itch.io

This is a promising start. the animations are nice (mostly). The biggest gripe I have with it right now is the lack of control remapping, or more so that the attack button is alt. Don't use alt for a control, especially since alt space seems to softlock dialogue cutscenes. The movement is a bit iffy. it feels floaty and a bit unresponsive, which isn't helped with all of the platforming on tiny platforms over instakill lava lakes. Some more animation frames for things like jumping would also be nice. The combat is pretty raw. The delay between pressing the button to attack and attacking is frustratingly bad, you can't attack in midair, the boss being invincible during certain animations is annoying, the fact that your only form of defense is a parry is annoying (although you may be trying to make the Sekiro of adult Souls-lites, idk), and I couldn't tell if it was possible to shake off the dog/boar before he raped me. 

There are other things I could nitpick, but this is honestly not bad for a very first alpha build from a solo dev. Just needs more polish, more reiterating design choices, and more content. I'm excited to see where this goes.

And as an aside, would it be at all possible to have a paid version of the game on itchio as well as on Patreon? I'd be more than happy to pay for a version with the latest updates and stuff, as well as to generally support development, but I just don't like subscription models (for probably the same reason devs love them, but still).

I'd be more than happy to pay for a full version of this.

Not bad little idler. Obviously inspired by AD, the mechanics themselves are pretty unique, and it has a nice rate of progression. Managing assignments and when to burn your wood are fun mechanics. Having to maximize the game to make it playable is annoying, and I got blue balled right before the end. After buying the The End [2] upgrade, the game set my particle cap to zero, and nothing I do changes it. I can't prestige, assign any particles, or gain any sparks. I softcapped myself one upgrade away from beating the game. very annoying.

Otherwise, fun idle game.

I absolutely adore this game. The style, the music, the dialogue, everything is great.

I am curious if you guys are working on another game? I would love to see what else you can come up with.

Souls-like that's only keyboard and mouse? Man you really want me to die a lot.

So far I really like what I see. The movement and animations are nice and smooth. The combat's decent. The range on the sword seemed very short and I kept misjudging whether I could hit an enemy or not. That and the fact that you can only attack in the cardinal direction your facing made combat a bit frustrating. But of course, like with any Souls game, part of the fun is the janky controls and the learning curve of how to work with it, so I can't fault the game too much for that.

The stamina management feels very tight throughout the game, with how you can only dodge and attack like 4 times before your stamina is empty. That isn't a negative though, since I like the slower and more methodical gameplay. Makes it hard to get out of a stick situation though.

The spells were, interesting. I'm not a big spell guy in these games, and the fact that you have to memorize a key combo to cast them made me not use them in combat much. But they worked well utility wise. The light for obvious reasons and the bolt for managing aggro. Also, as much as I liked the lighting mechanics in the second area, I feel the duration of the light spell is way too short. During multiple encounters I would cast it and it would run out before I killed everyone, which either forced me to fight blind or in a tiny area around a light source. Again, this could be intentional, but it sure as shit didn't make that encounter with the bow and two sword dudes any less of a pain in the ass. 

I'm not 100% with the level design. Part of the issue is that I got lost easily. See, Dark Souls doesn't need a map because every square inch of the game is unique (for the most part), so you can be placed randomly anywhere and know right away where your at. In a game like this though, where every room and corridor uses the same few textures and templates, it makes it very hard to know where you're going. The first area wasn't bad since it was open and relatively small, but I found it difficult to navigate the lower level because of how samey every corridor felt (the light mechanic didn't help much either). Adding more features and unique designs to areas would help, or you could just keep areas small, or you could try adding a map. (Or you can just ignore me. idk I just play a lot of games, not make them)

I like the weapon mechanics. The ability to switch out secondary effects effects on the fly, with the caveat that they have harsh penalties, is an interesting design choice. You could even have a shortcut for switching effects mid fights, but that might take out some of the planning and prep you would do before fighting difficult enemies. I like it though. There's also the obvious issue of only having two weapons, which are identical to each other outside of stats. It's a demo, so that's not really a complaint. 

The boss was meh. It looked cool, but I only died to it once, and that was from dodge rolling off of the edge. The sweep and projectile attacks were very easy to dodge while the slam attack was damn near impossible to time without spamming the dodge. Adding to that the ability to fully heal yourself five times and with plenty of downtime between attacks to heal, It just wasn't very exciting. Again, it's a demo, so I can't be too harsh. Just hope the bosses get a bit more spicier in the future.

Overall though, I enjoyed it. It's polished for a first showing and what's here just made me want more. I'm excited to see where it goes.

You know, it's things like this that make me love indie games. When I stumbled on this from the game randomizer, and saw that it was a black and white pixel game with no movement animations, I was ready for another baby's first game jam sort of thing. Never in a million years would I of thought that it would be something that literally moved me to tears. The subtle story telling with how you come to the conclusion yourself that something has gone wrong in the world. The scientist trying to find answers in a creature that probably can't even comprehend their world, much less give advice for it, but is still able to find bravery and motivation through them. The parallels between a t-rex looking up at the sky and a human looking up at the stars, always wishing for something that is out of reach, but knowing that their children will one day experience it themselves. This shit is magical.

The thing that makes me love this, and love the indie game genre, is how you will never know what you will stumble across. You will never know if a game is as basic and primitive as it seems from the get go, or if it will blow your expectations right out of the water. And I think that is what makes gems like these all the more brighter. Thank you for this wonderful game, and for being part of this wonderful community.

Edit: No wonder I liked this game so much, it's from the same dev who made Red Trees. I adore the work you put into your games, and the fantastic storytelling in them.

