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Thank you so much for playing and glad you think it has potential!

I've got a lot of ideas that I'd like to try in a larger version of the game (along basically all the variety that you mentioned) and plan to make an updated version in the near future once I iron out the basic combat through this prototype.

Thanks a bunch! 

The current version is balanced well in favor of the player for people to just get into the combats without dying and see the experience. I plan to keep working on it and finding it's own unique game with Dicey Dungeons as one of the major inspirations among a few others.

Definitely great notes on the control lock and pesky die placement.

I'll adjust the UI camera to help the die land in more consistently visible places and locking controls to avoid the inevitable accidental player double-click is something I often forget to do, lol.

An interesting mix of genres that caught me by surprise.

I was a bit wary of the computer terminal interface and trying to figure my way through various input commands to play the game, but it switched up so fast I honestly didn't really know what was going on for a lot of the early game.

The bullet-hell is quite well made and definitely forced me to change up my tactics. I managed to get through to the end after several tries. I think adding some more feedback about how far you are towards the conclusion of the bullet-hell section would help give players more drive to push through if they were struggling, but also create a sense of tension along the way since you would start to feel "so close" with only one or two hits left available.

Definitely more engaging once you get into it and figure out what you're doing. I ended up spending about 20 minutes on the first mission and an average of about 3-4 on all the others, lol. 

The mini-games for unlocking files are a neat way to diversify the gameplay, but I feel like the game could definitely use some more unforeseen hang-ups or alerts that you need to avoid along the way. Jumping between the different windows on the UI is clever and interesting at first, but can get a bit tedious when I'm really just trying to jump up to a corner to close the window and such so throwing hazards or enemy AI at me while I'm in the middle of the task would keep me more on-edge and give more of the feeling of being a hacker doing espionage things.

Some interesting scaling on the level design and trippy visuals.

I concur that I'd like to be more actively involved with the game after the level starts. Starting with very little money and then somehow earning money based on how far my units made it towards the eventual goal would let me feel a sense of progression within each level and let me try and adapt my build on the fly.

I also think a second or third type of turret for the humans to use would push people into diversifying their strategies more. It feels like tanking up and just overloading the single-shot turrets ends up winning the round whether it's optimal or not right now. If there were some kind of AOE turret that got blocked by the magic shields or a slow-rotating rocket launcher that had trouble following fast units then those would give you a lot more options in terms of level design.

It's pretty intuitive and presented well, but it sure is difficult.

I often felt like I would just lose attempts to pure RNG of pipe selections. The maps are super open, which should make creativity in pipe placement really easy, but I often just did a lot of sluffing pipes that I didn't need while waiting for the pipe I wanted to show up in the queue. I actually think that maps that feel more restricted in terms of space to sluff off pipes might get players thinking in terms of using pipes in places where they could "potentially" be useful if the queue ended up giving them the right combination rather than just dumping stuff in the corner.

I don't know if you've already got some level of logic behind the pipe selection for the queue, but this does feel like a great opportunity for "controlled RNG" that appears to be random, but somehow always guarantees an adequate set of pipes to complete the puzzle or somehow tracks the current build of the player so that it can throw in the pipe that the player is looking for with only limited time left before failure. Just thinking of ways to toss players a bone for the sake of letting them feel less like they lost to RNG and better be able to point at something they personally could have done better during their play.

Neat spin on a Sokoban game and the overall visual presentation is pretty awesome.

I ended up getting stuck on the level with only Windmill, three bad guys, and two red button-looking objects. I didn't really know what the red things did and maneuvering the AI to try and put them on top of the buttons got unpredictable so I had to call it after about 10 minutes of trying on that one.

The characters are really cool and I wanted to keep up with the plot as I was getting into the different puzzles, but the dialog boxes only show for a limited amount of time and they usually appear at either the beginning or key moments when I'm currently focused on figuring out the puzzles. I think the bordering background is super cool and really sells the comic book vibe of the presentation so you could lean into that more by having more close-up images of the hero characters with their dialog boxes pop up in the corners (like separate comic panels to further frame the puzzle space) and continue to show those after they've appeared so that you could still have the timing of when characters speak, but also not force players to switch brain modes from puzzle-solving to following a story in the middle of those two things.

