Like this game! The buggy game design is similar to mine, and I really like the graphics!

I like that this game is fairly innovative in its concept and story.

It was also nice to hear a narrator, was the speech generated? On my machine, the narrator and the text got out of sync which got annoying fast.

The bigger problem is that the help is too long and **not skippable**. Please, oh please let me skip that thing! Or at the very least make it go faster. If I ever wanted to replay the game, that loooooooooooooong unskippable intro would instantly put me off. Or maybe it can be skipped but I just couldn't figure out how?

To the game itself - it was a surprisingly hard game. I would say that jumping is almost useless most of the time, because that lava thing just moves too fast. The furthest I got was when the game said something about the save being corrupted and me having to copy it somewhere else. That was a nice innovative touch, but I couldn't actually manage to do it (or even read the text till the end) because lava ate me first.

I liked the graphics and audio.

Overall, two main things from me:
- please add the ability to skip the tutorial (and make it shorter if possible)
- make it easier

I might have just misunderstood the game, but this is the experience I got. I'm happy to revisit it if the intro is gone.

Anyway, congrats on finishing LD!

@mvasko2 Firstly I really appreciate your descriptive review.


Yes, I also feel that the first tutorial part should be skippable. That I will surely do as soon as possible. **Done**


And yes I made the lava move so fast because otherwise, I felt it was becoming too easy. If you say then I will decrease the lava speed a bit. **Decreased a bit**
Yes, the game is a bit difficult to understand I admit. You have to play it a few times to understand it properly.


See…


When you get the first component you can bring up the pause menu by pressing escape but that will not be a useful pause menu. Because that will not actually pause your game. But this pause menu is needed for your next component collection.


The next component is your save component. Once you get it you can go to the “Buggy” pause menu and save the game. So, when you again start playing you will have those two components. And thus dying, again and again, will not make you lose all the components.


The next component will be the “Rectified pause menu”. After you get this component you can pause your game successfully. The game will be actually paused i.e the lava and the timer. “But your save system will be corrupted”. This means that you can’t save your game now. And if you die now you will lose all your progression till this point and you have to start collecting from the beginning. But an autosave is performed and the save up to this point (i.e up to these three components) is done. So, pause the game as quickly as possible before lava eats you or the timer ends. Now calmly follow the instructions written at the bottom of the screen. Actually, it tells you that you have to copy your saved file which is present at location( depending on your system )( that path will be written ), and save it somewhere else. The file name will be “saveData”. Because once while you are in that stage i.e. three components collected stage. The game will keep deleting the saveData file if it is present in the path mentioned above. So. to continue from that three components collected stage you have to, again and again, copy the file from the place you copied that saveData file to the game save path( which you must be knowing till now ). Like this again and again try to collect the fourth component. Die….copy(your secure location)...paste(game save location)….play….


And as soon as you find the fourth component..congrats...you will be redirected to another menu where you can play this game only without any unstableness and by collecting coins you can try to beat yourself in highscore.


Hopefully, this explanation was clear.

@souptik-datta Thank you for writing out the explanation, I gave the game another try and actually got to the point of stabilizing it :slight_smile:

Turns out I was actually pretty close before. I got confused and panicked when I read the file system path in the message below. I didn't pause at that point but instead tried to get some lead over the lava and then rush to my file explorer :smile: (the time went out before I did). I guess I thought pause is still broken and I would just lose to lava if I tried to press escape.

With that in mind I was able to follow instructions without issues and got to the endless runner part. In hindsight, the lava speed might actually be OK :slight_smile:.

I really appreciate the originality of making the player interact with the file system, but I don't think the player should be reading walls of texts to be able to do that.

I realize it's a hard concept to get across (and grasp), but maybe it could be solved somehow with game design. Maybe introduce these mechanics more gradually in a story-like way instead of written text? I'm hazy on how to do that, sorry.

Anyway, keep on experimenting!

@mvasko2 Happy to hear that you could complete it.

