Puzzle design... Lucas, you are absolutely evil, and I mean that in the best possible way. This game is hurting my head, and I love it. Part of me wants to start over to review the mechanics as they come up again in case that's why I can't figure out what to do next. Part of me is terrified that I'll forget how I freed the orange key, and spend an hour figuring it out again
Seriously, top notch work everyone!
For what it's worth I had the same problem as the OP. I looked at the calendar, thought "well, I don't see days, but most calendars I've seen start on Sunday, and went through the whole puzzle on that assumption. Took me forever to finally go back and reconsider that assumption and swap my last two names to finally make the rest of the remaining clues make sense. And then when I saw the hint from Merulon about the hint in the agenda, I went back and looked and was even more convinced I wouldn't have gotten it if I'd seen that. A New Year's Eve party on Sunday might have clued me in if I'd noticed that, but a New Year's Party? Is that a NYE party? Or a party being thrown on New Year's Day? Obviously, with the benefit of hindsight, it's the former in the context of this puzzle, but I wouldn't have assumed so.
However, that problem aside, quite enjoyed it.
I probably just misremembered the positions of things when describing it. Looking back at the original comment I was responding to, Marie75020 was one step short of being able to leave the room, not one step short of the exit space, so I clearly just had a brain-fart when answering that one, and mentally put the star one space back from where I thought Marie was (obviously I didn't have the star there anymore myself to check it). Mea culpa. I'll update that comment so it doesn't confuse people ;)
Huh... does seem easier. At least mentally trying to walk through it it seems to get to the top right exit pretty easily, I'd have to play back through it to try. Not sure why I wouldn't have seen that back then. Maybe there's a path to getting to that point in the game that doesn't reveal the "largest flag gets used" mechanic so I hadn't realized that would work? 🤷♂️ Nice catch though, especially since so many people seemed stuck on that one back when it first came out.
I might have to play this again sometime. It was a fun little brain-bender.
I respect your vision. But the time I spent across two days trying to get through that area lies in stark contradiction to your confidence that people will be able to get it. There hard, then there's "Nintendo hard".... then there's whatever this is.
Guess I'll just choose to decide that's the end of the game, that you forgot to put the "The End" screen down there, and that 100% collection is merely a completionist target. Under those qualifiers, good game.
I was quite enjoying this until I got into the area with the background that has the planet with the cloudy ring. I don't know if it's a skill issue, missing an upgrade that would help me get out, or missing an alternative exit. But the only way I see to get out is a very unforgiving jump across three fireballs, up through a tiny crack, and backward through the spike area that got me down in the first place - with no checkpoints.
Up until that... the jumps seem really delicate - trying to jump off the very edge of a platform seems doomed to fail more often than not, and precision platforming with no jump height control is very painful (but may be part of the intended challenge). But otherwise, pretty enjoyable.
Wish I'd gotten here a few hours sooner to provide some input on this. I adamantly disagree with the user above re the mouse. While CTRL+<any letter> is going to be a bad time because of keyboard shortcuts (although I got a laugh out of one game that forced you to reconfigure the controls as a game mechanic... and tricked the player into bookmarking the game half way through), the mouse is the wrong control to use for this. A mouse isn't a button, its primary function involves positioning. By using the mouse as an input, it provides the impression that interactions should be oriented using the mouse - which is an entirely reasonable UX, but obviously not what you decided on for this game. And unnecessary mouse use makes a game more difficult to play on a laptop with a touchpad.
I see you left CTRL+arrows in as an alternative, and that works perfectly fine, so adding the mouse as an alternative here didn't hurt playability (although it's still not the right use for a mouse). But don't let the previous commenter's opinions fool you into thinking the mouse is actually a good/better "button" as you make future updates/games. From a usability perspective, using it for that purpose is wrong, because it implies a control scheme that it isn't being used for, and I spend WAY too much time explaining this to developers.
HOWEVER - two handed keyboard use then would be aided by not needing the mouse for menus.
I'm not going to fill out a form, but I will provide a little feedback. Mouse aim + camera/viewport that sometimes lags, sometimes leads, and sometimes stays fixed? Is the purpose of the UI to add artificial difficulty by making aiming feel unnecessarily unreliable? Because if it was, mission accomplished.
Was cute for a while, but trying to clean the Downpour level - nope, not doing that. I tried, but I'm giving up. Paint stuck in ceiling, no way to get close because the water gun has to get INTO the ceiling WHILE firing it downward constantly in order to get anywhere close to the ceiling?? Absolutely not. Not worth the effort of replaying the whole thing and trying to not get paint in the ceiling just to avoid that moment again just to see what's beyond the next (last?) door.
