What happens when you combine crazy people from a computer science department with our jam’s mushroom-y ingredients? You get an implementation of extraordinary idea of using PDF viewer / presentation app as a game engine.
Given this self-imposed constraint, the team fared quite well and delivered a somewhat satisfying visual novel. But having known that the team invested a lot of their time to write a PDF/slides generator with a custom scripting language of their own, I’d rather see them using a time-proven engine and delivering more content.
My main gripe is that while the game can run everywhere, it definitely should not. There is a distinct border between running and working. When the game runs in a badly configured viewer, it makes much less sense than authors intended; the game just doesn’t work.
Then more comes to my mind. Because of every state variable effectively doubling number of slides, as you cannot step into the same slide twice, there are only very few of them, making the game very short and trivial.
In the wild world outside, there are many games that are distributed in PDF form. Apart from various puzzles and crosswords, there is a whole roll&write genre, and for adventurous minds, there are game books, also known as pick-your-own-adventure books. While not mentioned explicitly in the rules of our game jam, these are allowed under the guise of designing a board game. And I think the team would be able to do it; as creatures in the game are cute (leaving kolejbába aside), the team would produce a nicely illustrated book. And the crazy part of the team could devise some cool tools for that.
But I must admit I stand in awe before your achievement.