Yes I fell that the design for explaining the gameplay is not good enough but in 48 hours I could design this.

I will try to develop the design in future.

First of all, had to do the classic manoeuvre to get it running on mac. But even after that OSX did some extra checks notifying that they're not sure that this isn't malicious software. First time I've ever seen that. Dunno if it's because you're deleting files. 🤔


That wall of text and the speech were off sync. Made it kinda jarring to follow. Also had some weirdness when the line end was reached, it first scrolled a bit before breaking and after a 10 or so characters on the new line, the line height adjusted a bit.

Did manage to beat it pretty easily.


That whole save corruption stuff etc was kinda cool but on the other hand quite pointless. It didn't really make the game any easier and the whole copying effort didn't really seem like it saved any time.

Always a good idea to add both WASD and arrow keys. And you managed to have a full screenful of text explaining the game and still not even tell the controls. Also, did not find any use for the jump. Even where it could have been used, it couldn't because the ground detection was so scuff that it didn't allow jumping too quickly after landing or near edges.

And don't really think it's a great idea to have the player object be a white glowing ball while the background also has a white glow in the middle where the player will spend majority of their time (making it pretty much invisible).

The fall damage seemed like a dick move in a game like this. And the lava on top seemed to rubber band a bit too much to my liking.

Anyways, good job! 👍

I liked the art style. Esp the font and the way the orb looked with the background. Game was short and fun too. I had to figure out a bit what I should be doing in the first part, as you only got feedback for the save system (i.e. the 2nd orb collected).

Thank you for the feedback @huntthewumpus. Hope you were able to complete the game because I tried to explain the game as much clearly as possible but still some ambiguity persisted.

I really liked the music! I really liked the typed sound effect and letters that was a nice touch. The gameplay really matched the theme and was fun to play.

In my opinion I don't think that voicing over with speech is that great unless you are adding to the story in some way as the narrator or as a character. Having the typing sound/ graphic would have been a much better way to convey progress while playing the game. Tutorials are also a great place for dialogue explanations of mechanics.

Great game!

I quite like the art, especially the bloom effect. Gameplay was pretty interesting to play and test around!

I love this game

Very unstable game, and very buggy, so the Theme is well met. Took me a few minutes to figure out whats going on but finishing it was very satisfying

Great concept, perfectly in the theme and pretty funny! Good job :)

Extremely cool! I think you nailed the unstable theme -- messing with the pause button, saves, etc. was really fun. It was a little unclear at times what exactly was happening without reading your notes, but overall the gameplay was great.

Loved the meta idea where you had to backup your save file! However, I feel as though the components were hard to reach during gameplay, especially when compared to the final endless runner game you get as a reward. I also feel that you should try to use less explanation next time, as that brought down the game a little for me.

I liked playing the endless runner and enjoyed the process of getting my way to the game as a reward at the end of the game. It was a unique submission and you put it together nicely.

Люблю такие игры. Там, где нужно ковыряться в своих файлах. Копировать и вставлять что-то. Такое редко встретишь. А идея интересная.

Спасибо! ^_^

Very cool idea and it really fit the theme well! Would have loved to be able to see the tutorial in writing aswell instead of a video/cutscene since it was pretty a pretty long video/cutscene. I was very confused as to what I was supposed to do since I died for seemingly no reason. But overall super cool concept ! :)

I really like the idea of the game and i think it was done pretty well. I really like the music too and the sound effects for the typing and the text to speech were good too (sometimes that stuff can get annoying bu here it was good). I was sad that the text to speech didnt match the words though.

Interesting game!
I really liked the introduction and how the main idea of ​​the game was presented. However, as soon as the process of the game began, I did not understand what to do, because the circle which I had to control merged with the background (maybe it was conceived that way), and also because the controls and the main mechanics of the game were not described anywhere.
Here I would think of a tutorial in some form.
The rest was a great game. The graphic design gave me pleasure!