hiiii
Interesting story you have! Though some parts are unclear. Like, whats up with that 300-ish day gap in repair logs: did they succeed in preventing Forks from constant damaging? Or perhabs they were on a vacation?
What kind of research the crew did anyway? I guess it was some kind of biosphere research of an alien planet?
And about their notes: how couldn't they take notes if they literally sent reports? It means they totally could just send on Earth scanned copies of research papers, doesn't it? Or did they want to take the originals because of sentimentality?
Finally, what did the Twig achieved when exiting the lab if it's on an alien planet anyway? When turning the main generator I thought that the robot would send some signal stating that there are some cool energy-generating plants (and researchers could return and thus get a Happy Ending yaaay)
Visuals
Story aside: art is cool, I've been surprised by the game even having an animation. BUT there's an absolute lack of sprites when characters talk. For example in Forks' memory card: Characters (I kinda don't remember the names but that's besides the point) go out of robot's view and talk about the nearing research founds cut-off, dialogue gets pretty heated but the sprites remain happy. Would be cool if at least it were visible which character is talking. Also there's a lot of problems with z-layers between Twig and random boxes, especially those stacked ones.
Also the doors between rooms could be more visible (the vertical ones). In the first room I walked around for some time and by some coincidence noticed the door lol.
Oh? There were 3 people in charge of art? Well, good job keeping consistent style! (except the art at the end but probably just rushed?) Would never thought there were 5 members in the team tbh. The end would be a cool place to put credits, but description is also fine I guess...
Controls
There is a gamepad support??? Yooo letsgoooo!! Oh.. it's not 100% and sometimes I was forced to use the mouse in the inventory but still that was cool. Though the walking animations felt bad when using joystick.
I guess you used something like "
if direction.y < 0: play('up')
elif direction.y > 0: play('down')
elif direction.x < 0: play('left')
elif direction.x > 0: play('right')
else: play('idle')
" So when going diagonally, lets say left-up, the 'up' animation will always take priority. Its ok with keyboard input, but with joystick player can go left and a little bit of up resulting in chracter mostly going left but having an 'up' animation which looks wierd. To fix this you can do something like "if abs(dir.y) >= abs(dir.x)" and then check separatly for vertical or horizontal movement :^)
Music/SFX
It's good. Music is good and the sfx are good. Sorry, can't give much of a feed back on this one. But maybe its a good thing? Imho audio doesnt have to grab player's attention. It's only bad when it's too repetative or abscent.
I think it's everything I had to say, congrats with submiting your first GJM entry!
byeee