Up until then though, no complaints. But that ruined it.
Downstab? I didn't even see that was a thing when I played the first time. That's one of my favourite melee mechanics in a platfomer (I think it was my most common attack in Hollow Knight). So I thought I'd give it another shot, see if that made it easier.... and found a bug. First boss, if you beat it while standing on the ledges, the flaming hover effect floats you into the room above, and you get stuck in the floor.
And the flickering button bug rears its ugly yet expected head on yet another idle game. I think that makes the fifth one in three weeks? Not as bad as some other instances of it - but when hovering over a button to buy an upgrade, the button appears to flicker, and sometimes ignores clicks (unlike other instances of this thought where you have to click MANY times to get it to register, this one just misses a click about 30% of the time).
Is EVERYONE publishing idle games on here now vibe coding with the prompt "and please break my buttons"? Or what's going on?
I wanted to like this. I really did. It started off well. I liked the look of it. I've always enjoyed Metroidvanias. I found timing the attack to hit enemies without them hitting me took some work to finally figure out, but that's probably a me problem.
But the up arrow to climb off the ledge feels really awkward (and frequently doesn't work for me - I'll bounce off the ledge, and then just grab it again instead of getting up, and have no idea if that's a bug or if I'm doing something wrong). Down + UP at the same time is almost painful to use the parry (and I honestly never figured out whether the parry was supposed to work on some of the projectiles or not - the floating balls in the spike area either couldn't have their shots parried, or my timing was just bad). I probably should have just given up on the keyboard and gone to dig up my gamepad.
Also the brief delay on movement after getting hit tripped me up in the spike area CONSTANTLY. I'd get knocked into the spikes, try to jump, not jump, and by the time I realized the jump didn't trigger, I'd take another hit from the spikes. The knock-back also made it so that I couldn't even get through the spike area after something like 40 tries, because I ALWAYS got knocked off the platforms - the balls ALWAYS seemed to shoot when they were lined up with the platform I was trying to jump on. And blocking the shot? NOPE. Knock-back into the spikes. I'm sure someone will just say "Skill issue" - but trying to get into melee range of something with a projectile attach that knocks you back every couple of seconds over vanishing platforms that exists for only a few seconds over spikes that ensure you have to start the whole sequence over every 15-20 seconds just stops being fun.
And I get that you were going for some narrative thing with the whole quicktime event with anxiety as a penalty for missing - but as far as I can tell it has no gameplay purpose or effect except to make people like me need to take 4-5 attempts to use a checkpoint (and I guess to make it take longer to run a boss fight).
Ah, the flickering button problem surfaces again in yet another game - 4th one I think I've seen in about three weeks. I'm pretty convinced now that there's a bug that these AI coding tools are somehow trained to keep reproducing. I look forward to the day when coding becomes art, science, and engineering again, instead of prompt-and-pray. Maybe I'll be lucky enough to live to see it.
Until the author figures out the prompt to fix it, just click the button really fast - you'll probably eventually catch it during an enabled frame.
Please do not let this wall of text I ended up writing discourage you. It ended up long, but is not meant to be discouraging or imposing lol.
I did see where you said this is your first game, and I wouldn't elaborate on all this if I thought learning how to understand and begin thinking about UX wasn't going to benefit your projects. So...
I was tempted to not say anything, because the other comments already talked about the controls, but I've written comments on this topic often enough now that I should probably just make a blog post somewhere, so I'll help add some usability/UX modelling to this:
The first player who commented about not using a mouse for a game like this was entirely right about that part. But it's not an issue of two hands (necessarily), it is usually an issue of it being the wrong input method (a mouse is designed for spatial interactions - when using it strictly as a button input it violates the mental model of what a mouse is, and adds an unnecessary barrier for laptops), and also under-utilizes what's more-often-than-not the dominant hand.
Also AD move with WS+mouse attack has the somewhat weird effect of splitting your attack inputs across multiple hands, AND making the left hand have to handle conflicting things - two keys are move, and two keys are aim, which means more mental processing is needed to keep track of the conflicting actions in WASD. Not that it's wrong - but is something to be aware of when planning out control schemes.