The in-game diegetic presentation is a cool idea and the mission briefings are nicely setup.

I feel like you could lean a lot harder into the diegetic controls and the feeling of specifically piloting a walking mech as opposed to a wheeled vehicle.

My limited experience with mech piloting games is that they often feel like exceptionally capable tank controls that allow you to rotate your upper half for your view while still needing to track your orientation of your lower half for movement. A tweak like using 'Q' and 'E' for rotating the torso and then 'A' and 'D' allow for strafing movement would really help the feel of mech movement.

As far as leaning into the diegetic controls is concerned, I found it a bit odd that I could rotate my view inside the cockpit while everything that I functionally needed to see was basically in my original view without any rotation required. Beyond that, I wasn't required to click on anything inside the cockpit to interact with them since every player action was bound to a key on the keyboard. Forcing me to click on things to interact with them (like clicking the reload capsule to perform reloads) would really sell the "inside the cockpit" feeling.

I'd suggest toying with increasing the actual display of the outside world to mostly fill the original view rotation (so that it's less painful to squint and focus on) and then moving the radar positionally closer to the player so that they're forced to rotate the camera down (and away from the viewport) in order to get that information.

You could also try things like "arm-mounted" weapons that need to be loaded to the left and right of the player position within the cockpit so the player is then forced to rotate to either side in order to load or otherwise interact with those specific features of their own mech.

Even the compass could be a physical thing that is actually hanging almost directly over the player inside the cockpit so that they're forced to rotate upward in order to check their heading and verify that they're moving towards specific locations for the mission.

I think the premise and concept are interesting, but I'm a bit lost when running through the gameplay.

If the goal of the game is to make the player manipulate the social relationships then I feel like the limit of 3 questions and then you're done with the date becomes really limiting in the available interactions you can have. If the goal of the game is to be a mystery-solving deduction game then I didn't encounter a lot of objective evidence about what happened during the crime to make good guesses. 

I played two full play-throughs. Trying to be flirtatious with my dialog ended up getting social interaction responses that didn't have anything to do with the crime, but being direct in my dialog got a lot of dead-end answers that didn't give me new information. Ideally I was looking for conflicting information between different people, but they all seemed to not want to say anything about the crime. 

I took a guess on Granny the first playthrough due to her inability to just answer questions about her project and her removal from the scene of the crime after a heated discussion with the victim, but the game seems to want me to believe that answer was wrong.

I took a guess on Steven the second time through primarily based on him being a jerk that didn't want to say anything other than "cooking is a woman's work", which avoids the actual conflict of the murder entirely. The game seems to want me to believe that answer was correct, but I didn't have any objective information that would incriminate him so I feel a bit of a hollow victory.

It's a great start on something that could be pretty cool!

I ran into a bug where alt-tabbing out of the web build window didn't let me set the Godot window back to the focus so I couldn't control the camera anymore, but thankfully it was oriented in a way that let me see the enemies spawning still, lol.

Just some thoughts I had if you want to keep expanding on this, I definitely get the feeling that there's more content that you wanted to put in here so I'll try not to just say "you should do THIS" ...

- If you want the waves to have so many enemies like they currently do then I'd give the player the ability to continue moving while their attack animations are playing. It would make the game feel more fair because the player is a more capable character and third-person action games can flow really well if the player doesn't keep getting locked in place to do their cool stuff.
- It's hard to gauge the exact range of the attack right now since the visuals are significantly smaller than the player character. I'd recommend toying with different sizes and I'd personally prefer going a bit over-the-top for the attack visuals so that they're very obvious where they reach.
- A quality of life tweak you could do would be allowing the player to hold the attack button and continue attacking. The enemies require several hits to take down each and that turns into a LOT of clicks by the end of a wave with the current number of enemies. If you want players to go through several waves then they'll start to feel the wrist/hand fatigue after a bit right now.

The mechanics are very solid and the functional upgrades really give a cool Metroidvania style progression.

