Really interesting entry! Communication as a "battle" mechanic is really interesting! Not sure if this was intentional, but the conversations became easy once I realized I could click the ? to re-trigger the symbol as many times as I wished until I remembered which action the symbol corresponded with. Loved the music, I think you said you wrote it all yourself in the Discord? Good job getting this done in the short time frame!
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Space Pioneers's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Audio | #13 | 2.667 | 2.667 |
| Accuracy & Authenticity | #15 | 2.500 | 2.500 |
| Gameplay | #15 | 1.750 | 1.750 |
| Overall | #15 | 2.000 | 2.000 |
| Thematic Relevance | #16 | 2.750 | 2.750 |
| Visuals | #17 | 2.000 | 2.000 |
Ranked from 12 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Historical Accuracy
Dates, names, events, authentic images and audio recordings from the time period have been used. More details on the page.
Thematic Relevance
This is a grounded (realistic) game to experience the struggles and challenges from the perspective of a single character.
The core gameplay loop is to design rockets by talking to the responsible scientist to gather facts and then calculate parameters with real formulas.
The strageness theme is explored in the first level with backstory.
Disclaimers
We have used pre-made assets mostly from Craftpix - see the page for links. No AI has been used.
Comments
5 days ago(+2)
Thank you, Alex!
The music was done by Lars. All credit goes to him.
You are the first one to notice that the questionmark re-triggers the symbol. I had to include it to make the game more user friendly. In fact - after watching Grace struggle during the live stream, I designed it to be even more friendly :D Now it shows the current need while the cheat sheet image is open. I leave it up to the player if/how much they use this, let them have some control over the difficulty.
I wish you a bright day.
Hey, thank you for playing!
Yes, skeletons - that is the relation to the strangeness theme! Korolev lost most of his teeth then and I thought - maybe he was thinking he was going to die (thousands of people did die there)... How can such a pessimistic outlook be represented? Maybe visually by presenting all the miners as dead men walking, just a matter of time, just another brick in the wall (or foundation for the road as it were in Kalyma).
Noted about the audio.
If you reached the skeletons then you must have reached the second level which has the core loop of the game. Because the transition is automatic in a few moments. This is also on the Itch page walkthrough section. Did you reach it?
Yes, I believe I reached level 2 - though I admit I hadn’t grasped that level 2 was the base of the core game loop. I will check it out.
Would have loved some flavour text conveying the dead-men walking. A cool thought, but a poetic jump from his ‘maybe I will die down here’ headspace (that might deserve explanation for HAGJ – though it nets strangeness points).
9 days ago (+1)
Hey, Jonathan. I'm sorry to hear you got stuck.
The white question mark next to the action selection menu opens the cheat sheet. And it will also trigger a symbol to be displayed in case you missed it.
The lines at the top are the queue - the blue line is the protagonist and the red line is the NPC. They loop back from the start each turn.
8 days ago (+1)
I played through the tutorial and completed it. For the final part it is enough to do basic actions to increase the mood and then you can do advanced actions to increase the relationship depth. You can see what the depth is from the green bar above the NPC character. It is similar to a health bar but instead of decreasing it you act to increase it. ;) 
After you click OK there is a bug which causes an endless loop. Just reload the page and you will be able to start the game.
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