Using two hands can be (and often is) a very good interaction model though, because it's often good to separate "concerns" between hands. Most people naturally use two hands for things, with each hand doing things to complement each other - for example supporting something with one hand while interacting with it with the other, or with many video games one hand handles movement, the other actions, or one hand - often the dominant hand - handles spatial movement requiring fine motor control like looking around/aiming with a mouse, while the other hand handles "commands", etc. Putting everything on one hand, even if everything fits comfortably, is more mental overhead.
Not that designing to support single-handed input is a bad idea - somebody may be balancing their laptop with one hand, or for various reasons only have the use of one hand - but that's a very difficult thing to do, because now you have additional problems to account for - the fact that you have very limited space to put all the controls, as single-hand reach is MUCH less than the amount of keyboard you can cover with two hands, AND you have to account for the fact that you may have multiple conflicting actions to perform with a single hand. For example, if you have to jump, and attack, while dodging left and right, you now have four actions all needing twitch reaction timing, at least three of those needing to be handled by some combination of your non-thumb fingers. There are... potential... control schemes that could allow for that somewhat comfortably - but they'd be weird, and non-standard, and you'd still be using at least one of your ring or little finger for twitch movement - which would be quickly tiring.
For these reasons, the second poster who commented about putting movement on the left hand, and actions on the right (but still on the keyboard) - or alternatively movement on the right and actions on the left - will be right more often than not. (there are some limited cases, like if you only needed left, right, jump, attack, you might get away with a single hand WASD+Space, with W jumping, space attacking, but even that's a bit awkward). With the number of actions in this game, it's very easy to think of combinations that are almost impossible to hit comfortably (like trying to heal while attacking something above you, or move left while attacking up).
I know that was a lot to read, and some of it may be a bit rambling, but if anything in there piques a bit of curiosity about UI/UX design, then my work is done ;)
Not bad. Similar to the other commenter, I was a little confused about how to gain influence until I just sort of suddenly got enough to build the first influence building. I'm not sure if I got a random event I didn't notice, or if it's because I reached 100 thralls - so a little extra info in game might be nice.
Also, with the progression balance, I noticed the first time I was stuck at around the second era (I might have researched the 3rd, but then made basically no progress in it, if I remember). After torpor, I blitzed my way to the 5th era barely even feeling like it was slowing down until it just.... basically stopped. The sudden need for thousands relics that you've barely been able to buy producers for just turn it into a waiting game. There's really not much point in doing anything else until those accumulate (which they did while I was writing this, so guess maybe I'll Torpor #2 on era 6)
The weird thing to me though is the buttons. They just sometimes don't work. I also notice they flicker a bit when the mouse is hovering over them. This is actually the second time in the last couple weeks I've seen that behaviour, so I'm starting to wonder if this is an engine bug that people are tripping over, a mistake in a tutorial somewhere... or a bug that AI likes to produce when vibe coding idle game loops.
Ah. I see. Let me guess - a future goal for "add bot to ground station" was supposed to clue me in to that? ;)
Joking aside, glad to hear you're looking into the pacing and clarity. I did find myself starting to get a little lost on where I was going next, what my goal was, but I think what you've got here is kind of cute so far, and has some potential!
Looking interesting so far. One small issue I ran into was the "missions" (like "Collect 50 Pollen", etc) apparently mean "starting now" - which normally isn't a problem, but is a problem if you already launched all the satellites before the "Launch a satellite" missions shows up. I don't know how much impact that has on the game or gameplay hints, but it's at least a thing that can happen.
That level took me many tries, but it just clicked for me. I'll try to lay out some hints here in a way that hopefully won't spoil it too quickly, and without making any assumptions about what you may or may not have figured out so far.
There's two mechanics that you need to reach the leftmost chest
The second mechanic is what you need in order to line up the key with the blocked chest, but if you push a chest into the lower left room, you can't get it back out or reach its lock. So you have to carry a chest in, and push it back out.
The chest that starts in the big room can be carried in, because it can be carried left/right with mechanic 1. But you need the key facing up, on the bottom row, to do that, which you can't do.... unless you use mechanic 2, with a chest on the bottom row.
Eh, far worse bugs happen in professional software (take it from a professional software developer lol). I applaud you having the motivation for coding side projects - I haven't had that level of motivation in years. I'm personally less concerned about there being a bug in a random itch game, and more amused/confused by the specific bug. I honestly can't think of how it happens by accident. I'd be curious to know what the bug is once you figure out the fix - if you're willing to share.
Oh, no, it's even MORE absurd than that. You can buy upgrades, but you need to click really fast to purchase any because (it would appear) that the button flickers between enabled and disabled while you hover it, and you can only purchase if you hit it during an enabled state.
