Thoughts?

fabula-rasa 2023-10-03 22:44

Oh, I have many thoughts. Some of them might require censuring :laughing:

This was quite surreal. Even more so, as it started "badly" the first time I ran it and all I saw was a black screen with the timer in the corner (the pineapple question never came). I tried every key on my keyboard and waaaaited and waaaaited before finally giving up and restarting. I think the game hates my double display setup. It launched fine on the second try.

I loved the photos and the stray thoughts on the pop-up windows, and hated the theme slaughter. I think that if you're gonna make me click on 1000 themes (or thousands, if I'd be willing to do that again and again), you should put in 1000 different ones - it's only fair :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: And they repeated much too much. Also, the flagging didn't work. I tried to flag them all. All of them (*evil laugh*)! But they stubbornly remained unflagged. Also no. 2, I think you should make it use DuckDuckGo instead of Google - support privacy in the web :grin:!

From the technical point of view, the game is really unique. You do some wonders with UI, all the windows, transparencies, transitions. You are missing a dancing bear, though. I demand a dancing bear! I found the low droning music oddly relaxing. But that maybe my 72-hours jam addled brain.

From the interpretation point of view, I'm uncertain. I think it's a free flow of thoughts to me, random and uncontrolled. What the brain does when left to its own devices. But I may be just too focused on the title. I found it curious that accepting a theme spawned a thought window and rejecting it didn't. Were those a "theme considering" thoughts, or just diaries of a madman? Or am I trying to apply too much deconstruction to the thing?

By the way, I stuck around all the way to 00:00. And the ending was disappointing :laughing:. But I do agree with at least one thing: BG3 is a very good game.

Me, slaughtering: Screenshot_9.jpg

trexxak 2023-10-05 20:32

@fabula-rasa Oh wow, thank you! Yeah, I guess there's so much possible user behaviour in it even I can't really tell what was intended behaviour and what was an honest bug anymore D:

Also didn't expect anyone really considering really slaughtering the second round of themes - seeing as it's kind of ridiculous to ask you to slaughter so, so many more :D I actually agree with the search engine part, I tried to remember how the original worked, and afaik it would lead you to a __-search... Which is no excuse, as I already play around with stuff, yet in early stages I wanted this theme slaughter module specifically to feel as real as possible - except for the flag mechanism, which I felt was simply too annoying to keep track off too. A smarter person would've perhaps just scratched it from the get-go :D

So, the counter ending was admittedly something else that was left on the cutting floor. I intended the game to delete itself when the counter finishes, but later on decided it was a bit excessive and ultimately just an easy to circumvent gimmick. So the timer just... ticks down and eventually closes the game :D

Dancing Bear! Yes! Amazing idea! Remind me a few days before LD55 starts :D Honoured by the praise on the UI-work u_u

Oh btw, I just included a Linux Build aswell. Just didn't have time yet to test it... not that the Windows Build is super quality-assured lol :D

100th-coin 2023-10-19 18:12

This was certainly an experience, and I'm afraid I don't understand the objective. Real talk though... Under your tech specs, you mention "Overconfidence and self doubt" and I'd like to share that I've been there. My LD34 game was just bad, I even wrote inside the credits to my LD40 game "I am not proud of this", and even after learning a ton over the years, my LD46 entry was such a flop. You said you weren't happy with this game, and I'm sorry to hear that. Recently I've been struggling to make my games more intuitive. I had a comment earlier today where the player didn't progress in my game at all, and it honestly hurt to read. They didn't provide great feedback, which also didn't help. Now that I've just been put in those shoes, not understanding the game at all, allow me to provide as much feedback as possible.

From my perspective, it appears the objective was to interact with the popup menus, possibly navigating them as a tree with some specific path ending up with the game's conclusion. (Or perhaps the conclusion is vague, open to interpretation, or unimplemented) A lot of the menus were spinny colorful ones, which didn't seem to lead me deeper into the tree, so I think the objective is to simply close those ones and move on. The theme slaughter seemed to lead somewhere, but I'm not sure, and I'm not going to click on 1,000 more themes to find out. If it does lead somewhere, keep it small, and if it doesn't go insane with it. Make the number, like a billion or something. You want to make sure the player knows what is and isn't intended, and making the numbers absurd is a good way to do that. In a similar analogy, if a pressure plate opens a door in an adventure game, but the door *sloooooowly* closes when the player steps off it, they might assume with enough speed or some strategy they could make it under the closing door just in time. If that's not the intended solution, you want the door to close really fast so they don't even attempt it.

I also had the "NOT IMPLEMENTED" screen, which I'll take at face value and assume it's not implemented and indeed safe to close out of. If it actually *did* lead somewhere, I don't know what you were expecting the player to do other than close out of it.

The transparent windows is interesting, but leads to some issues when recording. I'd rather not showcase my messy desktop, or whatever discord messages I have open. I know most people won't be recording though. On the topic of transparent windows, it leads to issues clicking on other windows behind the transparent one. That being said, I've seen very few games with transparent windows, and it's certainly a neat gimmick.

You definitely make the most experimental Ludum Dare game's I've played. I never know what to expect! I know how it feels to make a game you aren't proud of, and I know it's difficult to think positively about it, but you can't let it weigh you down. Whenever one of my jam games fell apart, I took notes. Seriously reflect on the things that went right and wrong. Make a postmortem! If you learn something from every jam, surely the next game you make will be better!

Perhaps there's some solace to be found in the fact that *I'm* still struggling to make my games intuitive. After all, the bonus spool that took you 10 minutes or so to collect was supposed to be a simple puzzle... I sure messed that one up!

Anyway, at this point I'm just rambling. I recorded a video of myself playing the game, and I hope this provides as much feedback as possible. Cheers, and good luck with the next one!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtNucshleDs

anchry 2023-10-19 18:51

This was a very, very different experience to most LD entries. I really like the very experimental approach to the entry, even though i'm still not entirely sure what I was playing. Good job on making something.. different, i think i enjoyed it

civmaniac 2023-10-19 19:15

I played the Linux build a few times trying to figure out the other/true ending, but I feel like the game beat me there. The only way I could finish it is with timer running out. Did I miss some essential clue? Perhaps, you could grant me a hint :smile:

nuin 2023-10-19 20:38

i am scared

egormnc 2023-10-19 22:07

I liked the game interesting gameplay

dan-str 2023-10-19 22:12

I'm impressed with what you were able to accomplish in such a short time. Keep making games, you're talented

ty-victorson 2023-10-19 23:47

This was a very interesting game! It reminded me of the GTA 5 minigame where you had to close all the pop ups! I'm not sure if my having two monitors messed things up but once I closed the "final" pop up the bar reached 100% but nothing happened after that other than waiting out the time. Overall nice work and a very unique entry!

david-huculak 2023-10-20 02:14

interesting concept, you had me hooked during the intro :smile:

doommustard 2023-10-20 21:11

there were 4 warnings that this was a virus and I don't know if some of them were part of the game. definitely fits the vibe of the game. wonderful.

t-c 2023-10-20 21:49

I, too, think pineapple on pizza is just fine. Good luck getting 20 votes, and hope you like your next submissions better. This one was very interesting, and for what it's worth I'm glad I got around to playing it.