also it is counter intuitive to move words that I got from the main text to the WordBank to be able to modify the order. I know it is small time for the jam, would it would be great to be able to just reorder words in the prompt.
Thanks for the feedback everyone.
@sergi-montaner I agree, being able to rearrange words within a container would improve the experience wholesale. It was 100% just a time limitation, haha. In the end though, I think the frustration created by having to dance words around in the first place, as @gonutz said, is that some of the puzzles are obtuse, and the answer domain balloons as you hoard more words.
In a perfect world I’d design the puzzles and the narrative tree such that you only have the words you need plus or minus three at any point by decreasing the number of words and increasing the number of answers. But a perfect world is hard (unless you’re Jonathan Blow or something :smiley:) so at the very least some UX improvements are welcome.
You are totally right, creating puzzles and making them accessable is very hard, especially in 48 hours! So don't mind, I am not really all that good at puzzle games in general, although I like them. Still looking forward to your future LD entries! :-)
Really fucking great! :D
@jjjjason Would it be ok for you if I get inspired by this? ^^
@narrenschlag Only on the condition that you send me a link once you’ve made whatever you’ve made :smiley:
@jjjjason Sure I will! :P
Guys, I see you've mentioned some technical issues here. I also would like to say that I need to know more about performance testing in order to check out my current mobile device. If anybody has some assistance, give it