It’s amazing. I think the game is too easy too, and there was an over-100-message-long discussion in the Discord this morning about how the game is too hard. Finding the balance is hard, so I appreciate the feedback. I think where it’s at now is a happy medium.
One thing is certain from feedback - the next update will reduce the number of times you need to play the minigame to progress. I’ll probably half it. I want to add achievements, so I will probably experiment with updating the minigame to have added complexity as the story progresses.
the major and glaring problem with the hacking game is the center symbol (forgot it’s name) is so BS, it can be just about done, but if you hit left or right it will instantly snap up to the wrong track, so if you are “under leveled” it means you are guaranteed an error EVERY time center symbol pops up since it’s track pretty much fills the whole left/right decision box leading to a perceived difficult game because you either fail by sending center symbol left or right, or you fail the 1/0 because you refused to move the center symbol
I don’t think the mini game is too hard but it’s long and tedious to repeat it so many times with it basically only getting longer and faster to increase it’s difficulty.
The length of time it takes to complete them per stage increases and with it just being the same thing again the one thing I definitely wouldn’t want to see is them gaining even more length to try to increase it’s difficulty. If it wasn’t needed to be repeated as much I don’t think the increased length would make it feel so tedious.
I agree too that it’s too easy, on android by having just 2 levels in hacking you can complete perfectly all hackings by just using one hand pretty easily
Alright, I have spent the past three days?, three years? faak I dunno, most of my free time since the Jam ended and a few days prior. I have played at least 80% of the submissions, and I honestly think that this one, Neon Dreams, this deserves the win. Solid writing, solid sprite work, the flaws are minor and not worth mentioning for a game made in a few days.
Best part: an engaging gameplay loop.
The Minigame (on PC) seems super inconsistent sometimes I press the button once and it goes there sometimes I’ve pressed right or left 3-4 times and it still drops straight down.
Suggestion:
A “simple” fix would be to have to toggle if possible between the lanes with the lanes its not set to go down being a sort of darker powered down colour. So if you for example press left the middle and right lanes go dull and you can leave it on the left lane so until you change it again all future ones go down the left lane.
You have to “tap” instead of “press”! If you have a 1 bit coming up, taptaptaptap left until it hits the intersection and goes left. If you hold or just try to time it, you’ll usually miss.
The lane toggle is a very good idea. I’ll look into implementing that in a future version. I’m trying to look into ways to make the minigame a bit less grindy, so having variants of it will help - that’s a good variant idea.
Amazing work with the setting, the story, the characters and all that. I’m not a huge fan of the way characters gain, bc it feels like the belly just expands, but I get that some like that so whatever. My main issue is, as some others have mentioned, the minigame. On computer once you’re on the enemy club and on the numbers are moving so fast that they might go past the point where the tapping matters in between spam taps, which is extremely frustrating. It would be much nicer if we could just hold press the key for left and right.
I really liked this game (even if that 100 courtroom one is a mf). My only real complaint is that there is no post game content or a free mode post game, with the time pressure of the debt I never felt I had breathing room to eat out with Iris so I barely did that.
What I found with the mini-games that you could brute force it by scrolling back to the prior screen if you got too many errors, that was until the black diamond club the mini game from this place was brutal and way too fast for the progression that I had to get at least one Lynx upgrade and then brute force the rest until the last week where you need 50K as the mini-game for that week is insanely fast and you need all 7 days to raise the 50K as the mini-game that gives the most at that point only gives 7k so you don’t have any breathing room
I focused on Iris upgrades to see those fatter sprites that we’re all there to see and I was able to grind enough each week to pay the dept and upgrade Iris each week and feed her enough to reach the next size [one week I was able to upgrade her twice] until at some point the player gets told that any size after 5 is only for Patreon users, so that was a wasted upgrade and a reason at all as the jam was about pushing limits. But what this meant was other then one upgrade for Lynx I never paid to upgrade him which has bitten me in the ass for the last week[?]
I did like from the update of changing the colour of the “a” symbol to help differentiate it from a 0 at a glance as I had sent a “a” to the 0 side more then once due to its similar shape
Right now I see the game having two focuses
1 you either focus on Lynx to make the mini-games easier, or
2 you focus on Iris to see how big she would get and hope the extra errors let you still get the max amount each mini-game
I say this as I feel that with how much each upgrade cost and how the story progresses that you have to choose one upgrade over the other each week, now you might be able to afford both upgrades in a week but you won’t be able to feed Iris the amount needed to see any changes
If this game gets more developments I think it needs to be set on a longer scale have 3 weeks to get the amount needed for the dept then just one week, this way players have a in game month to gather the dept and plan for what upgrades they want and when to feed Iris. This way you can increase the amounts needed for the dept and have it jump up as much as it is and increase the upgrades too or just lower what you player gets from each heist to balance out the longer deadline. You can also add in rent to help add more cost to balance out more days to do heist
I know this was a side project for the Jam and I don’t suspect more development on it in the future but I love the models used as they look better then honey select models, I also think there is too much purple used, I know its a cyberpunk world set in a neon city but there’s other neon colours then just purple, I figured Iris colour scheme was the purple reference not that everything is purple. That was my last complaint.
I enjoy it and am going to start a free game with 0.5b build to fix my bad decisions from my first play through I hope to see more work done on this game
I think that there is a missing story piece or something like that because it says lins says that gives 35k when i had to pay 25k and then ember says that the debt price increases to 50k when it increases just to 35k
0.5B made it cheaper to get upgrades, and that will continue to the next released version that has all 10 original planned sizes.
When that happens, I’m actually reducing the amount required game play time from a week to a few days (that canonically happens over a longer period of in-game-universe time) to reduce the amount of repetition of the hacking game. Since there will be 10 upgrades instead of 5, the upgrades will be cheaper and debts lower to allow you to enjoy more of Iris.
There will be more development - I at least need to finish what I started before the game jam as post game jam content!
Finding the balance is hard, so I appreciate the feedback. I think where it’s at now is a happy medium.
