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A jam submission

Concurrent SentencesView game page

Incremental game about earning your freedom in a labor camp across multiple universes concurrently
Submitted by JoyousLlama — 38 minutes, 53 seconds before the deadline
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Concurrent Sentences's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Theme (How well the game fits the jam's theme)#182.1243.800
Overall#241.9013.400
Balance (Pacing of the game)#251.9013.400
Fun (Overall enjoyment)#261.7893.200
Uniqueness (Origniality of the game)#281.7893.200

Ranked from 5 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

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Comments

Submitted

I like your game, I like the pit, I jump it in a lot maybe you add something here like a goofy or scary thing the make it spicy. I like the idea that throwing things in the pit.
I have 3 feedback
1 Game feels laggy (maybe my computer is responsible for it)
2- When I take the cube and walk cube move with little vibration I do not how to explain it and you probably realize it. It bugs me a lot.

3 When tutorial say open the store with E I did not see the store and I geniunely try 15-20 times to just press E lol. And when I try to find a store or something I accidentally find the mine. So maybe you should indicate it. Also store screen shows a lot of upgrades at first which feels little bit complicated.

Developer(+1)

Thanks for your feedback! Yeah I should have added something cool if you jump in the pit a lot lol, missed opportunity for sure. 

I definitely should have tried optimizing a bit better (I only tried on mine & my wife's PCs, hers is middling specs but of course as Pangbot mentioned incremental-enjoyers are less likely to have good specs hah) -- makes total sense. I think the vibration issue you mentioned might actually be tied to frame rate because I actually had no idea it was a thing (but the physics of holding the cube is like the only thing that is tied to the frame rate), that is really good to keep in mind going forward. I need to get a laptop or something to test games on in future!  If you don't mind me asking, what are your specs (mostly CPU / GPU / RAM)?

As for the tutorial shop thing... yeah there is actually an arrow that you can JUST BARELY see above the shop, but I accidentally made it be the tiny arrow and not high enough (it was supposed to be like the big arrow above the rig in universe 2) hah, whoops! Thanks for bringing it to my attention. And the store being a bit too complex at first, makes total sense tbh.

Thanks very much for your feedback! :D

Submitted

This was cool! I enjoyed a lot of the "fluff" features like achievements and the (seemingly pointless) arachnophobia setting, really shows that you had fun making it. In terms of game design, I have a few notes:

1. When fully upgraded, I enjoyed watching the blocks shoot straight into the hole, but I had to get a really specific angle in order to do that and assist with manually mining. Making a change to the mine (like an "operator chair" or something) so you could watch every block you mine easily would be a great addition.

2. For this sort of "progressive exclusive" currency, you run into the issue of fully upgrading a resource's output and then having almost nothing to spend it on. Having some way for the earlier resources to contribute later into the game (e.g. being able to convert 100 bronze -> 1 silver or each silver upgrade also costs some bronze and every gold upgrade also costs some silver and bronze) would help to make it feel like that effort wasn't wasted.

3. I loved how each universe kept running while you were away, but each universe (apart from Base) was exactly the same, just with a different coloured block. Having different layers like this in an incremental is the perfect time to shake things up a bit with the game loop, and you have even more options with it being in 3D. e.g. Maybe in universe 3 you have to swim with the block, or in universe 4 there are bridges over lava you have to traverse (or maybe silver blocks are actually spheres, gold melts if you leave it too long...). The more usual way is to introduce different ways to get the resource, or add extra steps, which you could also do.

4. If you're interested in making more incrementals, I would steer clear of Unreal in general. A lot of people choose to play incrementals because they don't have very good hardware. Mine's not too bad (i5-12400F, RTX 3060), but having it whir at max speed while I'm trying to watch a YouTube video at the same time isn't a very relaxing experience. You might be better off with Unity rather than Godot (Unity uses C#, Godot can use C#, but not for web builds - I use it because I like GDScript), but it's worth shopping around even if you do go back to Unreal in the end. It's not like there aren't popular 3D incremental games (e.g. Berry Bury Berry), but it'll always be an uphill battle for jams with Unreal.

Blah blah blah. Anyway, I enjoyed it and good job! :)

Developer(+1)

Thanks for your feedback! It all makes total sense. I'm glad you could tell I had fun making it hah, yeah the pointless arachnophobia mode was like one of the first things I added LOL. 

Rregarding the currency I definitely had intended to find some better use for the excess, mainly I was looking into gating higher tier upgrades behind multiple currencies together, but I ran into some balancing issues (who would've thought that largely putting off balance & e2e testing until 9 hours before the deadline was a bad idea lol)

Similarly I was hoping to flesh out the differences between each universe but spent a bit too much time focusing on the "fluff" hah, next time I'll try to balance out that ratio a bit more. With that said, my ideas for differentiators were terrible compared to the few suggestions you came up with, so thanks for helping me learn in that sense. If I end up expanding on it then I'll definitely take your advice, thanks very much

Also I had never heard of Berry Bury Berry, definitely would need to do a bit more market research into the genre if I do continue here hah -- I've played a handful of games but not enough, for sure. Thanks again for all your advice

Submitted

I liked your game . I liked carrying the cubes and droping them into the pit. It's simple but really satisfying. I think you could expand on that. There could be auto-thrower of the cubes ? Worker carrying themselves ?  

The balance was good : when it was becoming tedious, the upgrades made it unnecessary. I'm not sure to fully comprehend how the automatisation happens : is it dropping a cube in base universe that make it go again in universe 1 ? The inverse ? 

I was a bit slow I think (had the "scenic route" achievement :D ). Thanks for the game, was fun ! 

As for some ideas to help distribute the game : i think this prototype is solid, and would be much more played if it wasn't for the necessary download. And its a big file, i'm not sure you really need >1Go for this game. Maybe try some other engines, more browser friendly like unity / godot ? Or maybe try to package the game to ship the minimum of files. 

Developer(+1)

Thank you! I really appreciate you taking the time and rating it :)

As for the automation aspect, I wish I'd made it more clear that it is supposed to be from the upgrade columns which increase the passive tick rate & the launch power & accuracy for each rig -- with enough upgrades, each rig is actually able to shoot its resources directly into the respective pit! Therefore you can set each one up to run continuously while you focus on one, or however you like to do it haha. The base universe becomes the fastest one eventually and the other universes feed into it as well (though I think there's a bug with that particular upgrade) 

Regarding the download & file size... yeah, I agree with you on both points. I should have looked more into setting up Pixel Streaming; it might be laggy & ugly but at least it'd be more accessible haha. I also definitely should have spent a couple more hours focused on reducing the game's size... it's partially due to engine choice, and partially due to being nooby . I might end up trying Godot sometime for sure, sounds like it would help solve both those issues

Thanks again for your time & feedback! Hope you have a great day ahead

Developer (1 edit)

This is an Unreal Engine 5 game, which means I don't really have a way to get it working in the browser -- but it's totally fine if you don't want to download it, hah. I get it

I'm just glad to have made something! 

Although if you did want to give it a shot, some amount of feedback would be really nice :)