The game world is nicely large for the sake of exploration, but I found myself really wanting some kind of item to clue me in on at least the next direction that I should look for something important. Maybe it's just me being spoiled with that type of mechanic as prevalent as it is in a lot of modern games, but the feeling especially started to sink in at the point where I needed to find the tablets. Something like a sonar pulse that goes out and makes an icon for a point of interest in a direction relative to your current position, just so that I don't feel as aimlessly wandering at times.

It's a neat idea and an interesting combination of a few different games (thinking Nubby's Number Factory, Pinball, and Ball X Pit).

I found myself wanting things to escalate more as I played. The shapes seem to move at the same consistently slow pace and there's no penalty for them reaching the top of the screen as far as I can tell so it feels like something that would add pressure or challenge to the player would help keep the interest and intensity up the longer you survive.

I got into a state a couple times where I didn't seem to be able to play summons from my hand. Spells seemed to consistently work fine, but I was never able to finish a battle as a result of never having anyone on the field to really do the work.

The art is quite cool and really does evoke some of the old-school early MtG designs for me.

I'm a pretty slow reader so a LOT of the mechanics from some of the summons triggering effects almost completely flew by me due to how fast the text reads out when the cards are played. It does give you that feeling of playing against a player that knows solidly more about the game than you do and you're just trying to process things on the fly as they happen, but it also just highlights the massive value that tooltips on the various mechanic can bring so that players can review what just happened at their own pace.

Thanks for playing and the notes!

I understand the desire for targeting specific enemies, but I'm trying to lean into that for the sake of making it part of the problem the player needs to solve (a.k.a. - how do I get rid of that guy at the back or survive him until I can?) I really enjoyed Dungeon Clawler and they heavily leaned into that as a mechanic so I'd like to explore ways to make that more interesting with this setup.

I also have plans for several different player characters, but this guy is supposed to be the damage from damage and more damage type of archetype so he doesn't include any blocking or healing with his current ability set (I'll likely add some options for things like life-steal or ignoring damage as long as you're dealing damage in future iterations of his ability kit long down the road).

The free 14 damage is really a bug since I intended to trigger a roll event at the start of the player turn, but didn't end up getting that in for the submission of the jam. I'll probably try and update it over the next few days, but it's not terrible for letting people just use the abilities and win if they want to within the context of playing for the jam, lol.

Using D4-D20 is totally something I'd like to explore over time. I've thankfully got the dice created in such a way that I can create any type of die mesh that I'd like and it "should" be fully functional with only minor configuration needed.

I've got some plans for expansion on the rogue-like mechanics, but hadn't thought about mixing some die for the abilities and other die for their effects. I'd like to try and keep the UX streamlined so that the player just needs to click a single button for each ability and the system can automatically figure out which die it's supposed to use to pull that ability off. That might still work with the mixing of ability die and effects die, but it'll definitely take some experimentation.

I haven't done too much brainstorming about enemy variety yet, but as you mentioned there are several ways that enemies could contribute to the combats. I'm personally a big fan of simplified enemy designs that only do 1-3 different things and then creating interesting combats based on the combination of the different enemies (with any kind of Elite or Boss special combats having more complexity to make them feel more special). I've seen a couple games where the enemies roll dice for their behaviors (thinking Dicey Dungeons and Aristea), but I kinda like the more deterministic method for enemy behaviors because it makes the player gambling choices more explicit in the moment and less determined by RNG of enemy die rolls.

Nice chance to take a known game and use it to really practice and flex your pixel art and animation skills.

I'm not good at Chess, but I'm pretty sure I ran into a bug where the game killed my king, but I'm not sure how the move was allowed to occur. The game had done a good job of not allowing me to move into check prior to that point so I think the movement/attack validation code might have given a pawn some extra movement for the kill.

It felt a little weird to me that the bishops specifically had unique character sprites between them while the other more significant pieces didn't follow that pattern. I'd say that it's probably better keep unit type visuals uniform for all units of that type, but unique bishops may just be a specific case from other Chess games that is a standard that I'm not familiar with.

