itch.io

What's the an/aus switch? It seems like nothing is interactive in aus mode?

Ah, mosa lina, yeah, I loved that. It's been argued that it's an immersive sim. If so, for me it's the first immersive sim I liked. What it does so well is it maintains a good balance of difficulty, lets the player fail, and lets them quickly move on from impossible challenges.

If we were to talk about building a BLAME!-inspired immersive sim (also procedural, inevitably), I think finding ways to let the player fail would be a very salient theme.

The challenge of making large procedural worlds in interactive media is that it's sort of impossible to meaningfully interact with something millions of times larger than the player character (or having so much more information than the player could process in 20 hours), but it's not totally impossible, the player gets to make recurring choices as to which direction to trek in, and how to influence the weather movement of the constructors, but if these choices are real, this means the player's failures will be large in scale too, so what happens when a 10 hour journey leads to a dead end, the depletion of supplies, a converging ocean of safeguards? One of the things that makes Blame amenable to adaptation is that despair-inducing run-ending softlocks like these are thematically appropriate. If they couldn't happen, if that despair couldn't really be encountered, it wouldn't be a very good adaptation. Likewise, if the obstacles were not real, then the sense of transcendence in a good ending wouldn't be real either.

I liked this =] I wasn't good at it, until I was, and that's when I knew it was working.

Various thoughts copied and rephrased from thinky puzzle discord:

"[regarding the situations where the solution doesn't require using all cards] I love when a puzzle game has chekov's guns that it never fires red herrings. Or to put it another way, I love when puzzle games are naturalistic, when the fingerprints of a designer are fully absent, our attention is focused entirely on the puzzle itself (though I acknowledge that conveying the thoughts of the designer is a core part of most puzzle games)

"I guess it's that... frontier problemsolving irl is mostly about looking for ways of breaking all prior theorists' assumptions, so if games never cultivate a delight for breaking the designer's assumptions and only reward staying inside of the frame, that's trouble.

I wonder if it would be deeper if it were possible to see further ahead, to plan more.

I'm generally reluctant to get into pico8, because the screen resolution genuinely limits how much information can be presented at once, which means there are lots of designs you can't try.

I haven't played the games this was inspired by, and I don't think the rules are apparent at all without that background. Maybe explain them a bit more.

Recommend improving the controls in the following ways: Characters should swap when a character is dragged onto another character. Characters should drop onto the location where the mouse pointer is, not the drop shadow. I can figure out that they're being dropped at the dropshadow and that's the reason a lot of my drag actions are being ignored (that's how it feels before the player realizes what's happening, like inputs are just randomly failing), but aiming with the shadow of the thing I'm dragging instead of the mouse pointer feels wrong.

That makes sense. Well, okay, you could raise the frequency of Big Days to lower the number of people a visitor is likely to meet when they turn up. You can also reframe it, it doesn't have to be extroverted in theme. It can just be something like... "the egg will hatch in an hour". Or "a star will land way over there". Something a player will want to turn up and see. So will others.

I loved this. I didn't win though. (?) (Please include a walkthrough/solution image so that I can learn my error (I'm not going to try again, I think. I know when I'm done))

Suggestion: If the world is underpopulated, tell the user about a "Big Day" that's at some specific time in the future, when they're supposed to return. Help people to coordinate to come on at the same time.

Mention the number of users who were present at the previous recommended time. If it works, it will be a large and enticing number.
The fewer users are visiting, the further in the future the next Big Day should be scheduled.

If possible, get the app to send a notification when Big Day is about to start, if the user expressed interest? I guess you probably need to be Installed to run in the background and do that but there might also be some windows calendar/event scheduling API you could access without that.

There's something frustrating about being asked to "name my price" before I've played the game: I know that I'll have a much better knowledge of how much the game was worth to me after I've played it. I really want to pay the fairest price I can, but it's impossible for me to know what that would be before downloading! Stop asking me to guess! I wont! And there's no need.

Paying nothing and then paying again later isn't a very clean solution, it wont occur to most people, and by the time I get around to finishing a game, I will have often forgotten whether I've paid, I might not get around to it.

Solution: Provide a way to tell the site to remind us after a bit, or keep a list of our "To pay later" purchases that we can check every now and then.

Works for me. The 'PenitentDeadV1.4-Linux_Data' is in the same dir as the 'PenitentDeadV1.4-Linux.x86_64', which you are running, yes?

Tried the latest version (demo, linux), no, I can still only go in 8 directions. I should add that I didn't notice this was going on for a while when I started playing, it still has variable speed, I think, so it feels more fluid than it possibly is.

Another issue, file-roller (which is standard) has trouble unpacking the .gz. It would show a tar file inside, named the same as whatever the .gz was called, and it wouldn't be able to open that tar. Changing the extension to .tar.gz fixes the problem.

This is lovely! I'm playing with a gamepad and I'm really confused, why have you locked movement to 8 directions? Only getting half the benefits of a gamepad :[
(edit, same on windows)