>>324142
O.k., I'm not crazy! I thought there was an old thread.
>>324135
Attached, fwiw.
>>324146
Sorry bro, it's practically sloppa all the way down.
>>324129
>okflashgame/10
This is the highest praise I've received in my entire life. Dude, you're going to inflate my ego way too much, thank you.
>Though the difficulty is all over the place and some of the last levels are piss easy.
Yeah, I don't know. The idea I was going for was that the difficulty should match what's going on narratively. The idea being that there are these stages of:
<Talk to someone with your walls up for some time.
<That gets harder and harder.
<Something bad gets through, have a "fight".
<It's cold after that for a little while.
<Then you make amends, and it's incredibly easy again.
That feels really gay now that I'm writing it out.
>The motel level was the hardest for me, but part of it was that the game didn't tell you clearly enough that hitting a wall (good call with the name change) caused the gauge to go up.
I wanted something like "a boss level" for a puzzle game, so that faux difficulty is part of it, too. I'm glad it sounds like it worked out. I also changed the animations so there isn't an actual wall during that stage, too.
>You managed to make me put thought into beating some of the puzzles.
I said where they came from already in the OP, but the point of this was that since forever I've had this thought in the back of my head of, "You know, counterexamples in mathematics make for good game mechanics; why isn't that done more instead of copying https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lights_Out_(game) in every bad game?" Part of my goal here was to try to see if I could do that irl, and to hopefully show how to do that irl. I copied a lot from my old copy of picrel book to make this.
>Though that can be beaten with trial and error.
In theory, they all can. It's an issue and something that I'm not sure how to fix.
>I don't get the point of the clairvoyance, it's not a powerup
Got it, that's fair. I wanted to play with one more mechanic I could use during the puzzles, came up with that, but I should just remove it.
> I strongly recommend either a short pause between dialogue and gameplay, or another button for the dialogue altogether.
Got it. I'm really surprised I didn't think of this, because I got/get so irritated with the same issue myself when I was doing repeated playtesting.
>The dialogue and the lore is fine, It's warm and comfy enough, some parts I found silly, but it didn't made me cringe.
I feel more critical than you here. I don't like the dialogue, and I still don't know quite how to fix it to my satisfaction. Iori's lines feel so stilted throughout--I get I established that's she's a fucking autist going through conversations like they're puzzle games, but still. Why are they still going to the con after the motel/Why didn't Pippa ditch her? Why would Pippa even make an attempt at closing the distance with a fed? I make the bannings out like they're some over-the-top plot point, but in reality, who the fuck'd care? Eventually, I got to a point of writer's block and thought, "Fuck it, good enough." because I couldn't figure out how to fix these issues without having to throw everything out. There were actually a lot of moments that did make me cringe, but I was O.K. with them because my goto for cringe was "Is this better, worse, or just at A Goofy Movie? My goal was to try to keep the level of the dialogue right at that movie's standard, of all things to choose...
>Some of the cultural references were funny.
I feel like this is too egotistical to share, but two things I really liked: the shopping cart on its side "miles away from anywhere that ever had shopping carts" and how that came out in the end still gets a me to chuckle at myself. The screaming from the motel room is actually myself voice shifted and muffled. I pulled from a lifetime of hearing parents argue while I hid in my room, bad apartment complexes, etc.. I had a lot of fun with that one, even though my voice was really sore the day after. I remember Itoi saying that Earthbound's Onett was a love letter to rural city America. This is my love letter to America and the road trip even with its cultural decay.
Alright, I'm getting too sappy and full of myself, I need to stop.