Nice little Sudoku-style game! Glad you got some use out of the assets and good to see people using them. <3

Thank you for the suggestion on the cause! I've been trying to play with the laser visuals to make them more accurate, but hadn't looked into resolution settings as a potential source of the issue yet.

Made a feedback / first-impression video for you.

Made a feedback  / first-impressions video for you. Pretty cool start and hopefully this helps!

Thank you for playing and the feedback! 

I've definitely been iterating on the initial player experience and should have a few fixes in the next build that will help players avoid the slow start that you describe from your play-through. Thank you for the specifics on that stage of the game so that I can attempt to target balance better.

I'm sorry about the lack of messaging right now about how the prestige system specifically works, but that's a high priority in near future builds as others have also been upset by a similar experience.

The "mini lore info" should be more reinforced by other elements in the game once they're put in, but I'm glad that you found that interesting for a theme/context.

Thanks for playing and the feedback!

I agree on the economy side of things. The scaling of costs is currently too harsh so it's difficult to get enough for continuous upgrades each new round. That likely also heavily contributes to the "grindy" feel as things progress so I'm glad that your feedback further confirms that.

Show exact stats and the exact updated value of stats is definitely a good idea and probably a necessary quality of life update so I'll add that to the plans for sure.

Glad that it was helpful. I remembered your game from one of the Indie Game Clinic videos and just looking at its current state it's obviously had some revs improve so far. Keep it up!

Thank you for playing and the feedback!

Without seeing your play session, it sounds like you might have run into an issue with the web player not scaling nicely to your monitor resolution (at least as far as not being able to earn any resources via the pickups and the cut-off).

I'm super torn on the "click to shoot" UX decision rather than just mouse-over and auto-fire. I agree with you that it would feel more tactile and give the player more feelings of agency over the shots, but the game is going to ask you to shoot likely over 1000 bugs across a few hours so I don't want to cause players fatigue when they need to click that many times to do the basic interaction. Mouse-over has been a common trend in a few incremental games I've played recently so I'm trying to follow suit with that design pattern.

Your feedback combined with others solidly points to an issue with players not feeling good about the basic laser firing mechanics though so I'm brainstorming ways to make that feel better.

Made a first-impressions video for you. Hope it helps!

Made a feedback video for you from my first-impressions playthrough. Hopefully it's helpful!

Thanks again for the feedback on my game! I made a first-impression video for you as well. Hopefully it's useful for you and keep up the good work!

Thanks so much again for feedback on my game. I made a first-impressions video for you as well. Hope it's useful for you and keep up the good work!

Messaged on Discord, but replying here for record tracking and elaborating on specific feedback notes ...

- Player laser underwhelming: I've recently added some audio to the game to help juice up the laser, but will also try to add some feedback on the mouse reticle to make the charge/fire mechanics more intuitive.

- Lean into catching resources: I need to add a subtle audio blip to make that a bit more exciting/reassuring and you're likely right that it should be worth more bonus resources, but I'm still waiting on economy feedback to make too many drastic changes with that number.

- Start the upgrade screen with just the center resource: Absolutely right, thought to do it before but got lazy and didn't tweak that properly. Thanks for making me feel the pain of that oversight (sincerely), because most players would probably fall into the same hang-up that you did.

- Game felt like a grind: From watching you and others play so far it's pretty clear that I need to give more in-game feedback that the prestige system exists and provide more obvious incentives for players to click that button and progress the larger-scale game loop. Hopefully speeding up the process of initiating that loop will reduce the grind feel, but from your video it's obvious that it's easy for players to just miss that loop entirely and that basically keeps them from enjoying or finishing the final game.

Thank you so much for the feedback!

Over the testers that have played so far it's become obvious that explaining the laser and the overall round game loop is going to be a priority moving forward (basically every tester had some form of confusion about the laser and why the round ended).

I actually hadn't seen PVKK until now so that instantly went on my wishlist, lol. I'll try and juice up the laser a bit and definitely add more feedback around the firing mechanics, but I'm hesitant to do too much to the initial state of the laser because I do want players to feel the scaling of it as you purchase the upgrades.

