Yeah, the on-boarding is a bit rough. There's the "Learn" button on the title screen and the same stuff pulls up when you press the pause button, but it's sort of a general purpose guide and not really set up as a proper tutorial or anything. It definitely needs some love in that area. Thanks for checking it out!

Haha, yeah... I knew I didn't have a ton of time, so i tried to get the mid-line balance. It's challenging if you're just picking up the game for the first time, but still somewhat interesting even if you know the mechanics inside and out (in my opinion anyway). I'm glad you vibed off of it. I was definitely going for the "you're behind the screen" thing. Thanks for playing it!

I appreciate you taking the time to try it out! I'm glad you like it. 

Hey, thanks for that. ☺️ I think so, too!

Thanks for the kind words and for playing it. I agree (I'm a bit biased) that it works surprisingly well. It even surprised me when I first landed on it properly around day 3. I'm glad the feeling was captured well enough that you could pick up on it. I tried to lean into certain experiences a bit more than others. Some landed, some didn't. I'm happy to see that the tension and inability to control everything seems to be sticking well, though. 😅

I'm glad you liked it. Thanks for trying it out! 

Thanks for checking it out! I also like to watch the Ghost move around 😅

Haha, yeah, I almost deliberately avoided Synty since it's more of a safety blanket. I wanted to make something a bit different than I usually experiment with and this gave me a chance to be as ruthless as possible with scope while maintaining the core identity of the original idea. I think it turned out pretty well, all things considered, and I'm definitely planning to keep it up and push at least one more update for it after the voting period ends.

I'm glad that it landed in something of an inspirational way for you. I'd be glad if it helped you discover something along the way. Thanks for playing it! ☺️

Hey, thanks for the kind words and for playing it! If you like it even in this broken state, you'll probably like the updated version which will come out after the voting period ends. I've been toiling away off and on to inject a bit of breathing room into the turn flow, add sounds, and so on. 

I understand that it is hard to digest. Honestly, it even took me a few times to start remembering how things work and I'm the one that made it! 🤣 The guide helps a bit, but it's not very explicit with some things and it's a lot of text. There's a fair bit of complexity and depth there, but it definitely needs a bit more of a gentle intro. I'm hoping a more proper tutorial will help things out (hopefully coming with the first update), and that the improved turn flow and feedback will help reinforce things. I might add a quick summary tab that outlines things more explicitly, too, given the feedback I've gotten so far. Thanks for the push!

Yeah, I agree. It isn't so bad when you're familiar with the mechanics, but I didn't get to the point where I smoothed out flow. It suffers because of it. The local build I have is already addressing this. I could probably get away with pushing it up now, since it's just tweaking some numbers to fix a bug, really, but I would have to roll back a lot of the other stuff I've done to be ready for the build I push up after voting period ends. 

Thanks for playing it! 😌

Thanks for checking it out! I'm glad I'm it was interesting. I also like to lean in directions I don't think many others will for jams. It's a great chance to stretch creativity ☺️

Heh... yeah, it's a bit wordy. Honestly, I'm regretting not stripping the text down to bare game mechanics at this point, since I didn't get to roll out the tutorial phase and it lacked other kinds of feedback. It's definitely a bit deep for a typical jam game. 😅

Thanks for playing!

I was considering being more explicit with that, but I needed to get other eyes on it before I made any real decisions. Part of me liked the need to "read the city" to come up with the conclusions for when a contact goes dark or when the heat crosses the threshold, but there isn't enough feedback (the counter in the sidebar doesn't draw your eye to it when you tick past the threshold and the lack of sound doesn't help). 

For the exit unlock, I shamelessly pilfered the concept of a "heatwave" from meteorological concepts, so it's "greater than 90 for 3 rounds in a row" which is what a heatwave is defined as anywhere that uses Fahrenheit units. It was arbitrary during the design process and I just decided "90 sounds good" and that's where the name came from too. Had to make it interesting for myself in some way. Also, since it probably isn't clear, the exit window can actually close again if the board cools off before the Ghost gets there. 

For Contacts, the burnout cap is if their location ends at greater than 21. Yes, I stole from Blackjack. No, I will not apologize. I figured the concepts were relatively the same. Push the house as close as you can to the limit without burning out. They go dark for 2 rounds, then come back (supposing the heat has died down at their location).

For Rumours, you can only deploy them where a Contact exists (little green online indicator in the corner of the location node). The exception is the Suppress option, which relies on an active Rumour instead (green pulsing ring around a location node) and doesn't care if the Contact has been burned. 

I wish I had prioritized getting the on-boarding stuff in place, to be honest. I actually wasted quite a bit of time ruthlessly balancing it so that it was close to where it should be and working out the kinks. The path highlighting and floaty text both resulted from me chasing some bugs that I had to patch out, so that slowed me down more than I would like to admit, but I think they help the gameplay quite a bit, even if they don't read as well as I hoped. Turns out, the board was hiding heat from me in the exit node itself (which was an afterthought, really) during the scatter spread. 🫠

Yeah, it's one of those things you sort of have to absorb a little at a time. If you try to absorb it all at once, it can be a bit overwhelming. That's part of why I rigged the pause button to pull up the help guide again instead of just a plain pause screen, that way it can be referenced every now and then. My recommendation would be to skim it for the basics (the Rumours section is among the more important ones), then sort feel the game out a little at a time. It takes a few rounds to get a grasp on any one aspect of it, from my observations at least. 

My lacking introduction doesn't help. I had planned to get a more proper tutorial section/level in, but life gets in the way of my best intentions sometimes. 😅

Thanks. I appreciate it, honestly. I need the push to be more proactive with dev stuff, so it was fun to push myself in a different way.  It's been a while since I've taken a jam seriously and I had a lot of fun with this one. I'll probably keep working at this project off when I have time over the next week, then push an update after the voting period ends.