I may not be rich. I may not be a genius. I may not be lauded by my peers or have everything I desire in life. But at least I can say that I scored over 2 million in Smash 'n Dab.

Get on my level children.

The ball is in your court.

Great game. The art was good, the dialogue was well written (although the part with the protag waking up and being fixated on her shoes was kind of weird) and I'm always down for any story with interesting philosophical questions.

I'll also check out the John Locke essay you mentioned in your postmortem. I find the topic of determinism to be interesting, if only because I don't inherently understand or agree with it. The idea that the hands of God or fate control all of our actions makes sense, but I don't understand why it would matter. If the choices I make, like going to eat an apple or choosing to downloading a game on itchio with a cute anime girl on the front, are indistinguishable between free will and the will of a higher power, and if they still lead to me living a happy and fulfilled life, then why would one be any better, or any different, from the other?

Here are some tips for people struggling to build their towers

1. start with a big base. This is pretty obvious one but it has to be said. having a tower that's only 3 or 4 blocks wide is going to lead to a poor time. My final tower was 7 blocks all the way up, but still had some stability issues. Bigger is better

2. When you let go of a piece that's clipping with another piece, they push at each other until they're separated. Use this to your advantage to push into place any pieces that slide apart or to smooth out any oscillations. 

3. Have pieces interlock. When you have pieces that don't overlap each other, it becomes easy for them to separate and cause a bad time. Save yourself some pain and have pieces overlap themselves. using a long piece horizontally is great for that.

4. And the most important one, don't give up! Every time your tower falls, learn from that failure and build it even higher next time. No matter how disheartening it is to rebuild,  you will make it to the top.

Nah I had a good time playing it. I was just being a bit silly when I was writing the review.

First off, I gotta say how much I love Itchio's random game feature. 

And yeah, this game was good. The kind of game where all I can think of while playing was how bullshit some of the mechanics were, like the 8 directional shooting you get while enemies can shoot with pinpoint accuracy halfway across the level, or how the random patrol patterns in some levels can screw up your run. But like anything difficult you just pull up your big boi pants and learn how to play the damn game. And now after finishing it I have to say that I enjoyed what was here, warts and all.

Also I found an exploit on the purple guys where their death timers after they're shot keep going after you pause the game, so you can shoot them and pause for a few seconds and they'll die instantly after you unpause. Made a few levels much easier.

Jesus, what is this game? Why did I spend half an hour playing it at 11pm on a work night. Controlling the camera with a trackpad somehow made it even worse. I gotta say though that this game nailed the feeling of conspiracy theory, in a weird way. It was when I was counting the amount of boxes on each shelving unit to figure out the keycode when it hit me. The feeling of anger and frustration that comes with a puzzle in an adventure game that you can't solve. Where I have to both rule out the obvious red herrings that the game puts in, as well as the red herrings that I fabricate myself, in the vain hope that the developer is as insane as I am, that somehow counting every lamp in the level will somehow result in a coherent solution. And the best part is that the real answer is usually something so stupidly obvious (although I can't say the same for this game). The stupid floor puzzle near the end of The Witness was another one that did it for me, I mean how the hell was I suppose to know that the orientation of the shapes in the small grids controlled the orientations in the big grid. For this game I put in about 50 brute force attempts before I gave up and looked at the store page for a clue, only to realize that I missed a tiny piece of paper in a random corner that had the actual answer. There goes 30 minutes of sleep, plus another 30 minutes writing this comment out. And here I thought "wow, that was a good H game, I wonder what else this developer has made". Fuck me.

In all seriousness though, this is actually decent for a 2 day jam, especially since it was your first 3d game. It did what you set out to do, so kudos for that. 

Considering it was 110 degrees where I live, nothing sounds better right now than a nice cool glass of liquid nitrogen, even if it would turn me into a human popsicle from the inside out (or just horrifically burn my intestines, but the former sounds more enjoyable).

If only I could be so grossly incandescent.

I realized after a couple tries that you have to spam click while pointing the same rune above his head at him. 

I really like the atmosphere this game has, the art is well done and the themes of entropy is really neat, but this game just isn't fun to play. I think the fact you have to sit there for the full two minutes every time you try and have to refresh the page every time you fail makes it annoying to play. Also, and this might be a personal thing since this always happens to me on tests irl, the fact that I fully read the guide and understood the whole gist of what the test actually was for and still failed it is kind of infuriating. I guess you can chalk that up to me being stupid though. A slightly clearer indicator of what I got wrong would of been nice.

Short and sweet ;)

So I played your game and I do have to say that I enjoyed it quite a bit. I love the minimalist neon scifi look and it really looks good for a jam game. I also love the concept of the dual color lasers and having to have quick reactions to pull up the right shield and shoot the right weapon. I could imagine myself putting a lot of time into this game, but I had a lot of problems with the gameplay. The controls feel sluggish, the movement has a slight delay that makes positioning very difficult and the shields take almost a full second to deploy, making twitch reactions very difficult to do. The walls are very sticky and hard to move along, which makes dodging side to side almost impossible if your up against a wall. The arm holding up the shield takes up a lot of the screen area, and the tinted light coming through the shield makes seeing enemies and what color lasers they're firing frustrating. The laser hitbox feels wonkey, sometimes they still hit through the correct colored shield and sometimes they don't even damage after a direct hit, and they love to collide with the walls even if they're nowhere close. Again, I want to say that I actually enjoyed this game, and I hope that my criticism will help you figure out what you did right and what you need to work on. The concept itself deserves a follow and I'm excited to see more projects or a polished version of this game from you in the future. Cheers!