I can't imagine how or why that happens. That's broken in a way that feels like it should have taken real effort.
I'm.... not convinced about that skill trainer. I found him, I set it up to loop on him, and left it for most of the afternoon. Got up to something like 18 strength and I don't think I'm doing any more damage to rocks than I was when I started (I say something like 18 because I don't remember, but by the time I broke the white rock I'd looped enough times more that my strength was 21). I'm not even sure I'm doing AS MUCH damage as when I started. But each full action bar adds maybe two pixels to the progress bar.
I also have no idea what the different impacts of strength vs "today" strength are - but "today" strength always starts out at 0 - not sure if they're supposed to be added together, or how I'm supposed to understand those stats.
And, if I'm being honest, the looping mechanic doesn't really seem to add anything to the game. It just makes it have to repeat the same thing over and over and over again, which granted is kind of the definition of idle games - a repeating game loop. But the "time loop" mechanic (which isn't really even a time loop for the most part - even the tips largely dismiss it by describing it as simply "not remembering" the previous day... which is funny given that you exactly repeat the previous day - except where you've actually made changes that aren't reset.. but I digress) doesn't even provide that "numbers go up" psychological reward loop/dopamine hit that idle games normally would. You just pick the next rockyou want to beat on, and then watch the same loop happen over and over like 100 times until the rock is smashed. I think it's an interesting mechanic, I'm just not sure this gameplay loop realizes its potential.
I managed to find everything except the third scroll, 4 coins and I assume two hidden heart potions (assuming there's a total of 16 hearts
Pretty sure one of those heart potions is in a cow level, part a bunch of spikes - but I can't tell because it seems if you don't have a scroll, you can't select any scroll after it in the inventory, so I've been limited to nothing but double-jump for the whole game. But better than my first two attempts at playing it where I got the spike resistant scroll first... and the game still gave me the double-jump skill when it auto-equipped that scroll...
"Autocomplete" in this case is a bit fuzzy (the behaviour will be most familiar to people used to using command shells like Bash or Zsh, etc). Pressing <Tab> will show you all the possible completions from the letters you've already typed, completing it automatically if there is only one option. So when you press <Tab> without typing anything you''re getting all the possible commands. It's just unfortunate that the first two are "get" and "help", so hitting <Tab> makes it look like the output is "Get help...".
G, S, H, C, P, R, and W will each give you a couple of possible completions and need an extra letter before they are unique so they can autocomplete.
The wire end points are interactive, the target points are apparently just incredibly finicky and inconsistent. With enough tries though, you might get it. But if you do, you later get the ability to repair lights by assembling a puzzle.
If you get to that point, I recommend not playing on a laptop. Not because the trackpad makes it harder to solve, but because it's a lot less tempting to throw a desktop across the room.
Dear dev: Not a bad game concept, but please fix the click/drop/whatever detection. In the headlight repair "minigame" the light might be the least broken thing.
Played about one and a half levels. I think it has potential, but the controls feel very slow and clunky to me, and the visual effect makes it very hard to read the hint text.
To the issue of the controls, it's somewhat painful to have to wait through the walking animation to press the next key, especially when it's the key you're already pressing. And with the walking speed being as slow as it is, that means waiting a full second (if I timed it right) after you press a key before another key will register. If you're even a little early, your press is ignored. This makes movement feel very slow and awkward, especially when you're going down a long hallway where all you're doing is pressing one key over and over every second for 10-15 seconds or so.
Thanks. I had thought a while back that the crane game might have been what I was missing - but for some reason every time I tried talking to the cow, he always just told me to let him know when I wanted to play, so I thought maybe I didn't have enough money.
I can't remember if I ever actually tried speaking to him twice in a row until just now when you reminded me of it.
I can tell I'm going to be facepalming a lot playing this if that's how I started lol
I feel like I'm being trolled, or I'm just missing something really obvious, as I've never even managed to find the key to the car. It's my weakest start to a game ever. I can usually at least solve the first puzzle/level lol Still the game has a certain... something to it. Charm might be the right word.
Level 2 needs a different approach to "breaking" the big guys. In level one, you broke out by "deleting" part of a leg with an orange block. Breaking a leg here won't work because you need every block, you can't afford to sacrifice any.
But you don't need to actually remove parts of the big guys to break them - you only have to make them look different than the small guy. The arms can be affected too.
Use that to line up the two big guys with the big guy with short arms to make the middle one a proper big guy so it can be moved.