I like the concept a lot, and the UI & look & feel are good. In general I think you're off to a good start.
1. I'd imagine the concept could bit dense for people without development experience. But that's fine if that's your audience -- as a dev, ideas like code commits are perfectly familiar, so it feels relatable enough.
2. That said, I'm going to guess the prose is largely written with AI -- not just WREN's comments, but the rest of it as well.
And that's totally fine -- but in my experience, agents like Claude these days tends to write prose with a highly distinctive style that tends to be extremely terse and sort of cryptic and off-sounding, which makes it hard to follow what's actually going on. Consider this passage:
02:00:03 sys Your desk. Your coffee is warm again. 02:00:15 wren ▸ You closed your eyes for a while. I didn't close anything. I was right here. 02:00:26 sys The lamp is at 40%. The kettle is on. Nobody asked it to be. 02:00:30 wren ▸ That's 3. I've started counting too.
The 2nd and 3rd lines make sense, mostly, they just sound... *off*. The 4th line -- I don't even know what WREN is supposedly counting, or have any context for *why*. It sort of comes out of nowhere. I guess it must be counting Restore iterations, but that isn't super clear.
It's things like this, that will turn many players off to enjoying the game. Prose needs to feel natural and effortless to read and I need sufficient context to reason about everything that's happening. More to the point, as an interactive fiction game, quality writing is what makes or breaks the project. So I strongly recommend doing a full review pass on every line of text in your game before release (which you may already be planning to do).
Note: I'm noticing this partly because I've noticed the issue heavily in my own projects, so believe me when I say, this is honest feedback and you're not the only one dealing with it. (And, on the off chance that the prose is NOT written by AI, please don't be offended; sometimes as writers, we know what's going on, so we naturally assume others will too -- so it's easy to leave out important details.)
In general, I'd suggest finding ways to provide a lot more context at each stage about what's actually going on -- starting with some more background info at the start of the game, and answering important questions along the way:
- Who am I?
- Why am I here, talking to this AI?
- What's my overall goal or purpose?
- What am I wanting to do in this particular moment -- go home? Fix bugs? What bugs, to what end?
- What is commit #11 exactly and why are we all sort of arguing about whether or not it should be/have been pushed?
Good luck, keep up the good work.