One shot

liauj 2019-04-29 13:33

One of the paths I took ended up taking so much text space, I couldn't scroll further to continue. I had to back-track to a different path.

I liked the concept, but it was hard to put myself in the shoes of the protagonist (antagonist?)

synedraacus 2019-04-30 05:25

Thanks for the feedback, @liauj. Could you recall which path that was? Somewhere around the Mad Max reference? I'm fairly sure there is a bug or two in there.

As for the protagonist, well, yeah. I don't think it would be really possible to get someone sane to like the suicide bomber.

mikelovesrobots 2019-04-30 06:32

Wow. That's bleak. Interesting game though.

eyedromeda 2019-04-30 12:52

A really cool game with great writing. Some ambient music and maybe a different font would've tied it together, but I definitely enjoyed it either way, and the hand drawn notes were a nice addition. Nice job.

synedraacus 2019-05-01 02:42

@eyedromeda Yeah, some ambient would really help, but I just didn't have the time. Good point with the font, it's something I just forgot about.

dimoon-ly 2019-05-01 20:14

Cool game with good writing, and I enjoyed very much, thanks for the nice job.

foolmoron 2019-05-08 15:21

Very interesting perspective for a story. I think you handled the writing really well not to glorify or too greatly identify the player with the character, but still provide a clear motivation and goal to achieve. The disaffected casual writing was especially effective.

evan-minto 2019-05-09 06:24

I don't see enough narrative games in LD, good job! I like the idea of having a bomb you can detonate at any time and calculating whether you want to do it now or wait it out. It has a nice tension to it.

I like the writing but parts feel a little rushed (there are typos and some sentences are awkwardly phrased, etc.). That makes sense in a jam game, I imagine you would do another pass on it for a post-jam version.

I was having a little bit of trouble understanding the bomber's political philosophy. The intro kind of paints them as an anti-capitalist, but then it seems like maybe it's just nihilism, since they seem to be angry at "the man" in general and don't have any idea of what society looks like after the bombs go off. I wanted to learn more about that but maybe the lack of coherent ideology was the point.

synedraacus 2019-05-11 05:52

@evan-minto Yeah, the project is pretty rushed. Hopefully I'd do a post-compo version, both editing the minor mistakes and maybe extending the hostage dialogue. Maybe add a Russian translation while I'm at it.

>they seem to be angry at “the man” in general and don’t have any idea of what society looks like after the bombs go off.

That's the impression I got from reading the Unabomber manifesto a few years ago. If I recall it correctly, the idea is that you need to shut down the modern civilization, then it's Mad Max for a little while, then a better world with pre-Industrial Revolution technology somehow emerges. The last part doesn't sound very convincing to me, but then I don't feel like living in the woods and mailing bombs to universities. Unlike the rest of us, Unabomber does believe that the modern society is so fucked we're better off taking the gamble.