Dwarf Monastery by hotaloca
Dwarfs living a minimalist life
Some dwarfs has begun a life long spritial awakening journey in a cave monastery. Space is little, but with clever organization there is sufficient time for everyone to do work, meditation and sleeping.



How to play?
Please read this section, the in-game instructions are very minimal.
The dwarfs have a very limited space to live in a monastery. You need to organize their living space so they can do so without disturbing eachother.
Dwarf monks want to work (W), relax/meditate (R) and sleep (S). For each activity they have specific rooms, marked accordingly.
As they have limited space in the cave monastery, they need to share their working (W), relaxing (R) and sleeping (S) places. The dwarf monks run on a 4 hour long shift schedule. Your job is to organize their shifts and rooms (so their lives) so everyone is happy.
First review what room should get into the cave (simply drag and drop the pieces). You do not need to and cannot rotate puzzle pieces. Second select "Plan" and review which dwarf should go to what room in a given shift (in the timetable).
The rules:
No drawf should be without empty shift. This is for example not OK because the 12-16 shift is empty for the first dwarf.

Above the drawf shift empty slots, you have the (spiritual) goal of the dwarf. They look for Work (W), Relax/meditate (R) or Sleep (S). Sometimes the dwarf are very specific - and they want to use a certain room (they have a number, like W2). If there are no numbers (like W) it means the dwarfs are happy to work in any (W) rooms. If the numbers do not match, then the dwarfs are not happy. In the below example the problem is that dwarf wants to have two Working (W) shifts, but gets three instead.

The numbers of W, R, S need to match, but ANY order is OK. The dwarf can meet their goals in any order - in the end who counts days or nights. Even they can sleep twice a day.
If a dwarf meets another dwarf in the same room at the same shift, then they cannot work! They want to be alone. So the below example is not right, because both dwarf 1 and 2 is assigned to W1 room for the 0-4 shift. This problem can be simply solved by moving the shifts around.

An important and not intuitive rule: a dwarf must have access to the next room he wants to go. This means that the room needs to be a neighbour to the next room. In the below example the problem is the dwarf needs to go from R1 to S1 room (at 16 hour) but cannot because the S1 and R1 rooms have no common sides. Or in other words they are not neighbor tiles.

Bug fixes
- I have fixed the sound for this web version. Two error messages very mixed up in the audio.
Behind the scenes
I actually loved this theme - limited space. Several years back, I was thinking to have a similar game where the spaceship has very small amount of space, and this needs to be shared/optimized across different people. I remembered this idea, and although it has gone thru a lot of changes (as you can imagine), finally I am able to cross this off from my list.
- Game Engine: Unity.
- Graphics: Affinity Designer.
- Sound, music: BandLab, Audacity.
Ratings
| Overall | 247th | 3.352⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 329th | 2.74⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 159th | 3.5⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 150th | 3.808⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 186th | 3.462⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 146th | 3.346⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 132th | 2.978⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 211th | 3.208⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 25🗳️ | 29🗨️ |
Maybe learning curve should be a bit easier, or more tips on what everything means.
I will try this one out later, maybe more comments and tips will appear)

Getting quite tough. And filling the schedule is a tad tedious.
Also, you might want to add sub titles to the complaints, they are a bit hard to make out.
Still, very well made, and fitting music/sfx!
It was sometimes difficult to understand why plans were failing, especially since I often couldn't make out what the voices were saying. I'm still not sure why this didn't work, for example?

It would also have been nice if the "playback" of the dwarves schedules could be quicker; I felt like there was a bit of waiting around during the experimentation phase.
But the basic idea is a fun twist on set-up-and-play puzzle games; I enjoyed my time with it!
I had as layout:
R2 - R1
S2 - S1
S2 - W1
And as agenda:
dwarf 1 : R1 R1 R1 R1 S1 W1
dwarf 2 : W1 S2 R2 R2 R2 R2
Other than that, I quite enjoyed the game and the little messages of enlightenment that come up when you finish the level.
The palette, the art, the sound effects and voice acting are all very well done! 😊 And funny! After reading all the instructions, I still got stuck in level two, and could only continue after @tjm mentioning that it is necessary to build loops. But then it clicked, I had fun solving the puzzles, though I didn't manage to finish level 5. 😅 I like that you added audio feedback when a condition is not full-filled, but I would suggest to also highlight the affected dwarf. Even better, how about letting the animation play also on failure and visualize what went wrong (e.g. two conflicting dwarfs in the same room etc.)? TLDR; A tutorial and better feedback would go a long way, otherwise well done! 💜