Thank you so much for the feedback!

The game surely needs more feedback on a lot of things so I'm sorry that many things weren't clear. I There's unfortunately some issues with the mouse detecting targets and the pickups right now that I'm trying to sort out, which may have hindered your ability to actually shoot things and do the loop, but you seem to have the main idea about what you're intended to do.

I'm actively updating the game so bugs should be rapidly sorting out over the next couple of days and the feedback issues should also get clearer now that I've seen at least a few things where people get hung up or confused.

Thanks for the info!

I updated the page so that the resolution of the web window matches the resolution of the game. That should fix the zoom not fitting the play window issue. Hopefully with a better view you will be able to see what's going on and understand things more.

The buttons on the right of the upgrade screen are cheats that I have in the current build for anyone that wants to accelerate the resource gain process just to test the different things that you can upgrade without going through the economy grind to get to them. Just looking for feedback on both of those aspects of the game and I know that many devs don't want to play through a 2-4 hour experience to test someone else's game (especially in game jams).

Sorry for last minute submission. I've got the page setup with a password so hopefully people will be able to access it.

Password: igc

It's very cute and has a lot of nice little stories to tell to flesh out the personalities on the train in a realistic way.

I'm probably missing something, but I didn't much get the point of the die rolling whenever I was helping anyone and whether that really affected anything or not. I was able to complete tasks just fine even if I did roll a lot of 1's so I guess I might have gotten a "bad ending", but that's not readily apparent.

Nice entry and an interesting design.

It's a super polished little narrative that varies things up nicely and doesn't overstay its welcome.

The only thing I had an issue with is that I wished the enemies had the same light outline that the main character had so that they could also stand out from some of the backgrounds when they needed to. I literally didn't even see this guy the first time until he stood up and put his gun in my face, lol.

Overall a really good execution that feels quite good to play.

I enjoyed the very straight-forward nature of the puzzles and the introduction of the puzzle mechanics over time. The game starts off super strong with the striking visuals of the crash and the awesome soundtrack really creating the vibe.

I found myself wishing that the complexity/difficulty ramped up a bit faster since a few of the early levels felt a bit like filler since they didn't really introduce anything new or any of the things that I'd seen previously in combination with each other. I also ended up with a soft-lock scenario when I was supposed to stack the idol and a barrel and ended up putting the idol up higher to get hit by an arrow that knocked it out of my reach to get it back, lol.

Overall a very good execution on a solid concept.

The whole thing just oozes character and the color palette selection is right on the nose for the experience.

I would have liked to have some stronger use of either the pink or the white to highlight things in the path as good/bad so that players could have just that much more warning and agency in how to react to things. A lot of the objects quickly blur into "just more pink things" when the speed really ramps up as it is right now.

Overall an awesome entry with a true focus on fun and execution.

Excellent art, audio, and combat design!

As others have mentioned it would be helped a lot with some form of map or compass or other device for helping players navigate the dungeon and feel less dumb if/when they get lost. Even something as simple as some specifically placed blood marks on the wall to help people landmark their location in a couple spots would greatly improve the accessibility of the experience.

I quite liked the enemy designs since they all felt unique and challenging in their own way, but once you got used to the enemy patterns they were very beatable with less tension each time.

I greatly enjoyed the novelty of the story and the interesting twist on movement mechanics.

The boss fight felt a bit out of place to me. It was the first time that the concept of having health and taking damage had come into play and while I was decent enough at getting through the levels leading up to the boss I felt often that the movement was either unresponsive or too unwieldy to feel like I had a lot of agency in dodging the boss attacks. That feeling is made worse when the only place I can damage them is the location where I'm least likely to dodge their attacks since I'm directly below them. A possible quality of life tweak to that fight specifically could be just having buttons or something else to interact with on the opposite side from the respective boss that it affects so that the fight makes me bounce back and forth to opposite sides rather than sit in a very disadvantageous position to try and finish off the last remaining boss.

Overall a nice idea to break the typical platformer mold and a very good execution as well.