Decided to participate in one of these jams for the first time. Managed to hammer out this little game.
Link: YALS (itch.io)
The game attempts to fulfil the theme by having the player push the character to their limits in order to make ends meet, and expand their stomach capacity.
Game currently starts off quite slow, there isn’t much content, and I’m generally bad at writing but hopefully the experience isn’t too unpleasant.
Maybe I’ll update it before the jam ends, but probably not
EDIT: Updated with some minor improvements, See the changelog in itch. Also have some images:
tooltips are too far to the upper right which makes most of them impossible to see
Edit: After finishing the game, it was pretty fun. This is one of my favourite kinds of games here, and this one in particular reminds me of that one delisted floating circles life sim. Really enjoyed the flavor text at the bottom. I feel like, were the game to be expanded (heh), it’d benefit from more “events” (like the one that introduces AI, informs you that you’re immobile etc.) and a slower pace which would allow for more of this flavor. Very enjoyable overall.
I think it’s a pretty solid game, mechanically speaking.
I can see what people mean about window cut-offs. Maybe seeing if there is a way to make it fit other resolutions upon opening the game would be nice!
If you ever doll it up with some coherent visuals for the UI I think it would be very charming! I think honestly just outside of that and some VERY minor typos/grammatical flubs It’s pretty decent.
If anything, I think you could simply help orient the player into how the game works before throwing us into the system right after the exposition/little intro!
(i.e. visual[s] of what the meters are, what they represent. work system. etc.)
That and maybe some things that let us know how much the automated system is making per duration as well once that’s achieved?
Pretty solid gameplay loop. It’s impressive what you’ve achieved in the span of a week. My only real criticisms are two. One is that failing to make one payment on time leads to an instant gameover. Which is fine once or twice, especially since it’s likely to happen early meaning you won’t lose much progress. The game does blindside you a bit with it as a mechanic, meaning that you can get a huge advantage by being prepared for it. It kind of encourages you not to engage with the gaining mechanics at all for a good while. It’s just that failing should lead you to something more interesting rather than less. The current punishment for failure is going back to character creation and having to replay in almost the exact same way to get to where you were. It’d be interesting if they “kidnapped” you for a bit, causing you to lose weight or something. Or stole some stomach capacity away. Something that makes the player react rather than a hard “game over, restart”. I’m assuming that “Ending 1” is the only ending aside from victory in this version. (Because in it’s current state, the game isn’t really built for replaying to find endings). Anyways, that no longer becomes a risk once you reach a certain point in the game where the numbers you pull are absurd. You basically have to make a huge purchase RIGHT before midnight to fail at that point, and after a while even that becomes impossible.
The only other criticism is that the blurbs of text are really innocuous at the bottom of the screen. It’s a shame too, because they really add to the game where the visuals fall behind. Unless you’re constantly staring at them and intentionally pacing your gain, you’ll end up missing most of them. Partially because of the rng factor of what the character talks about.
I would love to see if you get any ideas for this in the future. Not sure where you would go from here, but that’s what makes it exciting. That’s the strength and weakness of cookie clicker type games. They’re relatively easy to implement, but hard to innovate on aside from gimmicks.
Currently taking an extended break from game development.
But once that’s (eventually) over, I might see about releasing post-jam updates of this game (people did seem to like it) or working on a different project, only time will tell though…
I really enjoyed the format of the timers, both in how fittingly oppressive they are at first when first starting out, forcing the player and charactrer to really strive to find a way out of their boring dystopian cycle. The dings of money freely pouring in were music to my ears as my cat lady continued to stuff herself with cake in comfort~
